Reinstalling Your Backed-Up Files Using Carbon Copy Cloner
My last post discusses my recent catastrophic hard drive failure on my Macbook. There was nothing to be done to save it and so 4 days after the event, my Macbook was returned to me from the Apple shop with a new hard drive with OS X freshly installed. Luckily I had used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a backup of my hard drive to an external disk drive and all that remained was to retrieve the backup and reset my Mac to its previous state. The process was actually very simple in the end but it took about an hour’s worth of Googling and piecing info together for me to to feel confidant enough to start. Losing your hard drive tends to make one cautious! So here is my step by step guide of how I completed the process.
One of Life’s Lessons: Backup, Backup, Backup
My worst case scenerio happened last night when my beloved Macbook crashed and refused to reboot. I then spent the next four hours on my desktop PC searching through all of the Apple support documents to try and resolve the problem. I never knew there was so many combinations of keys you could press on a Mac to try and start it up: I tried Power + Option, Power + C, Power + Command + Option + Shift, Power + P + R, Power + F + U + C ... well you get the picture.
Live Streaming that Works: BBC Wimbledon Coverage
One of the reasons that I love working on the web is because it is always full of surprises. Over the last couple of years I have attempted to watch several live streaming broadcasts only to be frustrated by the grainy, stuttering image that made viewing unbearable.
Bug Fixing My Expression Engine Site Part 1: Template not embeded on some pages
After setting up my initial site with Expression Engine in an afternoon, I was left with a couple of outstanding bugs that needed to be resolved at a later date. The first of these bugs was the non-appearance of my embedded sidebar template on certain pages. The ‘General Interest’ links in the sidebar are drawn from a weblog which I called featured_links. While they were present and correct on most pages, for some reason on the individual blog entry pages they returned as an empty list.
Can a Site be Implemented with Expression Engine in An Afternoon?
There’s come a time in a web designer’s life when he/she must accept that hand-coding every single page of their own site is no longer a practical solution. A decision must be made – for those that can, it’s very tempting to believe that a hand-crafted content management solution is the way forward. And so they begin, working evenings and weekends - because client work must take priority - to write the best CMS ever known to mankind. Its going to be easy-to-use but be adaptable to cover all the different types of content and design templates that make up the designer’s site. Its going to be so brillant that people will be knocking down his/her doors to get their own copy of ‘CMS Utopia’.
Firebug 1.0 Beta
There’s a lot of buzz (no pun intended) around the latest beta release of the Firebug extension for Firefox. Amongst its nifty features is the ability to measure and display CSS margins, padding and borders. I’ve always used the great MeasureIt extension in the past to measure approximate space on a page but now Firebug should make it even easier. In fact there are so many features to this extension that I may have to break a habit of a lifetime and read the documentation. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get the extension to run properly on my PC version of Firefox due to a known bug but thankfully as ever my trusty Macbook hasn’t let me down.
Redesign of AKA Design Solutions
The redesign of AKADesignSolutions.co.uk has gone live. It’s been on the backburner for a few months now because of working on client sites but after a a determined effort over the last few days, I’ve finally got something I’m happy with. It’s a bit of a work in progress at the moment and the plan is to add some finishing touches over the next week and to generally expand the site in the coming months.