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Time Machine posts

Filed under: Design, Fun, Macintosh, Freeware

The Time Machine Screensaver



Sure, you make fun of the chintzy Time Machine animation when you're out to sushi with your geek friends, but secretly you adore it. When the night is late, and it's just you and your Mac, you turn on Time Machine simply to gaze longingly into its starry goodness.

But don't you wish that you could just get that pesky Finder window out of the way, so you could stare into the full, unadulterated Time Machine backdrop? Well, we've got the next best thing, friend: the Time Machine Screensaver.

The Time Machine Screensaver is a Quartz Composer Movie that is pretty much an exact clone of the Time Machine animation. To install the screensaver, you can drag it onto the Screen Saver window, or put it into your default Screen Saver folder, or copy it to the Screen Saver alias included with the download. Once you see it in your Screen Saver preferences, select the Time Machine Screen Saver, and off you go.

Now, it's just you and the Time Machine. Face to face.

If you want something a little more "Leopard" themed, with the colors from the default Aurora desktop picture, you can download it from the Time Machine Screen Saver discussion forum.

[via Softpedia]

Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Shareware, Troubleshooting

SuperDuper backup utility updated for Leopard

SuperDuper!, the long loved Mac backup utility, has finally been updated for Mac OS X Leopard.

You might be wondering how SuperDuper! finds a niche even after Apple's own backup utility, Time Machine, has been integrated into every Mac with Leopard installed. The developers of SuperDuper! think of their relationship to Time Machine as complementary rather than competitive. Here's why:

SuperDuper! is for the disasters, the floods, the clicking hard drives, the machines that refuse to boot, whereas Time Machine's strength lies in the easy recovery of a single folder, file, or group of files. Time Machine can restore a full system, but that's not its bread and butter (and restoring from Time Machines requires you to have your Leopard DVD at hand).

SuperDuper! creates a bootable clone of your hard drive (which you can even place side-by-side with a Time Machine backup, if you have the space). Even if the original hard drive has been rendered unusable, you can boot from the clone and continue working. Tres cool.

The SuperDuper! 2.5 update is free for all registered users.

[via Macworld]

Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Apple, Freeware

Change Leopard's Time Machine schedule

Time Machine Editor
Leopard's helpful backup tool, Time Machine, backs up your Mac every hour by default. However, that schedule may not suit your lifestyle. TimeMachineEditor is an application that allows you to configure a different interval for your backups. We like the granularity with which you can set Time Machine: "Once a day" (choose the hour), "Once a week" (choose the day and hour), "Once a month" (choose day of month and hour).

Time Machine is a godsend for those of us who don't backup as often as we should. However, Apple didn't offer many configuration options for Time Machine. TimeMachineEditor gives you some of this missing control.

Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Apple

Time Machine: Leopard's best feature?


After having a peek at Apple's new guided Quicktime tour of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, we're convinced that Time Machine alone is worth the upgrade price. Time Machine is Apple's new backup and recovery software, but it's actually quite a bit more than that. The program makes use of external storage devices (like, say, a USB 2.0 hard disk) to create backups of your entire file system.

You can later browse the Time Machine copy of any folder by navigating a useful timeline. In this way, you can regress through previous versions of the folder. This is a fantastic way to keep from losing files or just do a simple form of revision control. If you need more time range in your Time Machine, it's only a matter of slapping on a new external drive.

Now, we realize this kind of backup and recovery has been done before, but when you see how sell it integrates with Finder and Spotlight, we think you'll be just as anxious as we are to get your hands on the new OS X.

Apple previews Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard at WWDC

Apple previews Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard at WWDCApple today previewed the next major update to Mac OS X, version 10.5 (aka: Leopard), at their annual World Wide Developer Conference in California today. Our sister sites Engadget and TUAW covered the event well, but there are some great new features in this next version that are definitely worth a look here at DLS.

The big 10 new features (with more secret ones promised) can be previewed at Apple's new Leopard preview site, complete with video tutorials. If you're not down for watching all those videos though, I'll summarize some of the big ones for your shortcut pleasure.

Read more →

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So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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