Post updates: Mac backups, accented characters in OpenOffice.org

Here are two recent comments that you might be interested in. First, Jean-Christophe Helary offers some advice on backing up your Mac, with a link to a post on his blog:

On Mac 0SX (10.5), the bundled Time Machine utility does hourly incremental backups off all the specified areas on your machine to an external disk.

Not only is finding “old” files trivial (you just search for it as you’d search for a normal file), but restoring your machine’s contents is very easy too.

My current setting is:
1) daily incremental backup of my whole home space to an external disk with the rsync utility (free software)
2) daily incremental backup of the whole system Applications folder to an external disk with the same utility
3) hourly incremental backup of my whole home space (without the local Applications folder, the Download folder etc) to an external disk with the bundled Time Machine utility

I wrote a piece on how to make a smart use of Time Machine and other backup utilities in the context of Spotlight (the indexing and search bundled utility):

http://mac4translators.blogspot.com/search/label/Time%20Machine

and then Bill Hibbert, whose macro was featured in the post Inserting accented characters in OpenOffice.org wrote in with an update on that too:

Hi
I’ve been pointed here by someone who found my macro via your blog and was kind enough to write and say thank you for it.
I’m not a professional translator, although have done a lot of French->English translation, and often work in the two languages together (I’m English living mostly in France). I developed the macro because my memory isn’t good enough to remember all the ALT,0 combinations needed to input even a modest set of special characters, and picking them off the special character menu is far too clumsy for frequent use.
The problem is a long-standing one in OO – these two bug reports, which were opened in 2002, give an idea of the history:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=6847

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4579
The latter in particular should amuse – I post as redi2go there, and you can see how irritated I was getting around the middle of last year.
Having had the insight that there was a simple solution that nobody had spotted in five years of searching and done the work to develop and test it, I was then infuriated by the sheer impossibility of making it into an extension and putting it into a generally available library. My post on the 4579 bug of May 8th gives a pretty accurate view of my feelings on the matter!
I like my solution because it doesn’t need the mouse, it’s quick and intuitive to use, it has no practical limits on the number of special characters made available, and it’s easy to customise to key combinations that make sense to you.
Anyway, thought I’d just check in and say hello, and how pleased I am that this little piece of software is useful to somebody – I really thought it had sunk without trace!