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Easter Hop 2005

Posted by matthew on Mar 22, 2005 in dance

The 6th Annunal Easter Hop is this week on Thursday 24th
March!! As with last year, we will be raising money for the
Peter MacCullum Cancer Centre. The Pearly Shells Swing
Orchestra will play for your dancing enjoyment.

We’ll have charity taxi dances, Easter eggs and all the
usual Easter hop fun. Matt Riddle will DJ during the
breaks.

Counter meals are available from 7pm, with the band starting
at around 8.30pm. Don’t miss this chance to be a part of one
of Melbourne’s oldest swing traditions. There is limited
dance space available, at the venue, however the floor will
be cleared of chairs and tables to maximise dance space!

Venue: The Bendigo Hotel, 125 Johnston St Collingwood.

Date: Thursday, 24 March starting at 8.30pm (dinner from 7.00pm).

Dinner bookings: 9417-3415

Entry: $12

This is a non-profit event. Part of every entry fee goes
to charity.

 
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Maintaining My Mac

Posted by matthew on Mar 22, 2005 in technology

Yesterday was maintenance day at Chez Zot. With less than 1.5% of my disk space available, my Powerbook’s hard drive was running on borrowed time. I have been strict about what gets onto it for a long time — there are no games except BF 1942, which I play almost daily, a very limited selection of Lindy Hop clips for teaching, and no pr0n! But with disk space at a critical low I needed to do something drastic. I can’t move my music (which takes >50% of the space) off the laptop because it’s my primary machine and I need it for DJing. So I needed to archive something else. I decided it had to be my iPhoto library — now including something like 3-4 years of snapshots from various trips. It’s grown to over 3.6 Gb in size in that time.

At the same time I needed to do a full backup. So to achieve this goal I decided to use the highly recommended and simple shareware tool, Carbon Copy Cloner. Good choice. After an hour or so I had backed up all user files onto an external drive painlessly. I also decided it would be a good idea to perform some routine maintenance and downloaded MacJanitor. This Freeware app runs a range of unix maintenance scripts that usually only get executed automatically late at night. Laptops like my Powerbook don’t usually run these scripts because they’re off at night, so every now and again it’s a good idea to run something like this.

As a result of these two things, I now have an extra 8% of hard disk space so that I can at least keep going for a while. In the long term I need an upgrade, but for now I’m happy.