William Reardon’s Blog

On Friday, I moved from a 15″ Macbook Pro to a 17″ model.

A lot of my work these days is done in “the cloud.” I use it extensively at work & home. Gmail was good enough to get me to switch away from Thunderbird, and I’m sold on how Google Docs makes it possible to access my docs anywhere, not to mention to making it easy to collaborate. (ProTip: If you’re getting married, Google Docs is a huge time saver.)

With that, I was surprised to find it still took a bit of time to setup my new machine. It seems I still rely a fair bit on local application & resources.

To make my life easier in the future, here’s the steps I need to go through.

On the new machine:

Install:

• Omnifocus
• Chrome
• Adium
• Emacs
• Dropbox
• SlimBatteryMonitor
• Quicksilver
• SynergyKM

Setup:

• Copy my Documents folder. Interestingly, most of the files hadn’t been modified since 2010 or so. I’ve started even keeping personal notes in Google Docs.




• Copy my resource files: .emacs, .bashrc, .bash_profile, & .bash/. I split out a lot of files in .bash & dynamically load certain things based upon the environment (e.g., home vs work).




• Setup iTunes
• Login/authorize.


• Copy music. Apple’s “Home Sharing” made it really easy. I sorted by my ratings & imported anything with 3 stars or above.
• Subscribe to: The Adam Carolla Show, NBC’s Meet the Press, Car Talk, Planet Money, Savage Love, Stack Exchange, This American Life, TwiT, TWiG, and the 2+2 Pokercast.



• Change the Finder preferences to display my hard drive & change the icon to Strongbad.


• Move the dock to the right. Set it to auto-hide & smallest size, with magnification enable & maximized.


• Enable remote login (for ssh) and screen sharing (for vnc).


• Copy over my TextMate Macros. I have a few simple macros to create a few standard meeting templates with a timestamp and folding patterns to allow me to collapse notes from a particular meeting.


• Disable & hide bluetooth.


• Run Keychain & have it display an icon in the menubar. This allows easy screen-locking, but I have no idea why this is where the preference is located.

On the old machine:

• De-authorize iTunes & Audible.

Other notes:

• I’ve ditched Growl. It’s now $2, which isn’t much, but I strongly dislike how they went about it. Surprising your community & taking advantage of them is never a good thing.


• Due to issues w/ Emacs & color-theme.el showing funky, I’m going to forge iTerm for a bit & give Terminal another shot.