How to increase or decrease your Boot Camp partition

If you’re running Mac OS X and Boot Camp you may need to increase or decrease the size of your Microsoft Windows Boot Camp partition, depending on what great videos games are out for Windows at the time. ๐Ÿ˜‰

To accomplish this task without losing all your Windows data you need 3 things.

  1. Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
  2. An HFS+ Mac-formatted external drive
  3. Winclone

To decrease the size of your Windows partition use the following steps.

  1. Make a backup of your Boot Camp partition from Windows. (optional)
  2. Run Winclone.
  3. In the “Tools” drop down click “Shrink Windows (NTFS) file system.”
  4. Follow the onscreen instructions.
  5. Wait… it takes awhile.
  6. In Winclone create an “Image” to your Mac-formatted external hard drive.
  7. Use Boot Camp Assistant to return your drive to a 100% Mac-formatted partition.
  8. Use Boot Camp Assistant to make a new Boot Camp partition larger than the file size of your “shrunk” Windows partition image, but smaller than your original Boot Camp partition size.
  9. When it asks for Windows disk, quit Boot Camp Assistant.
  10. Run Winclone again and “Restore” your Windows image to the new partition.

To increase the size of your Windows partition use the following steps.

  1. Make a backup of your Boot Camp partition from Windows. (optional)
  2. Run Winclone.
  3. In Winclone create an “Image” to your Mac-formatted external hard drive.
  4. Use Boot Camp Assistant to return your drive to a 100% Mac-formatted partition.
  5. Use Boot Camp Assistant to make new Boot Camp partition larger than your original partition size.
  6. When it asks for Windows disk, quit Boot Camp Assistant.
  7. Run Winclone again and “Restore” your Windows image to the new partition.

Kind of a pain, but it’s doable. I’ve altered my Boot Camp partition numerous times using the methods above.

Austin Jelly Laptop Stickers!

Austin Jelly Laptop StickersSo a couple of months ago Brian Massey had the great idea to print some Jelly stickers at Mikons.com. The idea being that you slap one of these stickers on the back of your laptop and new Jelly attendees will be able to locate a group of Jelly-ers in a public setting, such as a coffee shop like Cafe Caffeine! I’ve had one of Brian’s original stickers on my laptop for a couple months and it’s been a great ice breaker at Jelly.

We’ve been out of Brian’s original sticker print-run for awhile now, but today I got a new batch in the mail! Big thanks go out to Stephen Gutknecht for fronting the money to purchase the stickers.

If you’d like a sticker let me know at Jelly. They cost $2 a piece to print. Not so coincidently, we’ll be accepting donations of $2 per sticker. ๐Ÿ™‚

Alternatively you can hop on Mikons.com and create all kinds of schwag using the Jelly icon and have it shipped straight to your door.

I had a little trouble with the checkout process at Mikons, but Mark was fantastic about helping me, and it turned out to be an over the top customer experience.

Google Calendar โ€œQuick Addโ€ Firefox Add-on FTW!

I just found my new favorite Firefox add-on (extension, plugin, whatever). Using the Google Calendar “Quick Add” Firefox Add-on, press “cntrl” + “;” and your Google Calendar “Quick Add” box will popup in the middle of your screen no matter what tab or page you’re on.

So, you heard about a great event on Twitter? Hit “cntrl” + “;” type in the event and you’re done. I love it!

If you use Google Calendar you need to know about the “Quick Add” feature. It’s by far the easiest way I’ve ever seen to enter an event into a calendar. Somehow it can magically parse dates, times, locations, and even repeating events out of a one line description. It understands things like “every Friday,” “next Tue.,” and “noon – 3” Check it out in this short video demo to get the idea.

Unfortunately, as of this blog post, the Google Calendar “Quick Add” Firefox Add-on isn’t compatible with FirexFox 3 beta. ๐Ÿ™

A Windows Genuine False Positive!

So this evening my $300 genuine copy of Windows Vista Business decided it was no longer genuine. But my favorite part is I have lots of work due in the next few days and I’m paid by the hour. That means I am now losing money and face! So needless to say I’m a little upset.

But hey, surely Microsoft has some mechanism to get me back in the game right? Not after 6:00pm! Nope. I have to write them a pleasant email and kick back and wait for a response in the next 24 hours. Of course this should be fine. It’s not like I shelled out $300 big ones for the privilege of running Windows Vista Business. And hey, who uses Vista Business for business right? And even if it was for business purposes, who works after 6pm? Yes, a 24 hour turnaround email is the PERFECT solution. *That’s sarcasm Microsoft!*

I must admit, I was able to “chat” with a Microsoft rep. He was a tremendous help providing me with a link to the webpage I initiated the “chat” from, that also contained the support email address. He also ensured me Microsoft would respond to my email within the next 24 hours and he informed me that the email support is absolutely FREE! Can you believe it!? Bless my lucky stars, it’s FREE! *That’s sarcasm again Microsoft!* Free… humph. Give me a break. I should be billing Microsoft my time spent dealing with WGA.

If it wasn’t for Visual Studio Microsoft would have one less developer. Hell, maybe I’ll migrate over to Mono and run Linux and OSX.

OvertWhoIs.com – Domain name research minus the spying part!

In the past I have been worried about checking the availability of some of the domain names I have thought of. Can I actually trust the registrar to not purchase the domain name I’m checking on if I don’t buy it immediately? Apparently this topic is more popular than I once thought. I found this blog post on Digg recently Who Is Monitoring Your Domain Searches?

In an attempt to fix this problem I set out to make a domain research tool that people can trust. My solution? Use an open source whois script and give the web users directory browsing rights to the site. This way the users can verify that their searches are not being monitored by looking through the source code.

Check it out here at http://www.overtwhois.com/