RaffyJohn.com Rocks In My Head

Here is a great little Mac OS X app for editing PDFs: PDFPen from Smile On My Mac.

Some of its features:

1. Replace text in original PDF with editable text blocks
2. Fill out and save PDF forms
3. Move, resize, copy and delete images in original PDF
4. Copy and paste rich text; retain fonts and formatting when copying
   from PDFs
5. Select and copy text across multiple columns
6. Overlay text and images onto PDF (for example, sign purchase orders
   by applying signature image)
7. Show PDFs in single, facing-page, multi-page, and multiple facing-page views
8. Insert and remove pages; re-order pages in a PDF by drag & drop

Mike Mangino gave a fantastic talk on Facebook and Facebooker, a Ruby gem and Rails plugin for the Facebook REST API, at the Chirb meeting tonight.

What is fantastic about Facebooker, a point Mike reiterated throughout his talk, is that all you are really doing is creating a typical Rails app. Facebooker is all about helpers, doing all the FBML (Facebook’s Markup Language) lifting for you.

It took some time for my brain to wrap itself around such a simple concept, but the last thirty+ minutes Mike spent actually building a Facebook app., which put most of my concerns into perspective.

I just wish there would have been more time for a detailed discussion on topics like caching and scaling. Something that Mike alluded was simple, thanks to Facebook’s architecture.

I have never created a single profile on a single “conventional” social network. But I might have to now.

I primarily use the Google Reader as my RSS reader, but one thing about it kind of irks me… It doesn’t read my mind.

No, seriously. Whenever I subscribe to a new RSS feed through Firefox Google asks me if I want to add the feed to my Google Homepage (iGoogle) or to my Google Reader.

Ok. No biggie, right? I can deal with one simple question, a quick click of the mouse. But I have never used the Google Homepage nor have I once clicked the “Add the Google Homepage” button.

I know this would be easy for Google to implement, just read my mind and remember which one I like. Or is there a way to set this in my Google settings I am not seeing?

UPDATE (Jan. 29, 2008): You can complete a full system restore to a new hard drive with Time Machine. After installing the new hard drive startup your Mac with the OS X Leopard install DVD. But instead of going on with the usual install process, select Utilities > Restore System from Backup and follow the prompts. (via lifehacker at Restore Your Data with Time Machine)

–

Time Machine and SuperDuper are both backup solutions for Apple’s OS X operating system (SuperDuper is not yet available on Leopard at the time of this writing). Both effectively copy your entire hard drive to an empty volume like an external USB or Firewire drive, but there are a couple of subtle differences.

I thought I may be able to drop SuperDuper once I upgraded to Leopard, but it looks like it will be a part of my arsenal for some time still. Here are the key attractions of each:

Time Machine
1. Copies all files to backup location.
2. You can restore individual files by date. Going back a year by default.
3. You are unable to boot form the backup source.
4. Has the potential to eat up quite a bit of storage.

SuperDuper
1. Copies all files to backup location.
2. No historical recovery.
3. Boot directly from the backup source. (External Firewire drive)
4. Space used for storage will remain relatively the same.

The ability to backup from my external Firewire drive is HUGE to me. If my hard drive crashes I want to be able to simply restart my Mac and boot directly from my backup drive and have a working system. Time Machine lacks this luxury. Instead you would need to replace the hard drive, reinstall Leopard and then run a recovery from Time Machine.

It does have historical backups going for it though. So if you deleted a file a few days back and realized you now need it, you can still get it - You can also recover older versions of a file.

It seems redundant to have two dedicated backup drives, but if I want the best of both worlds…