Resurrecting a Mac With a Full Hard Drive

Today, I volunteered to help a new friend who could not use her Mac laptop.  She could get the gray Apple icon screen on powering up, but eventually it turned to a blank blue screen with no icons or dock or hard drive image.  She mentioned at one point that she had been told by the Apple Genius store that her hard drive was full, and that she needed to hook it up with another Mac in Target Mode to access her hard drive to clean off some of the files.

I tried the option, command, P, R sequence of keys to execute a PRAM boot sequence.  This did not help. So with a suggestion from my husband we tried the Safe Boot Mode.  To boot a Mac in Safe Mode - power up the computer, after the first tone sound, hold down the Shift key and release once the gray screen and spinning wheel and progress bar appear. 

This worked and we were able to see the friend's hard drive, dock and files on the desktop.  From that point, I realized that she had been trying to remove some of her photos from iPhoto application to make room on her hard drive.  There were a number of things that she did that actually caused the hard drive to fill up.  She kept saying that she had multiple copies of each photo in iPhoto and could not seem to get rid of them.

This is the scenario that I believe caused this duplication:
She thought she could drag the photos from iPhoto application to the trash can to get rid of them.  She did not realize that the photos were being copied instead of deleted from the iPhoto library.  Every time she dragged a photo out to the trash, it was duplicating the photo instead of deleting it.  She did this a couple of times, and as she did this, more duplicates of the each of her photos were placed into the trash.  She was compounding the hard drive space problem without realizing it.

I deleted the trash can which got rid of the duplicates there, but in exploring her hard drive, realized that she had also possibly dropped these same files she was trying to delete into her home folder and had another two sets of duplicated photos.

Once I found these and selected them and put them into the trash and also emptied the trash, her hard drive space was back.  Now, she is able to use her Mac again.

There are two things that can be learned from this:
(1)  A file is still on your hard drive, present in your trash can, until you actually empty the trash.
(2)  You cannot delete photos from iPhoto by dragging them to the trash.  To delete a photo in your iPhoto library, you need to run iPhoto, select the photo or photos to delete, and then hit the Delete key.   The photos then are moved into the Trash can in iPhoto application.  You must also empty the Trash in iPhoto for these to be totally removed. Tweet

Time Zone Dilemma

Found a great article that is important to read if you are traveling in different timezones.  As I travel from timezone to timezone, I have found that my iCal or Mac Calendar app is messing with my appointment times.  Somehow, an appointment I set for 9AM ends up at a different time when I switch timezones.  For instance, if I set an appointment reminder for an event to attend at 9AM while on the East Coast and I fly a couple of timezones away, I might miss my appointment, as the time in the calendar gets changed.

If you have this problem, be sure to check out this well-written article to understand the settings and way to handle this problem.  We don't want to miss any of our appointments! Tweet

Using Prospective to Capture the Moment

While visiting a sugar cane museum in Port Louis, on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, I learned a good photo tip.  At the museum there was the Beau Plan's historical chimney-stack, constructed in 1895 by A. Felix, an architect that stood 33 meters (over 100 feet) tall.

I wanted to take a photo of this very tall tower or smoke stack.   This presented a problem - how best to obtain this type of photo.  Normally buildings are so tall that one can't really get the entire building in the photo by looking up and snapping the photo.   Normally, one would step back to try and get an angle on the object that would work while photographing.  The area by the smoke stack was not conducive to backing up, as we were inside an enclosure which surrounded the tower.  So I attempted to just look up and snap the photo which did not work.

Then, I noticed that there was a mirror slanted along the wall of the enclosure that was tilted in such a way as to reflect the tower onto the mirror.  Cleverly, I decided to take a photo of the tower using the mirror.  My first attempt was not successful, as I failed to realize that I would be in the photo.  I ended up with the photo shown below (a self-portrait):

 Stepping further away from the mirror I was able to capture only the tower.  The results below:

Still not satisfied, I stepped to the side and took the best shot by angling the camera from a completely different prospective. See best photo below:

A valuable lesson in photography is to look up, look down and change your position to get the prospective you need on the object you are photographing.  You never know what you might see or capture.

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