CATAN :Board Setup Scenarios, how many of ?

If you are a fan of the CATAN board game, and you like our family have aquired all the expansions that are worth wile playing ( Seafarers & Knightes and Cities) and you have the 5-6 player expansion, you have alot of pieces to go through when you are setting up and you may eventually combined all your peices into one nice plastic box for ease of transporation.

While the instructions that come with each expansion should be kept with the peices for rules and such, there is not one place you can look to see how many of each peice you need to setup the game correctly (hex/tile type, number tokens, Commodity cards, Development cards, Resource Cards). Untill Now. My wonderfill wife compiled this list and I'm sharing it with the wolrd. I'd Suggest you print it out and keep it with your catan pieces for ease of setup.

Download the CATAN BOARD SETUP PDF HERE

Enjoy!

How to Candy your iPhone

Materials Required :

1 White iPhone
1 Pair of Scissors
1 Roll of Painters Tape
1 Roll ofRed Duck Tape

You could just use the Red Duck Tape directly on the iPhone but I figured the residue left by Duck Tap would be a pain to clean off, so the painters’ tape will be what sticks to the iPhone, which is easy to remove, and still holds well enough on the slick iPhone back.

Start by taking the Red Duck Tape and taping a 4-5 inch piece on to the top of the painters tape. It is easiest to do this while the painter’s tape is still on the roll. Try to keep the Duck Tap nice a smooth. Then cut the piece for Painters tape from the role.

Now you should have a piece of tape that is Red Duck Tape on top, and the sticky painters tape on bottom.

Then cut several strips in 3 different widths. Place them on the iPhone.

It’s a good idea to clean the back of the iPhone before applying your candy stripes.

I suggest you examine a Candy Cane to see how the stripes are sized and separated as if you cut all the strips the same size and place them equally apart you wont get the candy cane effect, just some dull stripes.

Enjoy!

APPLES & ACT! MAV 2010 Presentation

Download the Powerpoint Presentation from MAV2010 APPLES & ACT

Enjoy!

X Marks the Spot : Moving User Profiles, easier and better than Windows

In my Last blog entry I talked about how I upgrade my MAC by installing the CalDigit Raid Card so I could my data from hard drive failures. One of the things that I was protecting was my User Profile data which is where 80% of my data is stored. When I was a windows user, I had copied my windows user profile many time after many “nuke and paves” that were required to keep windows running smoothly and the moving of the user profile was never perfect and never without any problem, there was always settings that didn’t transfer or paths that had to be updated. It never worked with ease, and was always dreadful. With my recent “Data shuffle” while creating and adding hardware raid Protection to my data, I had to move my profile to a different volume name. I must say that it could not have been simpler. I updated the users profile path by right clicking the user, going to advanced and changing the home Directory. Logged out and logged back in and it was exactly the way I left it. Everything was the same, Backgrounds, icons, placement of icons, Icons on dock bar, I was even able to open programs and all their data was in place, simple things like Recently Open Documents list, Settings, Mail in Entourage ( I didn’t have to hunt down the PST). The ONLY thing that was not seamless was VMWARE fusion, my 4 Virtual Machines in the home page were broken links but that was easily fixable by opening them from the new path, which VMWARE is prepared for because it prompts you “ did you move this VM”, simply answer the questions and you will be booting your VMs in no time.
The only problem I had was because I was changing volume names, I had a problem with the volume name getting stuck using an old alias name, A quick Google search, ran a command and I was off to the races. Even with the mishap still better than windows.
Good Job Apple.

X Marks the Spot: Upgrading to Hardware Raid Protection.

X Marks the Spot: Upgrading to hardware Raid Protection.
The one thing that is not included with the Mac Pro is a RAID card. Apples sells one for about $700, but honestly don’t waste your money. While the apple raid card will support SAS drives, this is only 1 of the 2 perk compared to the CalDigit Raid Card. I actually purchased the APPLE Raid Card but returned it because it had no support for boot camp, was not as fast as cheaper Raid cards, and the features were lacking. I recently discovered CalDigit, which has been making external storage and raid cards for Apple computers for quite some time. The CalDigit Raid Card is faster, supports Boot Camp (additional cable required), and can support up to 16 drives (4 internal, 12 external) via 2 eSTAT ports on the back of the card. The Caldigit Card comes with Raid Shield software, a Java based UI for configuring the card. The software has some very cool features not normally seen in desktop raid software. For example, I have 3 X 750GB internal drives for data, but prior to the raid card I had my data on a software raid mirror, so once I installed the card, I created a Raid 1 Array using the spare no data drive, and one of the data drives. Then I connected the remaining data drive to the Mac Pro’s Mother board via the SATA cable included with the Caldigit Raid Card. Booted OS X 10.5.6 and copied my data to the Raid Array. Now that my data was safe, I used the Raid Shield to Migrate from Raid 1 to Raid 5, but adding the last data drive to the array, a few hours later the Raid Array was completely initialized as Raid 5, and all my Data remained. Its worth noting if you have a software raid, you need to break the software mirror first or it confuses the hell out of the raid card. The only other perk the Apple Raid Card has is that you can easily boot to a drive on the raid card. Because the CalDigit Raid Card is connected to all 4 drive bays via the iPass Cable, I had some difficulty getting the system to boot consistently to the drive on the raid card. The OS drive was not raided. I final result was to remove my second optical bay, and use the supplied drive rails, and SATA cable to move my OS drive to the on board SATA port. Once I did this I was very happy, and Now I have another open Drive bay for more Raid Space, Yippee more heat!