News from 'The Apple Blog'

Now that you (or a friend) switched from PC to Mac, what do you do with the PC? Surprisingly, that old PC might be a great accessory for your Mac (and not just as a footrest). Reuse before you recycle, pull that old PC out of the trash and make it submit to the power of your Mac.

Parallel/LPT Port Printing

First, a former PC often has an old printer lying around that might at least have some ink or toner left in it. Sometimes that printer might even be a heavy duty laser printer that unfortunately has a old PC parallel/LPT port which isn’t compatible with your Mac. After you set up your PC to print to the printer, simply right click on Properties and then set print for sharing.

On your Mac, go to System Preferences, and then Add Printer. If you click on Windows, the printer should show up as shared. You’ll probably need to choose the type of printer, since the Mac won’t automatically recognize it. When the ink or toner dries up, you may still want to keep this print server around to offload larger jobs without tying up your Mac or your main printer.

Networked Storage Space

While you’ve got that PC networked for printing, you might also like to use Windows File Sharing and create a network-accessible hard drive commonly called NAS (for Network Attached Storage). Your hard drive will be accessible to anyone in your household. Best of all, most PCs can often take more than one hard drive, so adding additional storage is relatively inexpensive and easy to do.

Besides extending your network storage space and sharing files, you can setup a utility like CrashPlan. CrashPlan allows you to easily backup one computer to another over a network. As always, standard caveats apply regarding setting a proper password, firewall, and antivirus for your PC.

iTunes Home Sharing

Even if you don’t enable file sharing, iTunes Home Sharing via Bonjour will still be accessible to you. Install iTunes on this older PC and store music you want to share with others in your household. With the proliferation of laptops in a household, iTunes music sharing is a bit harder without a central location. Why clog up the hard drive of your other Macs? If you backup your music to this central PC and make it accessible via iTunes, you’ve got a truly win-win solution!

CD/DVD Burner

Another great use of an old PC is as a burning station. Unlike Mac optical drives, PC drives are relatively inexpensive and easy to replace. If you’re making that mix CD for all your wedding guests [Ed. note: The RIAA views this as copyright infringement.] or want to burn 50 copies of your presentation for prospective clients, doing it on your Mac is a slow process and can wear out your drive. After you make a master CD on your Mac, use your favorite PC burning program and burn away! Your Mac isn’t tied up and if your PC burner dies, it’s easy to replace.

Virtual PC Without The Virtual

Finally, the best use of an old PC in my opinion is a faux Virtual Machine. While programs like Fusion and Parallels are great, they’ll never quite reach the speed and flexibility of a true PC. Bootcamp is great, but you always have to reboot to use the PC and its peripherals. I’ve got an older PC that serves one primary function: running Quickbooks for the PC.

Simply add the PC to your network and install a cross-platform remote control program such as LogMeIn, VNC or Timbuktu Pro. Using these, you can generally run the computer “headless”, that is without a monitor.

So the next time someone says “what do I do with this old PC?” you’ll have some great recommendations. Or you could gallantly offer to take it off their hands, free of charge. You’ll nab yourself a handy accessory, and help make the world a slightly greener place in the process.

Related GigaOM Pro Research: How to Get Your Green iPhone App Noticed

News from 'The Apple Blog'

Apple has a long history of using slot-loading disc drives rather than the tray-loading drives used widely across the rest of the industry. If you want to eject the disc, there are currently two ways of doing this in OS X that most users know of, but there’s actually a hidden app that you may not know about.

You can eject from the sidebar in Finder, or from the desktop (dragging to the trash). However, there’s also a third way: a menu bar item. Apple doesn’t show this item by default in Snow Leopard, which led me to try and find a way to enable it. It’s actually fairly easy:

1. Open a Finder window and go to /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras.
2. Double click on Eject.menu and it should appear instantly in your menu bar.

You can move the menu bar item by holding down the Command key and dragging it around. You can also get rid of it by dragging it off the menu bar, where it’ll vanish in a puff of smoke, just like you’d drag an item off the Dock.

News from 'The Apple Blog'

If you are a MobileMe subscriber, you might be aware that you can use iWeb to create a simple web page that’s good for sharing pictures and stories with friends and family. What you might not know is that the same servers that host your iWeb site can host HTML generated by any app, including Sandvox, RapidWeaver, or a powerful blog generating tool named Jekyll.

Jekyll is a command-line Ruby app that takes a directory of HTML and Markdown files and directories and then generates a blog. The main problem with blogging with MobileMe is the lack of PHP and MySQL, which is required for most common blogging platforms like WordPress. Jekyll gets around this by generating the entire site in static HTML each time it runs, so there’s no reliance on an interpreted language.

Getting started blogging with Jekyll and MobileMe takes a bit of tweaking, but the end result is a simple and powerful blogging platform for people who want complete control over their site.

Step One

Install Jekyll. Since Jekyll is a Ruby gem, installing it is as easy as typing the following command in your Terminal window:

sudo gem install jekyll

Step Two

Next, choose a directory to keep your local blog files. I chose to put my directly in Sites, since I don’t use that directory for anything else.

Step Three

Set up a basic “skeleton” of files. Follow the directions detailed over at OStatic to build the skeleton site.

Step Four

At this point, you should be able to type

cd ~/Sites; jekyll --server

into the terminal, browse to http://localhost:4000 using Safari, and see your “hello world” site.

Step Five

This is where the Mac magic kicks in, and why the blend of Unix and Mac makes for the best computing platform. Open Automator and create a new Workflow. Choose “Ask for Text” for the first action, and “Run Shell Script” for the second. In the “Question” field of “Ask for Text” put Title, and check the box that says “Require an answer.” In the “Run Shell Script” action, change the “Pass input” drop down box to “as arguments” and paste in the shell script below:

NAME=`echo $1 | sed s/\ /-/g`
USERNAME=`whoami`
POSTNAME=`date "+%Y-%m-%d"-$NAME`
POST_FQN=/Users/$USERNAME/Sites/_posts/$POSTNAME.markdown
touch $POST_FQN
echo "---" >> $POST_FQN
echo "layout: post" >> $POST_FQN
echo "title: $1" >> $POST_FQN
echo "---" >> $POST_FQN
/usr/bin/mate $POST_FQN

In this case, the script will launch TextMate as my text editor, but you can substitute any text editor available from the command line here. Your workflow should look like this:

Go to File > Save As Plug-in and choose “Script Menu” under the drop down menu labeled “Plug-in for.” Name your new workflow something meaningful, like “New Blog Post,” and save it. You should now have a script menu icon in the menu bar, with your new workflow available.

Step Six

Create another Automator workflow, this time only running a shell script, and paste this script:

USERNAME=`whoami`
cd /Users/$USERNAME/Sites
/usr/bin/jekyll > /dev/null
/usr/bin/jekyll --server  > /dev/null 2>
open "http://localhost:4000"

This will run Jekyll and open your site for previewing in Safari. Save this as another plug-in, exactly as before, and name it something like “Preview Site.” Unfortunately, this script will also let Jekyll run in the background indefinitely, so you might want to create a third workflow with these two lines of shell script in it:

PID=`ps -eaf | grep "jekyll --server" | grep -v grep | awk '{ print $2 }'`
kill $PID

That will shut down Jekyll.

Step Seven

The last step is syncing the exported site with MobileMe. Apple makes this very easy by mounting the iDisk under a “Volumes” directory, so you can create a fourth action containing a single script:

USERNAME=`whoami`
cd /Users/$USERNAME/Sites/_site/
rsync -avz . /Volumes/$USERNAME/Web/Sites > /dev/null

Make sure you adjust the paths to match where you decided to put the site. I chose the Sites directory, but you might want it somewhere else. To be safe, you might want to run this in the terminal the first time, just to make sure that you have all of the settings correct.

Last Step

That’s it! If you already have your personal domain pointed at MobileMe, then you are golden. If not, you can browse to http://web.me.com/username, replacing “username” with your MobileMe account.

Setting up Jekyll and MobileMe as your blogging platform does take a bit of work, but once it’s setup with the Automator scripts, its super easy to maintain. Jekyll takes care of all of the details, leaving you room to do what you really wanted to do in the first place…write.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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