Journal

CATAN :Board Setup Scenarios, how many of ?

Jeremy Wesley — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 17:38:53 +0000

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

Jeremy Wesley — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:56:49 +0000

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

Jeremy Wesley — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 19:27:17 +0000

Download the Powerpoint Presentation from MAV2010 APPLES & ACT

Enjoy!

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

Jeremy Wesley — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 13:39:58 +0000

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.

Jeremy Wesley — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 13:26:34 +0000

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!

X Marks the Spot: Applications and their replacements

Jeremy Wesley — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 13:19:49 +0000

This is a short quick list of the applications I had to switch to since some of my apps are not avaliable on OS X.

Chat > Adium (freeware similar to Trillian)
FTP > Transmit (shareware)

Office 2008 for MAC, allows you to use Office documents but the UI is nothing like Office 2007 on Windows, features are missing from OS X. iWork is cheaper.
Adobe CS3 is everything it is in windows, but with a OS X UI.
VMWare Fusion ( check out unity) great for running apps that have no alternative on OS X, Like ACT!
Remote Desktop > CoRD is a RDP client into windows machines, similar to RoyalTS
Torrents > Transmission – really cool
Quicken and QuickBooks are available on OS X

Another Application worth looking into is Quicksilver, a huge time save for keyboard freeks, like my self.

X Marks the Spot: The Keyboard Shortcuts

Jeremy Wesley — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 13:08:20 +0000

When I am working or even playing at my computer I tend to use one human input device, either the mouse or the Keyboard. I do not like to switch back and forth from mouse to keyboard as I feel this time is wasteful and unproductive. So I guess you could say I am a shortcut kind of guy, I really like my keyboard shortcuts. After using OS X for a few minutes I quickly discovered that a few shortcuts that I had grown accustomed to were not the same, or nonexistent in OS X. I guess the title of this blog could be “Vista and OS X keyboard shortcut differences”, but that just too long.

The print screen key , AKA screenshot, in OS X is much more advanced that then the default print screen in Windows. There are two variations of the print screen commands. If you use the CMD key in the keystroke combination the print screen is copied to your clipboard and will also be saved as a JPEG to your desktop. If you use the Control Key in the keystroke combinations then the jpeg is not created and the print screen is only copied to your clipboard. Here are the Keystroke combinations and how they are more advanced than the default in vista and its predecessors.

The Save the Captured area to a JPEG on your desktop, They do or don’t save a copy of that image in your clipboard.

CMD + Shift + 3
This will print screen/screenshot of your entire screen.
CMD + Shift + 4 ( My favorite)
This will bring up a selection tool so you can make a rectangular screenshot of a specific area. This is similar to Office 2008 OneNote ( windows key + s)
CMD + Shift + 4 + Space Bar
This will turn your cursor into a camera. Use this camera to take a picture of a specific the Dock, a menu, or a window and it will crop the background automatically for the resulting image.

These commands will capture the area to your clipboard, they do not save them image as a JPG.

Control + Shift + 3
This will print screen/screenshot of your entire screen.
Control + Shift + 4
This will bring up a selection tool so you can make a rectangular screenshot of a specific area. This is similar to Office 2008 OneNote ( windows key + s)
Control + Shift + 4 + Space Bar
This will turn your cursor into a camera. Use this camera to take a picture of a specific the Dock, a menu, or a window and it will crop the background automatically for the resulting image.

Home and End Keys most of the time don’t work they way they work in windows.
OS X Alternatives
The CMD Key is the Key with the apple on it on the Keyboard.
Windows Home = Mac Apple Key + Left Arrow
Windows End = Mac Apple Key + Right Arrow
Home and End are supported in Office 2008
There is not show desktop icon in OS X but check out F11- part of Expose on OS X
Windows Alt –Tab thru apps = in OS X try CMD + tab or F9 of F10 or Side Buttons on mighty mouse
Vista SideBar = Dashboard of widget in OS X hit f12 or push scrow ball on mighty mouse

Copy > CMD + C
Paste > CMD + V

Well thats alot but not everything. Hope that helps.

X Marks the Spot: The Keyboard & Mouse

Jeremy Wesley — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:59:02 +0000

The Mac Keyboard is pretty much the same as a windows keyboard but it does take a little while to get use to, about as much as switching from one name brand laptop to another. There are several Keys missing that many windows or vista users have grown very accustomed to, and they are Print Screen, Scroll Lock, Pause, Backspace, Number Lock, Windows Key, and the Right click Menu Key. Just because this keys don’t exist doesn’t mean that the function is nonexistent in OS X as many user do assume. The Windows key (also known as Start or windows flag key ) and Apple CMD key ( also known as the Apple Key) are interchangeable so it is not really nonexistent on the Apple Keyboard. I found the default mouse movement speed to be way to slow for me. Granted my desktop is composed of 3 X 19” screens so I have much more screen real estate that I want to cover. I had to speed the mouse speed up to the max before I was comfortable with the speed. I know it is not the mighty mouse device as I have used all of the same hardware on my vista install that is no more. The mighty mouse doesn’t have a clear break to define that it has a left and right mouse click, but the right click button is there, I find it’s a little farther right than normal windows mice. Mac OS X doesn’t really rely on the user knowing to right click on a object to see a menu as there are tool bar Icons with the same drop down menus. In the Mac World they are more familiar with the phrase “Control –Click” , I feel right click is so much more of a time saver. The Mighty Mouse has a ball in the middle similar to Logitech’s scroll wheel. The difference is this ball is much like the newest Blackberries (Pearl, Curve) navigation “pearl”. The Difference between the Mighty mouse Scroll ball and the Traditional Windows Scroll Where is that the ball gives the scroll a Horizontal as well as a vertical Axis to scroll on. I have found this beneficial when working in Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator.

Where does the H come from in the word Whiz?

Jeremy Wesley — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 04:33:00 +0000

Warning: I’m about to bitch.
I have a small software addon company that develops products that are primarily wizard based so that the end user's hand is held so they can get it right. Every now and then people email me about my company or products ( which all end in wiz i.e RDBwiz, HolidayWiz, etc) and they spell the wiz part as WHIZ.. I guess they didn’t notice that the wiz was short for wizard, and no where in the word wizard is there an H. So I ask, where does the H come from in Whiz? I did some research on the word whiz and I found that this word is not the same as wiz or wizard, In fact whiz refers to noise making or urination. So these people that call my products whiz, are they saying my products are loud, noisy and pissy, and they are still are interested in buying them? After pondering on it for a little while, I believe that these people are one of the following:
1. They are that ignorant to pay attention how I spell my product names.
2. They are incapable of spelling.
3. They are oblivious to the world around them.
4. They have smoked so much pot that they actually do see extra letters in words, like the H in wizard.

X Marks the Spot: The scary first step towards OS X

Jeremy Wesley — Fri, 23 May 2008 04:32:00 +0000

Back in December 2007 I purchased a new Mac Pro and installed vista 64 via boot camp 1.0 because it was cheaper than a Dell Workstation. I used Vista 99.5% of the time and after 3 months the Vista indexing service had aggravated and frustrated me so much, that when my C drive died, I naturally blamed Vista. As its indexing service was the one who was eating my hard drives for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. I also feel that this service makes vista much slower, but if you disable the index service you have no way to search for files or search in outlook 2007, making life real hard. I also felt that with Vista, everything had been moved around, icons were missing, and I was constantly reading sentences to find where the network settings where. I felt as if I was having to learning a new “pretty” OS that was not as stable as its predecessor. So since I was going to have to load all my software on the machine again, I took a chance, a chance on Apples OS X 10.5 AKA Leopard that came with my Mac Pro. It felt a bit like moving out of my parents house, so much responsibility in an unknown area, but did I really want to move, life was so good as I was in a comfortable place, but vista had made it uncomfortable, kind of like some patents do on their kids when they want them to move out. So I began to move what data I could off my crashing hard drive, and began looking for the OS X counter parts to applications and settings that I had grown use to working everyday in Windows. The big apps were easy, Office and Adobe CS3 Suite both install and work on Windows and OS X. We use Microsoft Exchange for email. I was able to get Entourage ( the Mac Outlook) to work with Exchange with little effort once I had the right settings from our Exchange hosting provider. So since there are some differences, I decided to document in my blog the differences that I noticed. I am sure I will not catch all of the difference but I will do my best to document which applications I use on windows and their counter parts on OS X, keyboard shortcuts, various settings, features, advantages and disadvantages. Just so I am completely clear, I used Apples OS back in High School, I think it was either 7 or 9, (the Macs that were all in one before iMacs) and I have been using windows since Win 3.1. I will decided to name these documentation blogs “X Marks the Spot” as I’m moving my digital life to X, and hopefully there is something wonderful buried under the X.