flop ya mac out

As someone who is gearing up to head overseas, I’ve put my laptop into somewhat of a lock-down mode, password protecting everything to make sure that it can’t be molested if it falls into the wrong hands abroad.

However, the drawback of such tight security is that (with the omission of physical labelling), if my laptop falls into the right hands, there’s no way the finder can figure out who the laptop actually belongs to.

Enter this handy hint, sourced from Apple’s own Leopard Security Configuration Guide. The hack allows you to place a custom phrase in the OS X Leopard Login Screen, just above the user name and password.

Crank up the terminal, and enter the following:

su [your admin username]
sudo -s
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowText “This laptop belongs to Jason Deacon, and you don’t.”

Of course, you may want to garnish your welcome message with maybe a contact phone number, email address or more impressive message than the example here.

The beauty of this hack is that as your contact details change when you travel, updating them is a simple as re-entering this into terminal. No more re-printing labels on the road, and you’re able to enter much more information here, too.

The Apple Security Guide is a good read, which I thoroughly recommend if you’ve got an eye for that sort of thing. We’ll explore more security tips in time!

One the features of Leopard i was most looking forward to was Time Machine. Still am. I’m still looking forward to time machine.

But i’ve installed Leopard, how could this be? What’s going on here? Why don’t i know the joys of bringing deleted files back from the dead and forgoing the dread of file loss? 

Because Time Machine is being real… a real fuck stick really! Twice it has almost backed up my HDD completely, but then come up with some error.

The last two times it’s started to backup, it says it can’t find the drive. Great.

Well i’m glad that in that wasted time my laptop’s hard drive hasn’t packed it in! Or i’d be rooted! (Well, i do have that other back up i made for when i installed Leopard, but not the point!) 

What a let down. I’d just been complaining to Jase a few days ago that every backup program i’d used had crashed on me, and so Time Machine was to be my saviour. But now i’m going to be the one to try and do the saving. To save me. 

In fairness, it could be that my ext hard drive is about to pack it in. Better now than a month down the road too! I ran ‘Repair Disk’ and i got this wonderful message from the OS X gods… 

Do ya see that? What i named my ext hdd?… Geddit? Clever hey! I bet there have been a number of geeks patting themselves on their backs for that one. Comment us if you’re another great mind that thought alike…

With every Jean, Claude, Van and Damn on the internet giving their first impressions on Leopard, I thought I’d add my voice to the crowd, with a focus on some of the finer tweaks that I certainly get a kick out of in updates like this.

Dan and I journeyed to our local Australian Apple Store this evening and were nearly met with a rousing applause.

The install went smoothly, thought the damn thing seemed to take longer ‘verifying the disc’ than actually installing the thing. If you’re in a rush, I certainly see no harm in skipping the verify step. If you are installing a family pack on multiple computers and are cool like me, then I would definitely recommend skipping this lengthy time-waster.

My first impressions are thus:

• The whole install process is so breezy, it really has been perfected.
• Spotlight flies like an absolute bitch! Amazing! On my MacBook Pro it took about half an hour to build the library and was off and racing. It automatically highlights the top entry now, a nice change.
• Sleep/wake times on the MacBooks are the same
• There’s no ‘Loading OS’ screen per-say, it just gets it straight on! Sexy.
• The Airport menu loads instantly, at last!
• Time Machine most certainly backs up over the Airport Extreme Base Station, providing you perform your initial backup with your external HDD connected to your mac, and then when connected to your Airport, manually logon to it once through Finder and set it to remember the password.
• The new side-panel of Finder is brilliant. .Mac is enabled by default, but that can be pissed off through the settings pretty easily.
• Safari feels snappier. Really. It’s out of BETA finally, too. I’m going to try and make the switch over from Firefox one last time. Firefox runs like an absolute dog for some reason, too. All the more reason to go Safari.
• I’m not entirely sure what to think of the new translucent menus, or gratuitous use of drop-shadow. I’ll sleep on that one.
• All the Help menus have been rehashed, to better serve the kind of people who click on them.
• Screen capture gives feedback for the exact pixel that you are hovering over. Awww.
• Time Machine is a handsome bitch.

I’ll certainly add more as it comes up. But on the whole, this is one of those upgrades that doesn’t smack you in the face with joy straight away, but instead gently flicks marbles at you until you realise that all-in-all, it is actually freaking awesome. I think I might sleep in my free Leopard tshirt.

So what do two Mac geeks do with themselves on a Friday at 6pm? Any other day it might be repairing permissions or polishing their iPhone screens, but today the flop ya mac out-ers took a drive to get some of Apple’s latest OS X offerings, otherwise known as Leopard.

Geared up for the long waiting line at the Apple store, along with the patented Apple buzz and anticipation, Daniel and Jason were in for something rather different…

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