Time Machine is a fabulous backup program. It’s easy, beautiful, and pretty much dummy-proof. If you’re a Mac user, there’s really no excuse for not doing regular backups any more.

But the hourly backups can get to be a bit much. The first few seconds of a backup can really slow down, or even interrupt whatever else you’re working on. And a particularly large incremental background can slow everything down.

I could never figure out why Apple didn’t include a scheduling feature into Time Machine. Every so often I’d think “they must have included it — I’ve just missed it” and dig around trying to find the elusive feature. But no. It’s not there.

Enter Time Machine Editor.

Install this tiny program, turn off Time Machine, and set your backups to take place on a schedule that works for you. You can simply change the intervals. That’s what I did — I’m now backing up every 4 hours. It’s easy enough to tweak if I want something different. You can also choose to back up on certain days

and/or at certain times. Then move the slider to “on” and you’re all set. It works as seamlessly as the built-in Time Machine app. No fuss, no muss.

Oh, and it’s free.

I don’t know who wrote this gem. I couldn’t find any credits on the download page. Whoever you are — thank you, thank you, thank you!

The other evening, David Pogue tweeted a request for ideas for new laptop features. This brought to mind something I’ve been wanting for years: an ergonomic keyboard for my Mac laptop.

Several years ago I broke my arm, and was in a cast up to my elbow. The cast prevented me from rotating my wrist to the proper angle for typing on a regular old keyboard. I went out and got a Logitech Ergonomic Keyboard. Not only are the left and right sections of the keyboard angled to a more natural position for your hands, but the keyboard itself isn’t flat — each side angles up a bit toward the middle.

It took a bit of getting used to, but it was perfect for my injured arm. The cast stayed on for 6 weeks, and after I got it off I found returning to a standard, flat keyboard exasperating. I realized I actually typed much faster and much more accurately using the ergonomic keyboard.

These days, I work on a laptop 90% of the time, and the keyboard has been hell on my wrists and arms. Fingerworks offers an interesting keyboard replacement for Mac laptops, but it’s still flat.

I know, I know, I can still use the Logitech keyboard with my laptop, but I don’t want to. I carry my laptop around a lot, and don’t want to carry an external keyboard around as well.

Lately I’ve been drooling over some of the new dual-screen laptops that are showing up on the market. All I can think is, if this is possible, surely an ergonomic laptop keyboard is possible. One that was split in the middle, and could be lifted and angled for comfort.

Come on, all you clever people out there. Make it so!

I don’t need a new Mac laptop. Ok, I admit, that’s never stopped me before. But really, the MacBook Air, stunning though it may be, is not for me. I do lust after the multitouch trackpad. I’ve been reaching to pinch my screen while viewing maps since a week after getting my iPhone. I’m ready for it. But there are too many limitations for it to be my primary computer, and I don’t want to go back to messing with keeping multiple computers in sync.

Then I saw the fabulous AirMail. Now there’s the hip yet understated MacBag. Cripes. I may have to get an Air just so I can carry it around in one of these.

That’s right — according to my mail reader (Apple Mail 3.1), I have 4 billion, 294 million, 966 thousand and 24 messages in my mailbox. Only 2 unread though, thankfully.

Weird. It’s been this way since I upgraded to Leopard.

At long last, I’m running Vista on my MacBookPro. My previous posts about installing windows (part 1 and part 2) and  installing Vista described a disastrous and ultimately failed attempts to install Vista Home Premium on my iMac. The short answer: if you’re running Parallels Desktop for Mac, the only Vista that will work is the big, fat, most-overpriced Ultimate version. Don’t even think about using the upgrade model.

So I reluctantly sprung for yet another copy of Windows. As if there weren’t already enough flavors of Windows Vista (there are 7, not including upgrade versions), I opened the clumsy packaging to find I have to choose between two install discs — 32-bit and 64-bit. Since I have a brand new beefy MacBookPro and the latest rev of Parallels, I went ahead and assumed I could use the 64-bit install disc. Yes, I should’ve checked first. I don’t remember the error, but my Mac wasn’t one bit happy with it. I barely got into setup, had a nasty crash that seemed to even affect Parallels. I didn’t even bother looking up what might have gone wrong. I just reinstalled Parallels and used the 32-bit disc. It installed without a hitch. Given my track record, getting Windows installed on the second try is pretty good.

Why Parallels thinks I have a floppy drive, I don’t know. It’s running fine on 512MB of RAM, which is way less than it takes to run it on a PC. Gotta love that :)

My quickie review of Vista – it’s slow. It’s really testy – it asks permission for everything, often several times while installing a single piece of software. I don’t know who said this – I’d love to attribute this quote to the orinator… “Vista is XP in a skirt.”

Here’s a screen shot (click to enlarge to 1440 x 900) of my MacBookPro running Parallels in coherence mode. Coherence mode lets me run windows and mac programs side by side without having to deal with the windows desktop. My Mac doc runs along the left side and the Windows task bar along the bottom. (this is my preference — you can leave your doc at the bottom – it’ll run below the Windows task bar.) I’m running VPchat (Windows only), Adium (Mac only) and Twitterific (Mac only).

Yes, I named my Vista virtual OS Parasite Rex, after the most excellent book of the same name. Parasite Rex : Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures – it’s fascinating, extremely readable science.

My short list of complaints after switching back to Mac included the following:

I can’t reliably tab my way to pop-up menus. I can never do it in
Firefox – I can occasionally do it in Safari. I’m used to rapidly
filling out forms without moving my hands from the keyboard, but I
nearly always have to go back and manually select the "state", and any
other pop-ups.

No more! There’s a very simple fix – why it’s not the default, I don’t know. Simply go to System Preferences and select Keyboard & Mouse. At the bottom of the Keyboard Shortcuts window, select the All Controls radio button. This will give cursor focus back to you for those popup and pulldown menus.

Wow, I can’t believe I just now discovered this. It’s easy – no-brainer easy — to sync your iCal, Contacts, Mail (all accounts & rules), Keychains, and Safari Bookmarks across multiple computers.

Let me back up. I’ve worked on multiple computers for years. I’ve always had the problem of certain info living on a desktop computer at home, and different info on my laptop. Email was the worst. Getting mail on both and leaving/deleting from the server from the other is far to cumbersome with any significant mail volume. Back in my PC days, I was never able to get iMap to work for email. I tried numerous times, as did our netops guy, all to no avail. For awhile I was fine using GoToMyPC, which essentially let me work on my desktop remotely from any other computer, even a Mac. (Sadly, they don’t have a client for accessing a Mac, but I highly recommend it to all you PC folks).

Then I switched back to Mac. No more remote access. Vine Server is simply too unreliable for me. I guess I’ve been afraid to try iMap on the Mac — I just didn’t want to go through what I went through in the past trying to get it to work. I keep running up against the fact that despite several months back in the Mac world, I still don’t expect things on my computer to work as they should. I bumped up against this the other day when I had messed up my font folder. I called several Mac nerd companies looking for immediate help. Finally one of them said “Have you called Apple?”. Doh! I simply am not used to thinking that the makers of my system software are available to help me. I even have an AppleCare plan and I still forgot. I called. They fixed my problem in 5 minutes.

But back to iMap. I went upstairs. First I tried to change my existing mailboxes to iMap. No go — I had to set up new mailboxes. I did so. It worked. I came out to my patio and did the same thing. It worked. Then I discovered the little option at the bottom of the mail preferences window: Synchronize with other computers using .Mac. I did so. It worked. I ran back upstairs and did the same thing. It worked!

There was one surprisingly cryptic dialog message along the way — I got this for several sync operations. I was really surprised — I rarely encounter poorly-written dialog boxes in Mac software. Or am I being blinded by the light?

30 minutes after deciding to tackle iMap, I not only can now get my mail on either computer without losing it on the other, I have access to all my appointments and contacts, so I can sync with my Treo (using The Missing Sync) while I’m out of town :)

I’m having one of those “I’m so glad to be back on a Mac” days.

So there I sat Friday morning, an hour away from an online meeting, surrounded by 5 robust computers, unable to do anything I needed, ready to tear my hair out. Some of the problems I brought on myself, some were beyond my control.

My first mistake was trying to do a shortcut installation of a CD full of fonts the night before. On my MacBook Pro, I was gradually, painstakingly installing them in Fontbook one at a time. But on my desktop Mac I tried to take a shortcut and copy a ton of folders directly into the Font folder. The fonts seemed to work fine in Fireworks and Dreamweaver, but when I tried to open Word, I got a popup window telling me about a corrupt font. I clicked “Ok” (the only option) and up popped another one. When I realized this was going to happen for each of the thousands of fonts I had copied, I forced Word to quit. “Crap, gotta deal with that soon,” I thought, and used a different word processor.

The next morning, an hour before my meeting, I went to open the Powerpoint presentation I’d need to reference in the meeting. The same thing happened — I wasn’t going to be opening the presentation on my iMac. Unfortunately, I don’t have Office on my laptop Mac, so I was going to have to turn to one of the PCs. I booted up the nearest one, and turned back to my iMac to see if I could solve the font problem. After several minutes I realized the PC wasn’t booting. It was trying — over, and over, and over. The reset button was stuck, and it was booting over and over, never quite making it. No time to mess with that — I moved onto the next PC. It booted fine, but the wireless keyboard batteries were apparently dead. I ran downstairs to scrounge for batteries. Couldn’t find any. Did I think to grab a wired keyboard from a different PC and plug it in? No I did not. OK, one computer left, and it’s the old PC laptop.

When I said earlier I was surrounded by 5 robust computers, I lied. I was surrounded by 4 robust computers and one rather slow machine. It’s a decent PC —  a newish X41 Tablet — but it’s only got 256k RAM, so it’s dead slow. I knew it would be 15 minutes or so before the thing booted, updated, and finally downloaded the 11MB file, so I decided to tackle the font problem. I decided to simply delete all the fonts in folders. Bad idea. Suddenly the IM conversation I was having with Susan turned to gibberish. My keyboard was responding to my typing, but not with the correct letters. My email and stickies no longer displayed correctly. I had broken my Mac.

I watched my PC laptop struggle to get the file open. I tried to launch YM on it, but it was too busy struggling with Powerpoint to respond.

So there I sat, with all this technology around me, unable to do a damn thing.

Just my luck: the meeting got moved out an hour.

I was able to fix the font thing. To do so I accessed the Library via the Macintosh HD (as opposed to from my home). The font folder there contains the default set (or the right set, at any rate). I copied them, and pasted them into Home > Library and I was good to go. It was that simple. I loved my Mac again.

The meeting went fine, although there was no speakerphone on the other end, so my “call in” was a cell phone sitting on the table — I had to ping them via IM if I wanted to talk.

We had a good laugh about having bad technology karma for the morning, but man was it frustrating. I’m still not back 100%. My Windows installation on my main Mac is hosed, and I don’t know yet if it’s a Parallels issue, a Windows CD issue, or a CD Drive issue. But I’m up and running again anyway. But I’m really ready for technology to get another order of magnitude simpler and more reliable.

The recent Parallels Desktop for Mac upgrade makes you feel like you’ve gone completely Mac. In the previous version, Windows ran in its own window on your desktop. This upgrade lets you run Parallels in coherence mode, which means you can run your Windows programs directly on your Mac desktop. The familar Windows taskbar sits along the bottom of your screen, just above the Apple dock. This screenshot (click the image to view it at 800×600) shows VPchat and Yahoo Instant Messenger running on my Mac desktop. Both programs are running smoothly and seamlessly.

Other great new features include:

• Resizable guest OS window (and automatic resolution adjustment when you resize)
• Capability to copy & paste between Mac and Windows screens
• Create multiple virtual machines

Full feature list

How much do I love my new Mac? So much that simply could no longer stand to use my PC laptop, and am now the proud owner of a MacBook Pro computer in addition to the desktop Mac. I bought it on my way home from a meeting in San Antonio. Impulsive enough for ya?

I do have a few peeves, however:

• You can only resize windows from the lower right corner, unlike in Windows, where you can resize from any corner and any side. I hope Apple fixes this in Leopard.
• Remote access is pretty weak. I used GoToMyPC all the time, and loved it. It even allowed me to use a Mac to log onto my home PC. Unfortunately there’s no Mac version, so I’m relegated to Vine Server. It’s adequate, but not very friendly, and it won’t force my entire desktop into my laptop window – I have to auto-scroll to move across the desktop.
• There’s no (at least I think there’s no) way to view thumbnails or previews of images in directory windows. I miss this when placing a graphic from a long list of files.
• I can’t reliably tab my way to pop-up menus. I can never do it in Firefox – I can occasionally do it in Safari. I’m used to rapidly filling out forms without moving my hands from the keyboard, but I nearly always have to go back and manually select the "state", and any other pop-ups. Update: I found a fix for this!.
• The MacBook Pro battery SUCKS. I mean really, seriously sucks. I get 2.5 hours, tops.

Not a bad list – all very fixable with software with the exception of the battery. I can’t imagine how long a list of PC/Microsoft complaints would be…