It’s incredibly easy to get going with a MacBook Air (Oct 2010), especially since it wakes up from sleep so quickly.

Mac OS X on my MacBook Air

1. Open lid.
2. Enter password.
3. Press Command + Spacebar to activate Spotlight (or whichever keyboard shortcut used to activate Quicksilver , LaunchBar, or Alfred App), type “Bean” or whichever text editor/word processor you use, then press Enter.
4. Frantically type whatever thoughts are spewing from your mind.
5. Command + S to save your document, then Command + Q to quit your text editor program.
6. Close lid.

Windows 7

You can type the program name after pressing the Windows key.

Once you’re done writing, Control + S to save your document, then Alt + F4 to close the program.

Software

Which programs do I use to write? The following are essentially free simple text editing programs, designed with minimal features so you can focus on writing. If you like any of them, please donate to the developers.

• Q10 (Windows)
• Dark Room (Windows)
• Bean (Mac OS X)
• Ommwriter (Windows/Mac OS X)

I save these small text files to a dedicated folder within Dropbox[1. Affiliate link to Dropbox. "For every friend who joins and installs Dropbox, we'll give you 500 MB and your friend 250MB of bonus space (up to a limit of 16 GB)!"] only for text files, with a specific prefix to help me find it later. (e.g. BP means blog post in “BP – Pronto writing in six steps.txt”.)

Why not use Microsoft Word, Apple iWork Pages, or OpenOffice.org Writer? If you’re only working with plain text, you don’t need the extra features and bloat.

If you don’t know the HTML tags for post formatting, copy your text[2. Select All for: (Windows) Ctrl+A; (Mac OS X) Command+A], paste it[3. Paste for: (Windows) Ctrl+V; (Mac OS X) Command+V] into your blog post, then format and/or add links accordingly.

So far, all is well. I’m waiting to receive my 2GB ValueRAM replacement from Kingston Technology, but the other 2GB is doing alright. I’ve also been looking through Lifehacker posts tagged #Windows7.

It’ll be interesting to feel the speed boost and stability that comes with using a 64-bit operating system.

Oh, and I’ll need to update my Recommended Software list. Done.

Now, 3RVX gives me a slick on screen volume indicator like Macs. Sweet! (Hat tip: Lifehacker)

When I woke up this morning, my computer couldn’t. *gasp*

Since my computer is on lower shelf of a wire rack, I had to:

• unplug the eight cables (4 USB, audio, Ethernet, VGA, and power),
• move my Canon CanoScan 5600F scanner out of the way (since it’s on the top shelf), and
• remove the computer cover.

After that, it was a matter of removing the BIOS battery and holding down the power button for about ten seconds to dissipate the power.

Warning: Geek lingo after this point.

<geekery>

Sick of it all, I decided to update the BIOS firmware[2. How to flash BIOS in DOS mode for Shuttle barebones systems]. Without a floppy disk drive, I searched for a way to make a USB flash drive bootable (to DOS). That’s tougher than it sounds.

I stumbled onto this page, “Creating a bootable USB thumb drive,” because I couldn’t download the HP Drive Key Boot Utility from the official page. Fortunately, it was less than 2MB[3. HP Drive Key Boot Utility weighs a ridiculous 45MB.].

Once my USB drive had DOS on it, I copied my new BIOS file and the flash program, booted into DOS, and updated my BIOS.

All is well, but I’m not sure I want to try standby again.

</geekery>

At work, one of the attorneys had a humongous PDF document she needed to email a lot of other attorneys outside the office. I tried extracting pages with an old version of Adobe Acrobat (v5), but the original file still kept the same size (despite having deleted the pages).

With open source (free) software, I split the document into two separate files in a couple minutes.

Required: PDFCreator

Once you install that, open your PDF document (original_superlongdocument.pdf) in your preferred reader. Now, go to File > Print. Change your printer to PDFCreator, then change your page range so you’re only “printing” half the document. If you have a 1,000 page document, set it to 1-500.

Follow the prompts and save that new PDF file — just not over your original. (superlongdocument_a.pdf)

Now, repeat for pages 501-1000 and save that one with a different filename. (superlongdocument_b.pdf)