T11M

I don’t often take to a new application instantly, but this app has been great ever since I installed it.  Quick, free, and open-source, Notational Velocity (NV) allows me to quickly create, edit, and search through my notes.  I’ve been using TextMate and Spotlight for this purpose, but it gets very difficult to manage all the different text files and often Spotlight doesn’t immediately pinpoint the correct file.  NV however has proven to be incredibly fast, stable, and efficient for managing all of those little notes I want to jot down and keep but not manage.  While being a very simple app it has a couple key features that I like.  First you can choose whether to store your data in an NV database or divided into individual text files.  Second you can enable encryption to securely store your notes – allowing you to manage passwords and other more sensitive information without hesitation.  Lastly there are a number of easy keyboard shortcuts that help speed the creation, search, and formatting of notes.  All in all I’ve found Notational Velocity a complete replacement for my old text file storage method.  Unfortunately it is Mac only and currently has no built in syncing (However you can change the storage location for the notational data it would be very easy to sync via a third party app like DropBox or even iDisk).  Check it out here and as with any open-source project they are also looking for contributors.

OS X, Software

So I played around with VMWare tonight and figured out how to resize the disk without data loss or too much trouble.  First time took about 30 minutes.  Second time took about 10.  I used GParted Live but you can use Partition Magic or any other third party software that comes on a bootable ISO that will do active partition resizing.

BACKUP THE USER DATA JUST IN CASE!!!

1. Shutdown the VM and go into VMWare Settings -> Hard Disks -> resize the disk to the desired size. (unfortunately Windows won’t just recognize the increase in space to the boot partition so you must do the steps listed below)
2. Download the GParted Live CD ISO (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php)
3. Attach the ISO to the VM as a CD/DVD
4. At VM boot press F2 to go into setup and change the boot order so that cd is before HD.  (This is really hard since you only have about a 1 second window and you have to make sure that you are directing the keyboard input into the VM).
5. You should now be able to boot to the GParted ISO.  Go with the default settings for booting into the ISO.
6. Launch GParted and click move/resize disk
7. Resize the disk to the new size you want Windows to see and apply the change.
8. Disconnect the ISO, reboot and check in Windows to ensure that it recognizes the change.  Chkdsk should run before Windows startup which is normal since Windows recognizes a change to the boot disk.

***Be sure to take a snapshot prior to making these changes so that you can roll back if necessary.  I did test the snapshot functionality with rolling back after the change and it does work.***

I think I like VMWare Fusion.  Still not sure about Windows though…

Software VMWare Fusion