Unduly Noted

Don’t throw that old 802.11b router out. If you have the ability to run a long ethernet cable to or near the end of your house that has a poor signal, you can extend your network without purchasing a branded “wireless access point”
How To:
Run a 25 or 50ft cable from one of the ports (labeled 1-4 if it is a 4 port router) of your main router towards or as close to the problem area.
Do not plug it into the old router yet.
Plug your laptop into the old router (port 1)
Check your documentation on how to logon to the routers configuration page. (Typically 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.2.1 are the most common, type either one into your web browsers address bar. Common default passwords can be found here)
Once logged in check to make sure this routers IP isn’t the same as your main routers IP. If it is, change the last number in the series (pick something in the 50’s should be fine)
Now still in this old router find the DHCP setting and turn it OFF. Your router will reboot (again if you had to change the IP above)
Still in the old router go to wireless settings and change the wireless name (the name of your wireless network) to the exact same name of your main routers wireless network.
ALSO: change the channel of this wireless network to something different from your main router. Typically 11 is the default so you should be safe changing it to 6 ot 7.
Now plug that long cord from the main router into one of the 1-4 ports of the old router.

Now if your laptops are set to get an IP automatically you will be all set to go, just give it a bit to establish that initial connection and get an IP (it takes a little longer than normal)
If you are having trouble resolving an IP feel free to manually set your IP address on your computer with the main router’s IP in the router/gateway box.

Your computer should now automatically switch to whichever signal is better without you having to do anything.

Im not saying these are the best, but they are pretty dang good and ones I use all the time. Best of all they are FREE and recognize a ton of cd/dvd burners.

MAC:
Burn (website) features Data, Audio, Video and Disc copy with a single drive. It can burn Mac only, PC (Joliet ), Mac and PC Combo Data discs. Audio recording is straight forward with a drag and drop interface like the rest of the program. Video recording supports VCD, SVCD, DVD, DivX. And don’t worry about file conversions, this uses ffmpeg, which can pretty much convert any video file for you on the fly (to MPEG-2 in this instance) before burning the dvd. The disc copy feature is fairly self evident. Just pop it in a disc and hit copy, or drag and drop an image to burn it to disc.

WINDOWS:
CDBurnerXP (site) is pretty loaded with features even it were a paid app. Create images, music, dvd’ even blu-ray. It runs on almost all flavors of windows that are still relevant including the windows 7. Fairly simple interface and works with a ton of burners. Check out the features list.

EDIT: This is also working ok on the final beta build of 10.6 snow leopard. Will keep you posted about the release.

This is an oldie but the software has gotten better from back when I first used it. So the problem exists that you want to swap a drive between mac and windows. Naturally you think Fat32, and you would be correct. But you have a DVD.iso image that is greater than the 4 gig file size limit of Fat32. If only the mac could write to NTFS.

3 Step install process.

Install MacFUSE (from google)
Install NTFS-3G (If the link is broken just do a search for it)
If this post is older than a few months check out the official blog for the links to the latest packages (macntfs-3g)
Reboot the machine.

All your NTFS drives will be full read/write capable in mac os x.
WARNING:
Sometimes if you force reboot windows on your mac or it shuts down improperly (bootcamp) the NTFS drive will not mount on the Mac OS X side anymore. An easy fix to this is to just reboot into windows and make sure it shuts down properly.

BONUS:
This also gives you the ability to format a disk from mac os x to NTFS-3G that works in windows of course. Just open disk utility, click on the disk on the left hand pane (the disk not the partition) you want to partition, select the partition tab and choose how many partitions you would like from the drop down. Pull down the “Format” drop down and click “Windows NT Filesystem (NTFS-3G). If you plan to make this bootable make sure you click the options button at the bottom of the page and choose “Master Boot Record”. Done.

If you are running windows and want to read mac drives (HFS) the best solution I know of is mediafour’s Macdrive7 (mac drive 7). Cost is $49 as of this posting and it really works well. Gives you several options for filename compatibility when transferring, plus many more.

Apparently Daemon Tools and or Alcohol 120 can slightly give you a headache. After several weeks of running one of them on a Vista Home Premium system all of the sudden my dvd burner stopped working. Wouldn’t read anything. It was not hardware because it could be booted from just fine. Remove the device in device manager, rescan for hardware changes still produced the proper name of the product but with the yellow exclamation triangle mark over it. Windows said it would not start the device because of a missing or corrupt driver. It all turned out to be an easy registry fix. Here is the Microsoft Article explaining the solution. I backed up the entire {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} folder first (just right click it and export). All I had to remove was the LowerFilters Key. Then just uninstall the device from the device manager and rescan for changes. It now works again.

hello pirates!

So you found yourself with a huge .iso or .dmg of Mac OS 10.7 (or earlier). Maybe you made it yourself and lost the disc, maybe you downloaded it, maybe your DVD-Drive is broken (as every singe one of my macs turns out to be sooner than later).

On a mac: Open up disk utility, click on your usb or firewire drive and then go to the partition tab. Name your disc, in this instance we will call it Mac OS X Install.

Choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the format.

Next make sure you click the options button and choose GUID (intel mac) or Apple Partition Map (PPC). Click Apply.

Now comes the fun part. In the left hand pane click on your newly named disk Mac OS X Install (After formatting is complete of course).

Click the Restore tab on the far right. Click the Image button next to the source field and choose your .iso or .dmg.

Next drag your newly formated Mac OS X Install icon (from the left pane or from your desktop to the restore field) and click restore.

If I remember correctly it will ask you for your admin user/pass.

If you get a failure at this step try to mount the image and restore from that. If that doesn’t work unmount it and try the original again. It has been flaky for me sometimes. A sure fire fix is to go to image in the menu and click “scan image for restore”. Takes a bit but lets you continue.

After it has completed eject the usb/firewire drive and take it to the mac you want to instal OS X on.

Plug in the usb/firewire drive and startup the mac. Right after hitting the power button hold down the “option” key. You will see a boot menu with your usb/firewire drive listed as a boot option. Click it and hit return. Install…

Reminder that PPC’s can’t boot from usb so you will have to use a firewire drive for this. Although I swear I have booted a Power Mac G5 from usb, its been too long to remember though.

Want to make a fully bootable usb or firewire drive of your current system that you can take with you? Or just for backup. Try:
Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper. Both great backup tools that are so easy to use they don’t need a post. Make sure you follow the formatting instructions at the top of this post if you want to make the drives bootable with these 2 programs.