Ever since I upgraded to the latest Leopard release the other week, my MacBook has had random wireless dropouts. It’s been an intermittent issue and has only affected my MacBook and not the iBook (PowerPC) or Mac Mini (Intel) in the house.

I’d been trying various things to get it fixed like changing the security settings on the wireless router, but the only thing which seemed to fix it was changing the “Group Key Renewal” to 600 on my router (LinkSys WRT54GS).

So far, so good… just a little tip incase anyone else is having the same issue!

EDIT: It’s definitely fixed – I’ve had no dropouts of my MacBook since changing the group key renewal from 3600 to 600. I’m not sure why this was a problem before, but hey, it works. Maybe the wireless card on my MacBook is a bit crazy and doesn’t like being renewed every hour rather than every 10 minutes. Strange…

I’ve been meaning to get a proper backup system going for a while now and I’ve finally done so with Leopard’s built in “Time Machine” feature. The one thing I hate about thinking about backups is that you don’t want to test your method thoroughly, as that would require you to simulate a catastrophy (i.e. throwing your computer at a wall, or such like) and so it’s very hard to know what’s going to work. This is why I opted for a backup solution which has been written (and presumably tested) by a major IT expert – in this case Apple. I trust Apple a lot – their software is usually flawless and their hardware even more so. And when there are problems, they fix them quickly (e.g. MobileMe problems).

After upgrading my MacBook hard drive, my overflow external drive was spare and so I’ve commissioned it into being a dedicated Time Machine backup drive. Currently it’s whirring away doing the initial backup (some 145.8GB of data…) and when that’s done it will do incremental backups every time I plug the drive in and click “Backup Now”.

I’ve never had to restore anything from backups, ever (*touches wood*), and I’m hoping I never will. But having a good backup plan is critical to modern day life because we hold so much information on our drives. I’d hate to lose all my data, it would really be so annoying.

So once this initial backup is complete, I’ll be a backed up man, ready to roll.

During the process of upgrading my MacBook hard drive I needed some software to copy my original drive over to my new hard drive. This is no easy task because the new drive needs to be bootable and if possible, a complete replica of my original drive (otherwise it would take hours if not days to restore my system to how I like it).

So in came SuperDuper which is a nifty piece of software which will do just what I wanted. It’s free for the trial version which will let you do most things (no time limit) but if you pay $27.95 then you can unlock the extra features like incremental backups. This might be something I’ll look into soon as I do need a decent backup system (I’m going to look at Time Machine first).

It really was so easy to use SuperDuper though – copying from my original drive to my new drive took about 2.5 hours for 60gb of data – not bad considering it’s doing a thorough job of making sure all metadata is intact (something which just copy and paste definitely wouldn’t achieve). Also, SuperDuper is fully Leopard compatible which is definitely nice to hear.

I’d certainly recommend the use of SuperDuper to anyone .

I’ve been doing some work recently on a couple of websites (one being for Riverdale) and in order to test the sites I set up virtual hosting on the copy of Apache which came with Leopard. There’s a few tweaks/issues with Leopard’s Apache which I thought I’d write down incase it helps anyone else, or helps me in the future when I forget what I did!

So to setup the virtual hosting you need to first change some details in /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf. You should make sure that the line for the virtual host module is not commented out:
LoadModule vhost_alias_module libexec/apache2/mod_vhost_alias.so

Then, at the bottom of the file, add in the following:
Include /Users/username/Sites/vhost.d/*.conf
Where username is your own username.

Then you should create the directory /Users/username/Sites/vhost.d and into it, put these two files:
00_default.conf:
NameVirtualHost *:80
<VirtualHost *:80>
   DocumentRoot /Users/username/Sites/
</VirtualHost>

01_virtualsite.conf:
<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName virtualhost1
   DocumentRoot /Users/username/Sites/virtualhost1/
   <Directory "/Users/username/Sites/virtualhost1">
      Options +ExecCGI +Includes +FollowSymLinks
      AllowOverride All
   </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Again, where username is your username.

Then, in /private/etc/hosts you need to add:
127.0.0.1 virtualhost1

Restart apache and check out http://virtualhost1/ – it should work!

The big problem with Leopard is that you can ONLY share websites from your ~/Sites directory. It works though if you put a symlink in there to another directory (such as in ~/Documents), but keeping your vhost pointing to the directory in ~/Sites.

I had my first slight issue with Leopard today. Basically I tried to plug my iPod touch in, but iTunes wouldn’t recognise it at all! It’s really strange, but I’m going through a troubleshooting process which is outlined on the Apple support website and hopefully that will work. I’m not sure if the issue is Leopard specific, but it was working fine before I upgraded, so I guess it must be something that Leopard did when it installed which decided to break iPod touch support.

Oh well, fingers crossed that this fix will all work smoothly.

Having come back from travelling and using my MacBook all over the world I decided it was time to give it some TLC and install the new version of Mac OS X on it. Well, Leopard is absolutely amazing.

I hadn’t ever installed a copy of Mac OS X because the only time I’ve dealt with setting it up has been on new Macs which come with it pre-installed. The installation was extremely smooth and I didn’t have any problems what-so-ever. I bought the family pack so it’s on my Dad’s iMac and my MacBook at the moment and I’ll install it on my Dad’s iBook and Helen’s Mac Mini soon.

The advantages of Mac over Microsoft really showed with Leopard. For a start, the price is amazing. I remember the days of Windows where a single license would cost around £150 and that was for the Home edition (read, crap edition). Leopard came with FIVE licenses (all for the same household) and cost a mere £129. I dread to think how much it would cost to upgrade a family’s PCs from Windows XP to Windows Vista. The second advantage was the installation process – absolutely perfect. The third advantage was that the upgrade works on every Mac hardware we own and that’s including some items from a few years ago. Vista hardly works on new hardware, let alone hardware that’s over a year old!

Anyway, that’s just my very quick review of the installation of Leopard, maybe I’ll write with some of my findings with Leopard soon.

[Can't wait to get an external hard drive and try out Time Machine!]