A month back a bear pulled down the pole and destroyed our bird feeders. Last week I got a couple of feeders for my birthday and after securing and re-enforcing the pole I filled them with seed and hung them up. Danged if the bear didn't pay another visit this weekend. One of the feeders spilled its guts immediately and then the bear took the other feeder into the woods and emptied it there.

Mom was nice enough to remind me that bears like fish. Thanks, ma.

The weekend wasn't all a bust. I successfully moved everything over from the old laptop to the new powerbook. All thanks to the amazing Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) from Mike Bombich. I've used CCC to make image backups of our Macs to a firewire drive, but hadn't even thought of using it for migrating to a new computer. Thanks to CJ for the tip!

Anyone who's set up a new computer knows what a pain it is to figure out how to get files from one machine to the other, finding all of the original application discs so they can be reinstalled (because there's always some preference or setting that didn't make it), and then email is always hit and miss. I've done this migration from a Dell laptop (lord may I never have to suffer another Dell, amen) to an IBM Thinkpad (if you have to run windows, get a thinkpad), and then to my first powerbook a couple years ago (if you don't have to run windows, get an ibook/powerbook).

We'll just ignore all of the desktop computer migration, starting with the original IBM in 1984 (or the timex sinclair and C64 the proceeded it), various clones, Mac II's, Quadras, and so forth. Some people have jet skis and snowmobiles and RVs and stylish hair, I have computers.

Oh, so back to Carbon Copy Cloner. CJ explained his migration technique which sounded pretty straightforward so I decided to give it a shot. I didn't get all of the details and ended up improvising a bit. For the curious, here is what I did:

• hook the new powerbook to the old one with a firewire cable
• boot up new powerbook with "T" key held down
  (this puts it into target mode, essentially your computer is a firewire disk)
• partition and/or erase the new powerbook as needed (two 40G partitions for me)
• run CCC, select old laptop as source, new laptop partition as destination
• open CCC preferences, uncheck everything except "make bootable"
• click the little lock, enter password, and Clone baby Clone
• go pick up the pieces of your shattered bird feeder, work on the pond and make some ginger beer
• clone complete, unmount the new powerbook drive(s) and shutdown the machine
• you can try to boot at this point, but depending on how big of a hardware jump you are making it may not work
  
  Note: migrating Faith's computer to the old laptop was complete by this stage, none of the following steps were needed.
  
  
• insert the OS disk that came with the powerbook while booting and holding down the "C" key (boot from CD)
• select the partition and choose Upgrade, I also selected advanced options, choosing not to install most of the apps or additional language options
• after the update restart, you should see your old machine's desktop and dock
• before running anything open the Terminal (Applications::Utilities) and type ls -lat this lists all of the files and directories in your home directory
• they should all be owned by you, if you see some files or directories with the name "root" you'll want to proceed to the next step
• type in sudo chown -R {yourname} * of course replace {yourname} with your name as it shows up in the directory listing (it will ask for your password)
• type ls -lat again and verify the owner is now you
• the chown command changes the owner for the files and directories in the top level and then recursively down from there, if you are curious you can add "-v" for the verbose version
• at this point you can either restart or try some of your apps, restart if you have special preference panes and other apps that launch themselves at startup

Amazingly my new computer has everything exactly the way I had it set up on the old one. Every email, every password, bookmark, cookie, application, preference pane, everything. Normally it would take days to massage things back into place, with plenty of compromises along the way. It's kind of eery how well this worked.

Of course your mileage may vary. I've heard that some folks with their own font manager (font suitcase?) have had problems. Be sure you don't change or erase the old powerbook until the new one is running perfectly. As I mentioned CCC works pretty well for making backup images of your computer and I made an additional backup image to an external firewire disk before embarking on this exercise...just in case. Eventually I'll be trying this trick in moving Faith from and old Mac desktop to the old powerbook.

Since I'm rambling about Macs here's some of my setup:

• Microsoft optical USB mouse for home/office. I'm a three button, scroll wheel mouse kinda guy I guess and they make decent periphs. (I have my eye on a MS bluetooth mouse)
• UControl: I use this solely for the scroll wheel emulation. Function-trackpad scrolls up/down. I'm lost without it.
• Launchpad (or Quicksilver) - once you try one of these you will NEVER go back
• Everyday Apps: Photoshop CS, BBEdit, Transmit (FTP), MacCVSX, iChatAV, Safari/Firefox, iTunes of course
• Built-in: Apache, PHP, Perl, SSH, terminal

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