Data is not safe if it exists in only one place. The only feasible way to back up a large hard drive is with another large hard drive. If either drive--main drive or your backup--dies, you need to replace it ASAP because as long as one is out of commission, there is only one good copy of your data. Therefore, for every hard drive you own, you need to have a) another drive of equal or greater capacity, and b) enough money in the bank (or available credit) to replace it when needed.

I appreciate that Mac OS X will warn me the first time I run an application downloaded from the Internet. However, I don't like that a) you can't turn it off and b) it warns about things that aren't applications. The worst is when I download a .zip or .tgz with a bunch of PHP scripts--OS X will warn me about every single one. Luckily, this can be stopped with a quick trip to Terminal: just navigate to the folder with the scripts and say xattr -d com.apple.quarantine *

Or, "things that have been in Windows since 1995 and/or Classic Mac OS that have not yet made the jump to Mac OS X, the most modernest OS extant."

Apple is making it harder and harder to get your hands on their precious movie files, but it's possible. You just have to know a few tricks.

So the iPad is pretty spiffy but I can see a couple potential downsides. One main difference between the iPad and an iPhone is that you'll tend to use an iPad for longer sessions, so lots of things that you could overlook when using an iPhone for a few minutes at a time will become larger issues when using an iPad for hours at a time. Multitasking, for one. I can see browsing on this thing for a while, but eventually I'd want to listen to some streaming music (I know you can load your own music, but sometimes I want to hear music I don't own) or have my instant messenger running. On a related note, I think it will be absolutely awesome for reading long things, like books and magazines, but not so good for long browsing sessions. I tend to browse by starting with Slashdot or TUAW or Daring Fireball, reading down the list, and opening many tabs in the background to read later. I don't think you can really do that on an iPad.

I had to use Time Machine to recover my 10.6 Mac. Two little issues:

1) Quick Look didn't work. It would open up the big grey rectangle but not show anything--pictures, movies, PDFs, Excel files, nothing worked. I was at 10.6.1 and 10.6.2 was out but installing that update (and all the rest available at the time) through Software Update didn't fix it. A tip here http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10398867-263.html suggested downloading and installing the combo update (also for 10.6.2) and that cleared it up. ("Combo Update" is Apple's term for "everything since the last .0", so the 10.5.8 combo update can be run on any system, 10.5.0-10.5.7, and it'll work.)

2) The system folder "/private" was visible in the Finder at the root level of my hard drive. Not a big deal, but since I never need to go there there's no need to see it all the time. Running "sudo chflags hidden /private", as suggested here http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=648139 did the trick.

When you plug in your iPhone and click 'backup' in iTunes, here's what happens.

Apple has made some nice updates to the Camera app in iPhone OS 3.0. Specifically, they've fixed two things that I really wanted them to fix.

Just a few notes about taking apart an Intel Mac mini.