As a long time Macintosh user, one of the applications that I really enjoyed using is BBEdit from Bare Bones software. I have been using this software off and on again since 1997. It's been a critical tool for any text issues that I deal with on the Macintosh. There's a lot of really cool things that you can do with BBEdit. Here's two cool features:

Replacing Text in multiple files is one of the reasons people use BBEdit.  We all have some need to replace text, and more often than not it's with multiple files. Over the past 10+ years, I have found that BBEdit is the easiest way to find and replace text in multiple applications. What's cool is that BBEdit also saves your search/replace so that you can reuse the search pair again. Extremely helpful when I needed to replace Window line breaks with Macintosh line breaks or vice verse.

One of the strong points to BBEdit's simple search and replace is the use of Text Factories. This functionality allows you to perform multiple search and replace at the same time. So if I had 200 files that wanted to replace all the line breaks to UNIX format and change the copyright year to 2013, I can do it in one simple action. BBEdit then shows you a report of the changes that it would perform and allow you to decide to accept all changes. Very cool and very powerful.

In short, BBEdit is a great application and worth the $49.99 price. Your getting an application that can be used for any text functionality that you do on your Macintosh. If you tried the application in the past, I encourage you to try it again.

I have been working on getting Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) installed on to my iMac via Parallel. The reason I wanted to do this is because I have some software that only run's in 10.5, and it will be very expensive to upgrade to work with (10.8.2)

There were 2 big issues that I had to deal with:

1. I wasn't creating the correct disk image for Parallel to use

Part of the core problem was that the Parallels log file wasn't telling me what was going on. I would see lots of PET_VM_EVT_VM_CONFIG_CHANGED, PET_DSP_EVT_VM_DEV_STATE_CHANGED and PRL_WNG_NO_OPERATION_SYSTEM_INSTALLED. But no clue what is going on. Basically if you get the 'Click Start' to launch after a few seconds after starting the process it means that your Disk Image is bad.

Thanks to some information over on MacFixIt, I was able to correct identify how to properly burn a disk image of an OS disk. ( I wasn't selecting the core device.)

2. I was unable to modify a disk image.

This is a problem with Mountain Lion and not something that you did. Apple updated the DiskCopy tool so that DVD master disks are read only. To get around this, I had to boot up my old computer and then created the disk image on that machine. That created the opportunity for me to edit the disk image.

Looks like I am in business and looking forward to installing my applications!

Last night I decided to connect an external monitor to my Powerbook G4 so that I could work with a larger screen and not use the smaller laptop screen. Apple calls this clam shell mode. To do this you need to connect a USB keyboard, USB mouse and an external monitor then close the laptop.

While I was installing some old drivers and in the process the keyboard language type got converted to Hiragana. I am not sure exactly which driver made the change, as I installed USB Overdrive, MacAlly IceKey Driver and SteerMouse.

I am thinking it was SteerMouse as it was the first driver I installed. The Logitech MX 518 mouse wasn't responding when I click and it appeared to move too fast. Later I notice that the USB wasn't working, as I was typing strange characters on my Macally IceKey keyboard.

SteerMouse was created in Japan, so that might be another clue that it was the application that changed my keyboard type to Hiragana.

I am going to uninstall all the drivers and third party utilities to see if I can identify the root cause and get everything working. Part of the problem I am running into is that I am using 10.5.8 on my laptop and some of drivers don't support that any more.

There seems to be a problem with Notepad++ and CrossOver. In particular the use of Dockable Windows with Plugins such as NppFTP and Snippets.

The problem that I keep running into is the inability to move a dockable window from the right side of the screen to the left side. The problem is that I am unable to drag and drop to the left and the window becomes undock. When the window is undock, there is no way to connect is back to the main window. To get back the previous state, I have to reinstall Notepad++.

Maybe someone else have better luck at moving the Dockable NppFTP window, but it just doesn't work correctly in Crossover.

Here's the complete description of Dockable Windows:

Notepad++ supports so called Dockable Windows. These are part of the GUI, but you can move them around and choose whether you want them aligned to any side of the main windows (docked), or floating like a separate window.

To change the location of a dockable window, click and drag the titlebar of the window around. When you drag near any edge of the main window, a rectangle will be drawn indicating that the window will be docked there if you release it. Moving it anywhere else will draw the rectangle in the same way the window would be positioned if it were floating.

You can resize floating windows like any other window by dragging its edges, but to resize a dockable window you have to drag the edge that is adjacent to the main window.

There can be multiple dockable windows grouped together. If this is the case, only one of the windows is shown, and the others are reachable by a tab bar that is shown below the visible window. Selecting an item from the tab bar will hide the visible window, and show the corresponding window from the tab bar.

I have an old Swann Firewire hub and was going to connect it to my computer. I wanted to use to connect multiple devices. I purchased this hub a few years ago and its been sitting in the basement for a while. When I put it in storage, I didn't keep the power brick with it. Which causes a dilemma, what power jack will I need? When I looked on the bottom of the hub it didn't have any specs. So I decided to search the Internet.

After searching several sites, I found the required power specs. It looks like the 12vV/1A is what will properly power up the device. I figure I post it here in case I needed this information in the future.

Here's the full details of the Firewire hub:

The Swann FireWire 6 Port Hub not only overcomes the 4.5M length limit in the 1394 standard for the user's devices, but it offers 6 independent 1394 bus connections, each with a 400Mbps transfer rate. Swann FireWire 6 Port Hub is the best choice for corporate and professional users who want a solid solution to IEEE 1394 / FireWire connectivity.

• True plug & play hot-swappable device
• Self or Bus Powered
• Fully supports IEEE 1394 standard
• FireWire protocol allows for connection of up to 63 devices
• Data transfer at 100/200/400 Mb/s
• 6 bi-directional ports with over-current protection per port
• PC & Mac compatible.
• Allows connection of up to 63 FireWire devices
• DV cameras, DV camcorders, DV recorders, still digital cameras
• HDD, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, DVD-RAM Digital TV, Set top box, scanners, printers, disk drives

• 1394 standards compliant; IEEE 1394-1995, P1394a (rev1.1)
• Asynchronous & isosynchronous data transfer
• 100/200/400 Mb/s transmission rate
• 6 x 6-pin 1394 bus connectors
• 1 x DC 12V/1A input jacket

• G3 300 or higher
• Mac with 1 FireWire port
• System 9.04 or higher
• 64MB RAM minimum