David Alison's Blog

With summer weather fast approaching on the east coast I decided it was time to get a new Battery Backup device (aka UPS) for my Mac Pro. This decision was hastened by my experience a couple of days ago when the power dropped during a thunderstorm and my Mac Pro—unable to communicate with my Tripp Lite UPS—dropped from lack of power. To my surprise I found through comments on my blog that OS X has built in UPS support, though just not with the older Tripp Lite I owned. I also got a few comments from folks on the blog and in e-mails recommending a couple of different Battery Backups and I did some more research on the topic. Though several vendors have products in this space APC seemed to consistently bubble to the top, both in end user ratings on sites like Newegg and with editorial reviews. I had owned APC units in the past and had very good luck with them. APC even has a great tool for determining which UPS class is best based on your power needs . Armed with this knowledge I deci...

One of my favorite applications was improved today when iSlayer released iStat menus version 1.3 , a free utility for OS X. If you haven't already downloaded and installed it I can't recommend it enough. It's a great tool for monitoring the health of your Mac and I've used it as a quick-glance diagnostic tool whenever I want to see if something's amiss. The obvious changes to 1.3 are in the UI for configuring the menus. The screens have a cleaner graphical treatment and the controls are organized a little better, especially in the calendar configuration area: There are also a number of bug fixes and additional minor features in this release. If you aren't using iStat menu then by all means, click here , download it and install it. While you're at it you may want to look at their Dashboard widget as well: iStat Pro . Between the two I can see at a glance what is going on by looking up at my menu bar, click on it to dive in a little deeper, launch Activity Mo...

I've been experiencing some quirky behavior on my Mac Pro since upgrading to 10.5.3. First there was the Time Machine error , which I had never seen prior to 10.5.3 but has now occurred on both of my Macs. It was easily fixed but a bit disconcerting. For the last few days I have been watching my system logs using console and noticed a series of failures where the backup seems to get stuck on a single file and then the entire backup fails. When this happens I get the Time Machine Error dialog as well—something I never saw prior to the 10.5.3 update. Subsequent Time Machine runs are clean though so it appears to be failing on single files. Again looking through the logs it appears to be different files each time. When I examine the backup volume I do not see an entry for the backup that failed - there is just a gap of one hour in there. Seems odd to fail an entire backup because of a single file though. Mouse Droppings I also have experienced a problem with my Logitech mouse. Clicks ...

At 1:30am this morning my wife woke me up. "The power is out." My sleep addled brain slowly came online, registering what she said to me. I cast a quick glance at the digital clock on the nightstand and sure enough it was dead. There was a mild thunderstorm in our area. As I lay there debating whether this required action on my part—again, my brain wasn't fully activated yet—I heard the faint cry of my UPSs down in my basement office. It's rare the power goes out in our area and if it does, it never stays off more than a couple of minutes. The UPSs that powered the various machines in the basement could easily handle a 2 or 3 minute outage. That's when my wife said: "It's been out for about 15 minutes." Ninja like I sprang into action, racing down the now pitch black stair case and hoping I wouldn't twist an ankle and plunge headfirst to an embarrassing demise: "Local hero perishes in valiant effort to save data" would be an unlikely he...

I spend a lot of time in Safari which is my browser of choice. I would like to share the resources I've come across to improve the Safari browsing experience. Even though I've talked about a couple of these in bits and pieces before I wanted to create a single comprehensive post that covers Safari across the board; tips, helpful sites and some usage techniques. Setting up Safari Before we begin there are some settings that you should check. Open the preferences (Command-,) within Safari. In the General section I have my browser set to open links from applications in a new tab in the current window. Though I do occasionally use multiple Safari windows it's pretty rare - I much prefer to keep it all in one window and leverage the tabs. Under the Tabs section I also have Command-Click open a link in a new tab and do not  select tabs and windows as they are created. Even with these options set, some web applications—Gmail in particular—manage to open links in a new window. Appl...

I'm now at the four month mark in my move to Mac. It didn't start out as a switch; when I bought my MacBook in the beginning of February I was really looking for an excuse to play with some new technology. I was satisfied—not excited mind you but satisfied—to use Windows as my operating system. I had my development environment on Windows and was well versed in all the ins and outs of it. I custom built my PCs myself, mildly over-clocking them to get better performance and being very comfortable in trouble shooting virtually any class of problem. I was a pretty hardcore Windows guy. What started as an addition to my little technology family evolved pretty rapidly though. Not only did I find the Mac intriguing and fun to use, I found myself enjoying my Windows machine that much less. The MacBook went from a curiosity to a cool toy to my preferred personal productivity tool in a very short period of time. After a couple of months I hadn't really switched though, my MacBook was...

This morning I nudged the mouse on my Mac Pro and was welcomed with the following window: Funny thing is that the dialog has an OK button. It's really not OK. Why not? Because it didn't tell me where the problem was. As I've said before, I love the simplicity of Time Machine , though presenting an error message like this is not very helpful. Something - anything - to indicate what went wrong would be a good idea. I accept that you don't want to scare off the non-techies with a detailed error message but having a little "more" link that described what the problem is would have helped. Rather than investigate I decided to go with the flow. I clicked the OK button and then told Time Machine to back up now. It happily whirred away and looked like everything was fine, then at the very end up popped the failure notification again. Crap. I did what I always do when something unexpected happens on my computer: I Google'd up the error message. There were a number o...