Moving on, Trying to Leave a Clean House

Well, today is the six month anniversary of Greasy PC. While I'm slightly surprised that this blog has lasted this long, the real achievement to me has been to average slightly more than one post per day for the entire duration. At almost 200 posts, that might even be the most number of blog posts made of any of my friends IRL, and some of them have maintained blogs/livejournals for years and years.

In truth, in addition to wanting to document all the various tweaks and customizations I've put into my computer over the past year, I also did this blog to prove to myself that I can commit to a project wholeheartedly and consistently over a long period of time. I hadn't worked on any of my own long term projects in God knows how long, but of what I've done on this blog I truly am proud.

In the interest of full disclosure, one of the reasons now's a better time than any for me to cash out, is because a week ago, I got myself an iMac. I know.

This was a purchase I'd been gunning for for months now. As an animator working in films, I'd always made great use of my PC. However, when it became more and more necessary for me to have access to Final Cut Pro and its codecs, my need for a new machine pointed me in the iMac's direction. It was the best option for the price (I might blog about that in the future still).

Don't worry though, I still love my PC. I've got Bootcamp successfully running Windows XP on the iMac (it runs Team Fortress 2 far better than my old PC did), and I've got Synergy allowing me to control both my mac and PC with the same keyboard and mouse over the network. I even recently successfully transferred my Firefox profile from the PC to the Mac.

So where does that leave us? Well, I'm making no promises, but I may turn out a few more posts here and there about making the smooth transition from using a PC to a Mac. Also, I'm going to try my best to organize this blog to stand the test of time: making sure all posts are tagged properly, creating some static "favorite" pages, and otherwise making it even easier for stublers-on to find what they're looking for.

So don't worry, Greasy PC will be greasing it up indefinitely. In the meantime though, hope to see you around on my other endeavors; you can always check my official site, which I'm hoping to update now that I've got a little more free time. Otherwise, good luck to everyone, and see you around!

Copy and Import Firefox Profiles, Settings, Extensions, Bookmarks, the Manual Way

A few days ago I featured MozBackup, as a simple way to backup, copy, import, and export Mozilla application profiles (Firefox, Thunderbird, etc). Unfortunately, I also lamented the fact that MozBackup was its own application that needed to be installed in all the PC's you want to import from/export to. It also unfortunately wasn't compatible with OSX, when cross-platform compatibility was one of the most important features of Mozilla's apps.

Well, today I'll show you how to transfer your Firefox profiles from one computer to another manually, without much hassle. Doing this works without having to install any external programs, and also works on OSX.

First of all, locate your Firefox profile folder. On Windows XP machines, it can be found here:

C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Mozilla

On Vista machines, the address is:

C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox

In that folder, you'll see another folder called Profiles, as well as a file called profiles.ini. 

To copy your profile to another computer running Firefox, copy that profile folder as well as the profiles.ini file to the same location in the new computer. If you're transferring to a Mac, the location is

\Library>Application Support>Firefox

And with that, just copy the old Profiles folder and the profiles.ini file, delete the other Profiles folder, and you're done!

Review: DExpose2 OSX Expose-Like Feature for Windows

DExpose2 is an application for Windows that brings forth Expose-like features to Windows. For those that don't know, Expose is a feature on Macs that let you view all the open windows at once, resized to fit the entire screen. Here's the feature running on a Macbook, as well as DExpose2 running on an EEE PC



This was always a cool feature in Macs that was a different approach to switching from window to window from Windows' alt-tab (see here for the best Alt-Tab replacement for Windows), and it's cool to see someone try it for Windows. But how well does it get the job done?

First thing's first: DExpose2 works pretty much out of the box. Hitting F11 engages the tool, and it even offers other options that add to its interactivity. From the looks of it, DExpose works by essentially taking a screenshot of all the open windows and renders those individual screenshots whenever you hit F11.

It's an extremely novel solution and one I wouldn't have imagined as a way to do this for Windows. Unfortunately, as a result, it's not as seamless as the way this works for Macs. As you know, I haven't had the most luck with taking screenshots in Windows since I began running three monitors at once, so DExpose2 would routinely chug whenever I hit F11. Worse, to save rendering time, you can also set DExpose2 to take window screenshots periodically, or whenever the window view changes. If you're on any window that changes constantly, like a browser, this will prove quite the hassle. I routinely had Windows explorer chug on me every time I went into a new window.

It also doesn't help that it takes up way too much memory, around 20-35 megabytes of RAM. When Taskswitch XP takes up less than 1 megabyte and also offers window previews, DExpose2 is just unacceptable.

I tried DExpose2 before it was recently featured on Lifehacker, but I was surprised they would endorse a product as resource intensive as this. Sure, my computer isn't the fastest out there, but such a small addition to your operating system should never come at such great a price. When it comes to switching windows, I'm gonna pass on DExpose2 and stick with Taskswitch XP.

Apple Needs Linkin Park's Help, Not My Money

I'm typing this on a Mac at work, after having read the post on Macrumors, a blog I subscribe to.

But still, yet another reason for me to not care to buy anything Apple for a while yet still.

Saving Flash Work on a Mac (gasp!) without Crashing

I use Macs at work, as someone who works in the media industry, even though I love my PC and Windows XP at home (where I also do work). Sometimes there's just no escaping it. So here's something I'd since learned while working in Flash 8 on Macs.

When working on an increasingly large .FLA project file (imported video and audio, lots of images, long-ass timelines, etc), Saving your projects starts becoming a huge pain in the butt. It would just hang there with the spinning beach ball. For months I'd assumed it would just crash and I'd lose work, which drove me nuts.

Eventually, I found out that it was just taking forever to save, up to 20 minutes or more. If you left it alone, it wouldn't crash, but you were certainly at the mercy of Flash taking its sweet time. My assistant at the time went out to have a smoke.

FINALLY, I figured out that instead of Saving, if you use "Save and Compact", which clears out your cache and previous save states and undos that normal Saving usually keeps, I was able to cut down the save time of my project down to probably just under a minute. Huzzah!

Still, blech. There's no such problem on PC's and in fact it's quicker to do a normal save than to do a Save and Compact since the latter technically involves more actions (it's like rearranging your entire suitcase every time you wanted to add a pair of socks).

Of course, this workaround for Macs only really applies to project files approaching 100 megabytes or more. Less than that and normal saving shouldn't be too big of a hassle. But in a situation where you absolutely MUST use a Mac to work on a large Flash project, Save and Compact is your friend.