I added a second DVD writer to my Mac Pro which also supports HP’s lightScribe. I wasn’t really interested in the lightScribe feature as much as just adding a second optical drive to the Mac Pro. At time of purchase I wasn’t sure if LightScribe is even supported by Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.x).

My test hardware:

LightScribe DVD Drive: LITE-ON DVDRW LH-20A1H LL0A 136
LightScribe Media: DVD+R Memorex (label is gold colored)

I came to find out that there is indeed support of lightScribe for Mac OS X. Drivers and two application can be downloaded free of charge at:

Driver:
LightScribe System Software for Mac OS X 10.3.9 and higher

Application:
LightScribe Simple Labeler for Mac OS X 10.3.9 and higher (Very basic application)
LACIE LightScribe Disc Labeling (Offers many more options than the LightScribe Simple Labeler)

There are many commercial application available for Mac OS X that support lightScribe.

The LightScribe Simple Labeler is very easy to use and guides you from the beginning up to the lightScribe process. If you like to add image/photo resources to your label and/or like to place text yourself, you would need to use LACIE’s LightScribe Disc Labeling or one of the many available commercial lightScribe applications out there.

All of these applications have one thing in common, which is the use of the same lightScribe drivers. Following are my findings about the lightScribe feature/experience:

Pros:

• - Water resistant.
• - Very crisp and clean results.

Cons:

• - Very SLOW, depending on the quality it can take up to 35 minutes.
• - Even at best quality, the result seems quite washed out in color. It might me possible that it depends on the media brand but I don’t think it would be significantly different from what my results were.
• - At this point lightScribe only creates monochrome labels.
• - At least double the price compared to regular writable CD’s/DVD’s.

Personal Opinion:

I am personally not impressed by this technology. It is too slow. If you need to create a label quick, which usually is the case for me, then LightScribe is not an option. To print a label takes little time compared to lightScribe. And the good old Sharpie beats both of these methods :) ...

This is NOT the way I like to start the week.
Many people refer to me as Jack of all trades due to my knowledge in many different areas. Besides my graphic design background I am also A+ certified and know my way around computer hardware.
A habit that I created throughout many years of building/customizing computers is to test a new hard drive over a period of time, within a stress test, before employing it as a boot drive, your system depends on.
I never had a new hard drive fail on me running it through a 7 days 24/7 stress test period. Thats just what I did with all of my 3 1TB hard drives, I recently purchased.
I put one of them to work as a boot drive. Today I shut down the computer properly as usual and booted from the BootCamp hard drive to work in native Windows XP for a project.
After I finished what I was doing I shut down and tried booting from the Mac OS X Leopard hard drive, but all I got was a gray screen with a blinking gray folder and question mark icon. I knew at this point I might be dealing with a huge problem.
Using the option key during startup didn’t show the Mac OS X Leopard hard drive as a boot option at all. It just vanished. The way I could hear the hard drive spin up and initialize was just fine, no out of the ordinary noises. So I considered a gone bad hard drive controller on the motherboard.
Since the Bootcamp partition showed up fine it could still be a hard drive controller problem if the hard drives were connected to separate hard drive controllers.
Out of personal worst case scenario experiences in the past I made it a habit to backup my hard drive at the end of every day (full clone).
It was time to put the software I used for the cloning process, to the test. I replaced the Mac OS X boot hard drive with the backup hard drive. And the backup hard drive booted up just fine. This excludes a hard drive controller problem and pin points the problem right to the original Mac OS X Leopard boot hard drive. I connected the original hard drive again together with the backup hard drive and using the Disk Utility from Mac OS X Leopard, the original hard drive was not even visible within the Disk Utility. Since I lost ‘only’ a days work I did not even bother employing recovery strategies since they are always lengthy. I ran out and got another 1 TB hard drive to make a backup of the backup hard drive which is now the main boot hard drive.
In all my years of experience I have never had a hard drive go bad after passing a 1 week 24/7 stress test. This hard drive was at most 4 weeks old.
Even though I have been smacked with a hard drive crash and lost a days worth of work I was almost feeling like having a party because of my backup and the way it worked instantly as a new replacement.

Follow Up

Another Seagate hard drive incident (hard drive number 2 of a total of 4 I purchased at the same day.

Adobe Air seems to be a nice cross platform framework. I thought giving it a shot and installed it to take advantage of nice 3rd party applications for the Adobe Air framework. I received the following screen (this is just one of the three applications I tried installing showing the same screen):

Is this an application I want on my computer? Not me! On paper Adobe Air sounds like a great solution but screens like this give me the creeps :) and I stay away from it.

First off, I can count on one thing in my life, and that is bad luck. I could write a book. Murphy’s law strikes every single day at least once and I am not clumsy or anything of that sort.
I started using Time Machine to back up my 1TB (terabyte) system disk. Currently it occupies 460GB. So I thought I should get at least one backup with a few days on my 1 TB external hard drive of same make, model and size. Unfortunately it needed more than just one 1TB.
I ended up excluding certain large folders from Time Machine. So I got it to start, finally. I had it run through the night and as I checked the following morning I got the following Time Machine Error Message:

I figured to efficiently use Time Machine with a 1TB system drive, I would need at least 2 1/2 TB if not more. This is turning out to be somewhat of a more involved issue. I have to look for an external hard drive solution that gives me the amount of space I need.
In the meantime I will be utilizing SuperDuper! for my backup purposes. I can schedule it and do what I need and it is a complete clone of the system hard drive, bootable and all. I can add a schedule where it just updates the changed files. The only difference is that I can not go back in time, which is quite a nice feature. Until I have an external hard drive solution that covers 2 1/2 or more TB I have to work with SuperDuper!.

I have my Mac Pro now for over a year and have not attempted to install my copy of Windows XP Pro (32 bit) under Boot Camp. There was no need for since Parallels Desktop and VM Ware Fusion are awesome replacements with the advantage to run Mac OS X and Windows at the same time. Boot Camp will not allow Mac OS X to run at the same time. The benefit on the other hand is that if you use Boot Camp you get native support of Windows and FULL SPEED. Parallels and VM Ware Fusion can really slow you down at times.
Today I decided to do this. Following a quick explanation on what I did in order to get Windows XP Pro running natively on a Boot Camp partition.
First off make sure you have a full copy of Windows XP Pro with integrated SP2 (Service Pack 2), an update alone will not work. Also have the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Install CD ready since it contains drivers.
Also if you are like me and write your CD keys on the CD because you are prone to loose the key otherwise make sure to write down the key before you put in the Windows install CD into your CD Rom. You will not be able to eject the CD during the installation process because the eject CD key on your Mac keyboard will NOT work. I started the Boot Camp Assistant which is by default in the 'Utilities' folder within your 'Applications' folder. I opted to dedicate an entire 500GB hard drive in my Mac Pro to the Boot Camp partition.
I selected the option 'Create or remove Windows partition'. After that I selected the dedicated hard drive and chose the option 'Erase disk and create single partition for Windows'. If you do only show one hard drive you should select the option 'Create a second partition for Windows'.
To my surprise Boot Camp only showed internal hard drives to select from. I thought my external SATA hard drive (connected through eSATA) would show up or even the FireWire Hard Drive, but they didn't. So I had to place the hard drive in one of the bays of my Mac Pro, to show up as selectable hard drive.
I followed the on screen instructions, put in the Windows XP Pro install CD and restarted the Mac Pro.
The Mac started booting right off the Windows XP install CD and the Windows installer started up. I faced a problem when selecting the proper partition. I just had way too many partitions displayed for every single hard drive built into my Mac Pro and attached hard drives. I decided to shut down the Mac unplug all external hard drives and pull out the remaining internal hard drives that are not needed for the Boot Camp installation. No need to risk formatting the wrong hard drive just to install WIndows XP if you know what I mean.
I restarted the Mac and the installer started up again. Now it was clear which partition to select for the Windows installation. Select the partition you would like to install Windows XP on and select the full format option! Do not use the option quick format since this will cause problems later on. At this point I almost #### a brick. Formatting the 500GB hard drive took a whooping 2 1/2 hours. So make sure if you do plan on dedicating a large amount of hard drive space for your Windows Installation to get a large coffee as well. After finishing the hard drive formatting the Mac rebooted.
At this point if you do have a Mac OS Boot partition still online make sure to push the 'Option' key of your keyboard during boot up to select the Boot Camp partition, so you can finalize the Windows installation.
Once Windows finished the installation process I put in the Mac OS X Leopard Install DVD and it auto started the driver setup. Let it do its thing and reboot Windows.
At this point you successfully finished the installation of Boot Camp with Windows XP Pro. Unfortunately I still had 2 hardware device alerts within the hardware manager of Windows XP. It showed a missing graphic card driver and a missing eSATA card driver.
In my Mac Pro I have two graphic cards installed. One nVidia GeForce 7300 GT for which the driver were installed and one nVidia GeForce 8800 GT for which the driver have not been installed. This was expectable since the graphic card was newer than the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Install DVD. I went to the nVidia Website and downloaded the missing driver. I selected the GeForce 8 series driver. The installation went without any problems. To my surprise both graphic cards were running just fine under Boot Camp and I am able to use all 3 of my monitors. The other missing driver I got off of the eSATA card manufacturers installation CD. All is fine now and I will continue to explore Boot Camp's native Windows XP Pro installation later.
One thing I am not sure about is why Windows XP Pro only shows 2 GB of my 16GB total installed in my Mac Pro. I know Windows XP Pro 32 bit has a 3-4 GB memory limit but it should display more than just 2 GB of ram.

Time Machine offers simplicity and piece of mind. At this point I would like to point out a view things that Time Machine can't do.

1) Compressing Files

Time Machine is not able to compress files.

2) Encryption

Time Machine does not encrypt files.

3) Airport Disks and network-attached-storage (NAS)

Time Machine does not recognize hard drives attached to AirPort Extreme base station and does not recognize any NAS devices.

4) Bootable

Time Machine does not create bootable hard drive backups.

5) Optical Drives

Time Machine does not store data on optical drives, such as CD's and DVD's.

6) File Vault

Time Machine does not back up FaileVault-encrypted user folders, unless you are logged out.

7) Flexibility

Time Machine only allows to exclude selected files and folders and does not allow things like files of a certain size, files based on extensions, etc.
Time Machine only allows you to backup only to one destination at a time.
Time Machine's backup schedule scheme of hourly, daily and weekly is fixed and can only be altered with hacks or 3rd party applications.

Did you ever create a document in Adobe Illustrator CS3 and found yourself exporting it to a PDF file for the press or other purpose and open it with Adobe Acrobat Reader, just to see certain letters appear 'fat' and different from all other letters? This is primarily a problem when creating outlines of the fonts used in your Illustrator document.
Unfortunately in Adobe Illustrator you can not export font or font sub-settings to a PDF file. The advantage of outlining fonts if you can't embed them is, that everybody can view the text the way you intended to, even if they do not have that particular font installed on their system. The disadvantage is that the Adobe Acrobat Reader usually shows l, i, I as fat and irregular letters, especially at smaller sizes.
Most clients get back to me and ask about these fat letters. All you can tell them is that it will print alright and that Adobe Acrobat Reader has a rendering problem in that regard. The document in fact prints properly and without these fat letters. But try to explain this to a client investing thousands (or even more) of dollars to have it printed, and on top of it in an oversized format, that makes it impossible to test it with the home printer.
Adobe knows about this issue since 2006 and has not addressed it as of yet.

Follow Up (September 11, 2008)

A workaround to avoid outline problem is to adjust the preferences of Adobe Distiller to include font sub-settings. That said by default font sub settings are not exported to PDF files from Adobe Illustrator, but once you change some preferences within Adobe Distiller, you can add font sub settings to your PDF exports and completely avoid the fat letter bug.

Mac OS X Version: 10.5.4
QuickSilver Version: β54 (3815)
I installed QuickSilver about 3 months ago, and it turned out to be one of my most used applications. The power and flexibility of this application is amazing!
Staring up my Mac Pro it showed me the following error message:


It happened a view times before but usually pushing the relaunch button fixed it. At this point the relaunch button doesn't do it anymore. I almost started to panic because of the extensive use of this application helping me save a lot of time.
After some tying I found a solution:
Basically deleting the clipboard history worked for me. The QuickSilver clipboard history can be found within your user folder at:

~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Shelves/QSPasteboardHistory.qsshelf