Tuesday, February 26, 2008
O’Reilly News for User Group Members- February 2008
Get 35% off from O’Reilly, No Starch, Paraglyph, PC Publishing, Pragmatic Bookshelf, Rocky Nook, SitePoint, or YoungJin books you purchase directly from O’Reilly.
Just use code “DSUG” when ordering online or by phone 800-998-9938.
Free ground shipping on orders of $29.95 or more.
Also, view these links for upcoming events:
Thursday, February 21, 2008
WeibeTech’s Drive eRazor
by Brian K. Duck, Product Review Editor
What is Drive eRazer?
WiebeTech’s newest hardware solution completely erases all data from a hard drive quickly and easily. Stand-alone operation. No computer required! Faster than software.
Why use hardware?
Drive eRazer is faster than software programs, and Drive eRazer doesn’t tie up a computer. What’s more, it’s far easier. Simply connect it to a drive and flip a switch. No computer needed.
How fast is it?
Faster than software. A conservative estimate is 35MB/s. A 250GB drive would be fully erased in under two hours.*
Drive eRazer is faster than software programs, and Drive eRazer doesn’t tie up a computer. What’s more, it’s far easier. Simply connect it to a drive and flip a switch. No computer needed.
Ok, so I received a review unit from WeibeTech to try out.
First off the appearance and purpose of the unit is to safeguard data without using a dedicated computer to reformat disks. I’ve actually got a G4 setup in the basement for just this purpose. It’s appropriately named “LabRAT” and is used for little else!
Why? Over the last few years, I’ve accumulated 3 different removable drive systems, two of which use (P)ATA drives. One of these the BayDock 800 was offered by Weibe and reviewed earlier. (It appears to be offline, the review may have been posted prior to the adoption of Expression Engine as our content management system, I’ll see if I can republish it later.)
Parallel-ATA drives MUST be formatted before installing in the Macintosh, the older OS would simply not mount an unformatted drive. No explanation was offered to the user.
(The Serial-ATA (SATA) drives are less of an issue because you are asked after installing and rebooting if you’d like to format the drive. Some of this functionality coincides with the release of Leopard, the lastest version of Mac OS X.)
However, with the Drive eRazora new drive can be prepared without a dedicated computer, and dropped into a tray ready to mount and use!
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Get the Last Word on Mac OS X Terminology
by Adam Engst, Publisher of TidBITS and the ‘Take Control’ series of eBooks.
We Mac users sling technical jargon around every day, but if you’ve ever felt uncertain about what a term actually means, help is here in “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” The ebook is a mad romp through over 500 Macintosh- and Internet-related terms. You’ll learn how to figure out if your optical drive can write to a double-layer DVD, why 404 and 501 are interesting numbers, how to work with the three main types of dashes that you can type on a Mac, and much more. We’re not talking about some dry old dictionary here - these definitions are loaded with useful tips, practical advice, humor, and empathy. If you enjoy the serendipity of discovering useful tips in unexpected places, you’ll love this ebook.
Order Here:
Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon
Written by veteran Macintosh authors Andy Baird and Sharon Zardetto, the 191-page ebook extends the familiar Take Control design with handy alphabetic navigation tabs on every page, oodles of custom graphics, and over 2,000 internal links. Want to learn more about a particular entry? Margin icons link to hand-picked external Web sites, TidBITS articles, and other Take Control titles. Save 10% off the $15 list price right now with the MUG discount embedded in the link above.
Still not sure? Check out the free 39-page sample to see what we mean!
Saturday, December 01, 2007
Five new Take Control eBooks Launch You into Leopard: Save 30%!
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is finally here, and we can now share with you the fruits of an incredible amount of work over the last few months: five of our most popular ebooks completely updated for Leopard, and they’re all available right now, led by Joe Kissell’s essential ”Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard.” Once you’ve installed, our other ebooks will help you customize all of Leopard’s new features, share files much more elegantly than in the past, and manage your fonts with Leopard’s new font activation capabilities.
To the thousands of you who pre-ordered our Leopard ebooks, thanks!
You can now click the Check for Updates link (or red starburst) on your pre-order PDFs to download the full versions. If you haven’t yet ordered, we have three options for you:
1. Buy just the ebooks you want individually. They’re all $10, except for the 217-page “Take Control of Fonts in Leopard,” which is $15. If you’ve bought the Tiger or Panther versions of any of these ebooks,
click the Check for Updates button in your copy to save 20%. MUG members can - as always - save 10% with the links in this message, but the bundles are a better deal.
2. Buy our core “Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard” and “Take Control of Customizing Leopard” titles for $15, saving 25%. This bundle is linked on the left side of these books’ pages on our Web site.
3. Buy our “I Love Leopard” bundle of all five ebooks - over 650 pages in all! - for only $38.50, saving 30% off the cover price. Again, the bundle is accessible from the left side of each book’s Web page.
You can read more about each of the ebooks on our Web site, but if you really want to know…
Monday, November 19, 2007
Install and Run Windows on an Intel-based Mac with Ease
by Adam Engst, Publisher of TidBITS and the ‘Take Control’ series of eBooks.
If you want to install Windows on your Intel-based Mac soon, or if you’ve installed Windows but aren’t happy with how it’s working, you can find up-to-date help in the 148-page “Take Control of Running Windows on a Mac,” by Joe Kissell. The ebook is completely up-to-date and loaded with all the details you need to run Windows on a Mac successfully with Apple’s Boot Camp 1.3 beta, Parallels Desktop 3.0, the release candidate of VMware Fusion, and the free public beta of
VirtualBox. It also now covers both Windows XP and Vista and includes real-world advice about installing Windows, dealing with tricky peripherals, sharing files between Windows and Mac OS X, backing up a Windows installation, avoiding Windows malware, and more.
Still not sure? Check out the free 29-page sample to see what we mean!
Read this book to learn the answers to questions such as:
- How can I get a copy of Windows XP or Vista that will work on a Mac?
- What can I expect and how can I avoid problems with Windows activation?
- Should I run Parallels Desktop, VMware Fusion, or VirtualBox?
- How can I best right-click in Boot Camp?
- How can I make my Bluetooth device work with Boot Camp?
- What are my options for sharing files between Windows and Mac OS X?
- What is a smart way to back up my Windows installation?
- How can I print from my Windows software?
- What techniques can I use to avoid viruses and spyware in Windows?
- How do I use one installation of Windows for Boot Camp and my virtualization software?
Save 10% off the $10 list price right now with the MUG discount embedded in the link above.
