Weekend Scare

I was sitting on the sofa, reading some Website or other, and my wife asked me to look for something for her that she thought our granddaughter may have last had. I put my MacBook down, next to the sofa, on its side, power cable up. I began to search under the cushions and knocked one of the throw pillows off the sofa, and it knocked over the MacBook, which fell onto its power supply with a pretty loud thump. The screen went blank. I nearly panicked, but then saw that it was rebooting. It came back to life just fine, and I didn't see anything go wrong the rest of the day.

Snow Leopard, part 2

Amazon says my copy of Snow Leopard has not yet shipped. Sigh.

Snow Leopard

In June, I purchased Leopard to prepare my MacBook for Snow Leopard, which, at the time, was supposed to be released in September. As I was backing up the MacBook to prepare for the Leopard installation, the HD failed. I had to buy a new HD for the laptop. I've really liked Leopard in the now nearly two months that I've been using it. By now, you've probably read or heard that Snow Leopard goes on sale tomorrow. I ordered it from Amazon Monday, and they're telling me I'll receive it around September 9. I'll probably do a complete backup again and do an "Erase and Install" when I get Snow Leopard. Today, I've read in a couple of places that I may have been able to skip Leopard and could have gone from Tiger straight to Snow Leopard. Doh!

Back that data up! -- part two

I bought the WD hard drive at Best Buy. The first thing I did was back up my old external HD to the new one. It works fine so far. I'll probably back up my wife's laptop tonight.

Back that data up!

Check this week's ads from Best Buy and Office Max for deals on 1TB drives. They're both selling them this week for the same price as some of the 500GB drives they're also selling. Buy more than one and secure your data!

Here's the one at Best Buy: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8475777&type=product&id=1185271084278

Office Max's Website is not showing the same as the printed ad.

How Do I Play mkv Files on Mac OS X Leopard?

I was having trouble playing an mkv file on my MacBook--I'm running Leopard on a Core Duo MacBook. Using VLC, I would get the sound, but no picture. With QuickTime or DivX Player, they'd say they could not open the file. A Google search turned up Perian, and I installed it. Still no go. I then found that I was not running the latest VLC player. I had .86 or somesuch, so I updated to 1.0.1. Now the file plays fine.