I need a bigger hard drive, Part 2

Whew! When we left off last time, I had just reinstalled both OS 10.3, followed by OS 10.5 on my 5 year old iMac - you know, the kind with the pixar-desk lamp-like body? (Why did they abandon that body type so soon, anyway? It was so cool! And I liked the mobility of that screen.)

That whole exercise left me with almost no space on my hard drive, so I was shuffling around deleting unused apps. I mean, who needs World Book 2004 in the days of Wikipedia? And I never use Virtual PC anymore now that I have my Intel MBP with Parallels running Windows XP. That opened about 6GB. Then I started the iPhoto library import from Previous Systems (which I mentioned in the last post). As more and more photos were imported, the GB remaining got lower, and lower, and then approached zero - so this whole time I'm scanning for other big files and apps I can get rid of. I learned more about the files on this machine than I've known since I last used it regularly in March 2007. Here's what I learned...

Somehow, I ended up with doubles of almost every picture taken in my iPhoto library. One would be the typical 1mb file size, the other was appx 19KB. I'm guessing that this has to do with the way I imported my iPhoto library. Not knowing truly how to do this (and not being able to find anything about how to recover a library in iPhoto 6 help) I just selected "iPhoto library" from the Pictures folder in my old User directory. I'm guessing this imported ALL of the little thumbnails as separate pictures? Anyway, I've spent at least an hour so far deleting these one by one, and am only about 1/3 done.

I also found out that I have duplicates of almost every photo taken prior to 2004, because when I changed to iPhoto from the software that came with my Canon camera, I never deleted the original Canon files. That's good, at least, because it buys me some more space on my hard drive now that I know I can delete those...

So today, the fun continues cleaning up that old 12/2003 machine, while I'm still down to 2 GB on the MBP. All this because I'm a notoriously bad filer, even in analog mode, so it's no wonder my computers are as cluttered as my office! But that's a story for another day.

I need a bigger hard drive!!

Or need to know how to clean out my computer like I never seem to be able to clean out my office... My MacBook Pro is perpetually within 2GB of maxed out. Today I thought I would clear some media files off by transferring some of them to the 5 year old iMac that my son (viewer of said media files) uses. No sooner is the USB jump drive in the slot than I see that this computer also, will soon be out of hard drive space. ARRGH! So, my amateurish tech mind says - hmm, I'll just delete some "Big" files, and then I'll be ok...

Well, about the 3rd round of deletions caused some sort of crash that the poor old iMac couldn't recover from. Spinning wheels, then little dots going around in circles under the Apple symbol after first one, two, then three forced restarts. So, brilliant techie that I pretend to be, I drag out the original system disks (mind you, I upgraded this machine to Leopard close to a year ago.) I managed to start the machine, but it the only option I could find had me reinstall the OS. So I did an Archive and Install, and hoped for the best...

I restarted, found my old documents in the "Previous System" folder, started moving them over, then said - I'm going to need to re-install Leopard anyway. So I grab the Leopard Install DVD and begin that process. Of course by now, the Previous System archive has taken up even more space on the hard drive, so I have to choose custom install options in order to even have enough room. I de-selected the Japanese language option and eliminated all of the printer drivers that I know I will never need (they give you ones with the printers anyway, right?) and finally managed to work my way down so I had enough space to do an install.

An hour or so (and one clean kitchen) later, and I was back in business, but with still less space on the hard drive. I decided to re-import my iphoto library so that I could then delete the "previous system" archive. Yet another hour of sitting and watching the computer. At least this time I was watching every photo I ever uploaded flash in front of me. Only at some point I realized that I was seeing the same pictures over and over again... and that I was perilously close to running out of hard drive space COMPLETELY...

And at this point, I had to go pick up the 5 year old from school, so have to continue this saga later.

It's an East Coast weather night!

Today we were able to sit outside until 8pm (and the son and hubby are still out there!) It's a balmy 75+ degrees, which is not entirely typical for our backyard. It reminds me of the weather at our family's place in NJ, though, which we just returned from. The weather in NJ prompted me to search for a better iphone weather app. I am opposed to spending money on apps, as a rule, so I settled on the free version of the Weather Channel App.

I've setup 5 preferred locations so far. The app lets me check temp, relative humidity, and the all important "feels like" temp. My favorite pages other than current weather are the weather by hour and the Map view. The Map view helped me convince hubby to break camp early last Sunday rather than stay in a rainy tent for 3 hours only to still be breaking camp in the rain! This was after the "weather by hour" view had encouraged him to leave the campground movie showing of Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs in time to get the rain fly up and therefore prevent a major soggy disaster.

I don't know what the pay Weather Channel app would give us that the free one doesn't. For now, I'm just a huge fan of Weather Channel lite!

How I spent my summer vacation!

My son, husband and I just got back from a month of travel. I got a new iphone 3GS before we left, and was THRILLED by the improved speed of 3G over my original Edge Network iphone. Pages that used to take the time it takes to sing the National Anthem to load now zip open! My location on Maps is way more accurate. My 5-year old can stay occupied for hours making videos. I'm in love...

I'm a little OCD when it comes to traveling (where can I fill up the gas tank, is that restaurant really as good as it looks from the outside - WHERE can I get my morning Starbucks fix?) My next few posts will cover the apps I loved and relied on to survive 2 road trips from Marin to the Sierras and one 10-day journey from New Jersey to Maine and back. Who knows whether anyone else will enjoy reading about this as much as I enjoyed experiencing it, but you never know until you try.

For now, though, I'm signing off to referee a battle over train tracks and trains between my son and his best friend...