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Money CAN Buy Happiness

March 27, 2011 by Nathan Lively Leave a Comment

Hey there! If this is your first time here, why not sign up for updates via email in the sidebar over on the left? 😉

I just read a post on Quora called What life lessons are unintuitive or go against common sense or wisdom? I wanted to comment on Yishan Wong‘s answer. He said:

  1. Vanhulsteijn - CycloneImprove your commute by buying a nice car. I should point out that before this he says, “Improve your commute by living closer to work,” which I couldn’t agree more with, but what I wanted to add was, Improve your commute by buying a nice bicycle. I live in Berkeley, CA. It’s a great city to bike in and public transportation is bike friendly. This is really important since driving into San Francisco is a pain. When I moved here the first thing I did was buy a great bike. This way, instead of being tempted to drive, I am excited to ride.
  2. Fix your computing experience. This to me meant finally investing in an ergonomic monitor and keyboard stand. I did a little research and discovered that I had had my monitor and keyboard at the wrong height for years. It may seem kind of silly at first that my stand cost three times as much as my monitor, but it was worth it. If you are wondering, I have an Ergotron WorkFit-S Dual.
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Filed Under: computers, San Francisco Bay Area Tagged With: Berkeley, bicycle, ergotron, happiness

How To Install OS X 10.5 On A PowerBook G4 With A Broken DVD-ROM Drive Or Without A DVD

January 1, 2011 by Nathan Lively Leave a Comment

This is a quick technical post that may seem trivial, but I spent a long time looking for this solution so I wanted to make sure that it would be easy for someone else to find in the future. The PowerBook G4 that Boxcar Theatre gave me to run the sound design for their production of Clue has a problem. It can’t run Qlab. Qlab is the software the runs my sound design. The current version of Qlab only runs on OS X 10.5 and up. The PowerBook has OS X 10.4. Small problem, right? Normally it would be, but the DVD-ROM drive on this computer is broken. I tried so many ways to update the OS until I finally discovered a simple solution.

Target disk mode! If you don’t have an available firewire external drive like me, but do have another mac with a firewire port, then you can put your OS install DVD into the drive of the other mac, start it up in target disk mode and the install DVD will be available to your PowerBook. Alternatively you could write the install disk image to an internal drive on your target disk mode mac.

That’s it. It just took me a long time to figure out what the requirements for installing OS X 10.5 on a PowerBook G4 were (see below), that the PowerBook’s optical drive was broken, and that you could use target disk mode to access the optical drive in another computer.

Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard requires:

* A Mac computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5, or Power PC G4 (867 MHz or faster) processor
* 512 MB memory or more
* A DVD drive for installation
* 9 GB of available disk space or more

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Filed Under: computers, San Francisco Bay Area, sound design

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