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This is Hendron’s Digest: on educational technology.

Archive for October, 2007

Leopard Migration

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

Update: After writing this, my second attempt at a migration failed, too. In both cases, it tripped-up on a folder containing portfolio materials I created from a class I took. I removed this folder from the queue for migration, and attempting a 3rd run.

Thus far, my migration to Mac OS X Leopard hasn’t gone real smoothly.

Migration Assistant

I started by installing a new hard disk into my PowerMac G5. This drive would be the “Leopard” disk. Still in the computer was my older master disk, the “Tiger” disk. I installed a “fresh” copy of Leopard on the new drive, and used Migration assistant to copy-over my information to the new drive.

The first migration, which took place while I slept, failed.

Seemingly, it couldn’t move the Applications, only copied half of my files, but then it couldn’t create a new account in doing so. One suspicious thing it left in the folder name for my “non” user was “.noindex.” Once Leopard discovered my Tiger drive, it began indexing it with Spotlight. I have read that the two indexes, the Tiger and Leopard variants for Spotlight, are not compatible. So… I told Leopard NOT to index my older Tiger drive.

Then I ran the Migration assistant. And surprisingly, it failed.

So this morning, I did index the drive in Leopard, and have run Migration Assistant again. It’s currently at the 3 hours, 5 minutes mark.

I chose this method for getting started with Leopard to avoid having to make a backup clone of my Tiger drive. The new drive afforded me more space, etc. I have several options awaiting once this is complete for using Time Machine.

Pop!Tech Education Fellows

Sunday, October 21st, 2007

There is always a lot of good things to see and listen to from the Pop!Tech conference. I really enjoyed watching this one.

I also blogged about this elsewhere, and plan to run it in my newsletter next week in Goochland.

Fonts

Tuesday, October 16th, 2007

At lunch the other day, a colleague said that my documents all look consistent. “They all look the same, they have a personal stamp… same typeface, etc.” I began to think about fonts. Well, those who know me well know that I’m always thinking about fonts. Some favorites of mine I do use often, in hindsight, and while they aren’t any of fanciful “new kids on the block,” they are all old favorites:

John’s Fonts

I use Myriad and Union a lot in documents I produce at work. Union is nice and chunky, and appears “large” even at smaller type sizes. Centaur is difficult to read on screen, but when magnified, is quite arresting. Pontifex makes me think of the 80s, I hope it someday soon comes back into “style.” Aldus is the thinner, taller, more delicate and refined cousin to Zapf’s Palatino, a font that unfortunately has been overused having been found on millions of PCs.

I used the “middleschrift” variant of DIN in lowercase in 2000 for my website, biberfan.com. It was originally designed for German highway/traffic signs.

Free World Map

Monday, October 15th, 2007

http://english.freemap.jp/worldpaint/worldpaint.html

For more in the collection see here.

Google Docs

Monday, October 15th, 2007

Great little video demonstrating the appeal of Google’s Docs, Spreadsheets, and Presentations.

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