The basic editing and management features are very good. I’m very happy with this as a basic journalling tool. I’ve also figured out all the server configuration issues, successfully posting articles to both WordPress as well as Blogger/BlogSpot.

The editor is weak in its support of HTML. I’ve been using a lot of HTML paste-in from Google Maps, Urbanspoon, and others, and this really doesn’t work. I thought a nice workaround would be to add a link to an image, but you don’t seem to be able to do this. A link only seems to work for text, primarily because images don’t seem to go along for the ride with posting a journal entry. This might be a setting, since the images need to go somewhere else but haven’t figured this out yet (or didn’t receive any errors on posting which would tip me off something wasn’t going well).

So, all in all pretty satisfied, with some small nits I think I can live without. Might be a purchase.

I came across “MacJournal” (from http://www.marinersoftware.com/products/macjournal/, and maybe http://homepage.mac.com/dschimpf/), which has very positive marks from MacWorld and CNET. Simple word processing (good), effective document tagging (good), and automatically posts to blogs if you have the right services (which I do). The full screen edit option seems interesting as well. The downloading of blog entries into the tool is quite excellent.

We’ll see how this goes.

Screenshot and Feature Tour of Mac OS 10.7 Lion.

On a day like any other, I flip open my sleeping Mac Book Pro and find myself waiting for the unlock dialog.  And waiting.  And waiting.  And it eventually dawns on me that the laptop is not busy looking for attached hardware but it is busy deciding to never present the log in dialog to me.  I can tell its is still running – it makes the proper beeps as I press keys and I can hear the fans and drive whirring away if I press my ear to the case.  But, I can’t see what it’s doing (or not doing).

Turns out the video stopped working, which requires shipping the machine to Apple for replacement and creates the dilemma of what to do without a machine for a few days and what happens to my data while the machine is in someone else’s hands.  Let’s break down the problem:

1. What if the drive is replaced/lost/damaged during this process? I’m not worried about this.  I use the OS X Time Machine feature for backups, which copies changed files hourly so the most I lost is what happened in the past 60 minutes.  I generate a lot of files through Email and word processing, but not so much I’d lose too much since most of that is actually on a server and I wasn’t in a real active period while this happened.
2. What if someone else looks at my data? Another area I’m not worried about.  I use encrypted disk images that are mounted while I’m logged into the system.  If I’m not logged in, plus use a separate mount command with different passwords, my data is just a big lump of bits.  I have several images I use for different categories of work, and I mount them and dismount them depending on what I am doing.  I prefer this over the File Vault encryption of the whole hard drive, since I don’t want to waste time or cycles encrypting things like scratch files and iTunes.
3. What do I do while my machine is in the shop? Aah, here’s a problem.  Fortunately, our IT department keeps a few machines available for just such an emergency.  So they gave me a spare Mac Book.

Problem: the Mac Book has no Firewire port, so no way to connect by backup drive.   So, they changed it for a Mac Book Pro (although I really liked the 13 inch form of the Mac Book).

Problem 2: The Mac Book Pro spare had a 120 G drive, mine had a 160 G drive.  And yes, I filled it passed 120 G.  So, I needed to do some trimming.

As discussed in an earlier post, booting up OS X in “Firewire Mode” helps tremendously.  You can boot up in this mode without seeing the video, and it allows you to see and copy the drive image as needed over Firewire.  From the spare I started copying off data that didn’t need to go to the spare machine.  iTunes files (30G, bah) were copied to an external USB drive.  Photos as well.  A few other random personal things and I got the total size down to the point where I could transfer to the loaner with 5G or so left over.

The spare machine was now a functional copy of my machine, and my machine was shipped off to Apple Care with a promise of 7 business days to be returned.  It actually came back in 5.

I made sure to be careful about what I was creating on the spare machine, so copying over work that was done on the space was easy, and done with a USB thumb drive.  These are the world’s most useful things to keep around in the 2G or more variety; much easier than figuring out how to do it machine to machine or to a server.

This can be extremely useful for copying files off a machine to another one, and in my case what made it especially useful is that it is easy to boot up a machine in Firewire mode even if the video is not working.  You can easily hold down the “T” key while booting, even if the screen isn’t visible (more on that in a later post).  Any other transfer off a machine usually requires either physically removing the hard drive, or interacting with the operating system to turn on network sharing of one kind or another.  This is quite impossible when you can’t interact with the video.

This also brings up the importance of encryption of sensitive information, since anyone getting physical control of your machine can boot it up and attach another computer to it.  One encryption approach uses File Vault to encrypt your whole home directory.  This is very good encryption for someone that doesn’t want to think about it.  I personally don’t use it for a few reasons.  One, I don’t feel the need to waste my computer’s time encrypting iTunes songs, temporary internet files, and other trivia in my home directory that I don’t care about and that will lengthen a back up process.  And two, it complicates the ability to pull off files like with this Firewire trick.

Another encryption approach uses Disk Utility to define encrypted file shares of my choosing.  I define a dynamic file share and set encryption for it as needed for some of the categories of documents I store (like “Admin”, or “Financial”) and treat these file shares like top level folders on a drive.  There are multiple encryption choices and only the files I want encrypted are placed in the file shares.  These partitions are mounted or dismounted as needed for my work.

So, with the mounted Firewire computer I was able to drag off and backup the encrypted and unencrypted files from the soon-to-be-shipped-off-for-repair computer.  This made me feel safe about my data, and safe to ship off my computer with the sensitive files locked up.