After realizing I hadn't given my BootCamp partition enough room on my new humongo-drive (upgraded from 120gb 5400 RPM to 320gb 7200 RPM), I went looking for a way to add a few gigs to it. The solutions were wide and varied. Most had to do with cloning the partition's contents, killing the partition, making a new one with Boot Camp, stopping the Windows install, and then restoring the old Windows install.

That was a lot of work and a lot of hassle.

Then I found someone recommending CampTune. It's a free download and "pre-release" but it works fine. It's a working Linux ISO file you can download and burn to a CD-ROM with your favorite disc creator package (or Disk Utility).

Once it's burned, hop into System Settings, choose the "Startup Disk" option, and set your machine to boot from CD-ROM next time. Boot from the CD you burned and you'll go into CampTune, which has a very simple interface for changing the respective sizes of your Mac and BootCamp partitions.

When you're done, everything should work as normal, although if you created a VM in Parallels or VMWare to use your Bootcamp partition inside OS X, you may need to recreate the VM.

That's it. Pretty simple, huh?

Don't be scared off by the "pre-release" status. It's been that way for over a year now and I think Paragon just decided the market for people wanting to resize their BootCamp partition wasn't big enough to charge for it after all, so they just left a good release candidate up as the free download and moved on to other projects. It worked well for me.

As always, don't mess with the internal structure of your hard drive without having made backups first.

Good luck! Have fun!

I recently posted my solution to connect the Samsung Moment to a Mac laptop using Snow Leopard via USB. Once that was done, the question was how to get my iTunes music and playlists from my MacBook Pro to my Samsung Moment.

I use iTunes to manage my music collection, both stuff purchased from iTunes as well as my older MP3 rips from CD and MP3s I've purchased or received free from Amazon.com. A while back, iTunes moved to a DRM free format for most new purchases and you could upgrade older purchases for 30 cents a song. The Moment will play the DRM free AAC format (M4A) from iTunes. But there's one problem, the built-in music player on the Moment, as well as two others I tried, will not recognize the information tags in the M4A format. Fear not, though...

CONVERTING ITUNES M4A TO MP3

Go to the Preferences pane for iTunes. In the "General" page (main page), go to the section that lets you specify what to do when you insert a CD. There, it has a button for "Import Settings". The default is iTunes AAC format, but you can set it to MP3. Once you've done that (you can also specify a variety of bitrates and other info), you can go into your music library, right-click on any song that's listed as "Purchased AAC" format ("Protected AAC" still has DRM), and convert it to MP3. You can highlight a large number of songs and perform this right-click action to batch convert them.

After this, I found that the three Android music players (the built-in one, MixZing, and one I can't recall) I tried would not read ID3 v2.x tags as iTunes wrote them. I ended up deciding to use MixZing because it handled the index display of videos as well as music and was better than the "Gallery" built-in video player that just shows you icons with no titles.

To import my music and my iTunes playlists, I found that DoubleTwist worked very well. It recognized my Samsung Moment and imported my iTunes Playlists with ease. It generated .m3u playlist format lists that the Samsung could understand, and dragging the playlist to the Samsung in the program took care of importing the playlist and all the associated music files.

A Playlist Caveat

If you want to import existing playlists, you're going to have to update them with any files you converted, otherwise they'll still sync the m4a version of the song to your phone. This isn't terrible. It still plays. It just comes up as "Unknown Artist" from "Unknown Album" with "Unknown Title". So if you're just shuffling your playlists and never look at the song info, who cares? if you want to know the name of the song/artist that's playing or play a specific song, then you need to convert the songs and fix up the playlists.

Two downsides. One, it will not convert/unprotect videos from iTunes that have DRM. So, for example, the free episodes I got of "Handy Manny" and "WordWorld" on iTunes won't play on my phone without some additional and illegal massaging. On the other hand, the music videos that came with the "Madagascar 2" soundtrack got upgraded to DRM-Free when I did the big batch of upgrades. So the will.i.am "I Like to Move It" music video transferred over and plays beautifully on the Moment's AMOLED screen.

Second downside is the way it handles podcasts. Rather than separating them out, they're incorporated into the music catalog. So, my "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me" audio podcasts are found under the album of the same name with "NPR" as the artist. As for my "Sesame Street" video podcasts (for my 4-year-old), they only come up in the "Movies" section under the general "iTunes" heading. They're not in the "Movies" or "TV Shows" lists, so they can be a little hard to find.

On an upside note, if you give a YouTube video URL to DoubleTwist, it will download the Flash .flv file of the YouTube video to your hard drive. Putting the files on your Moment can take a while, though, because it re-encodes the videos into an MP4 format before transferring them. Since the Moment works with YouTube, this is only valuable for being able to watch YouTube videos when you don't have an internet connection (like when you're on a plane) or you're in a poor coverage area. I'd love to know if any of you have suggestions for a quicker method for downloading and converting YouTube videos, or a faster .flv to mp4 conversion method.

It also seems to do the conversion on the fly, so if you're rotating videos in and out and back in again, you may want to use a separate converter to do a permanent conversion from the Flash .flv file format to one your Moment can play. I tried transcoding with VLC and that was difficult to produce a video VLC could play back, much less my Samsung Moment. Quicktime Player's "Save For Web" option in the file menu worked very well. I selected the "save for iPhone" option and it created a good quality m4v file that my Moment would play.

I also copied over some other videos I had in other formats (collected over the years) directly to the card. I was able to play the .wmv and .avi format videos, but not the .mpg. Of course, these formats can have various underlying codecs, so don't take that as a blanket statement, but it's a decent place to start. Of course, if videos won't play on your Moment, but will play in Quicktime, you should be able to use the "Save For Web" function to convert them to a format your Moment will handle.

Hope this information helps you. Cheers!

I posted about my difficulties connecting my Samsung Moment to my Mac laptop. If you want to, you can read those trials and tribulations.

If you just want the solution...

After looking for drivers, doing various experiments, and getting feedback from others with the same problem, I just hunted for any and all settings having to do with USB and one finally worked. It may not be perfect, but this seems to help.

Go into Settings -> Applications -> Development on your phone's main menu.

Turn on USB debugging ("Debug mode when USB is connected"). It will recognize that a USB connection now exists.

A widget will pop up on your Mac saying it's recognized a network device and will want to install the phone as a modem. Don't worry about it. It's a red herring. I never configured that, never connected that.

Go into "Notifications" from the phone's main menu and you'll see a notification under "Ongoing" that says "USB Connected (select to copy files to/from your computer)". Touch it.

You'll get a dialogue with the title "USB Connected" and the text "You have connected your phone to your computer via USB. Select 'Mount' if you want to copy files between your computer and your phone's SD card." It offers options of "Mount" and "Don't Mount". Touch "Mount".

A removeable drive will appear in Finder called "No Name". That's your Micro SD card and you can begin copying files. You'll need to unmount the card for applications on the phone to have access to it. I created a folder called "Music" in the DCIM folder, put a couple of MP3s in there and I'm listening to them now.

Don't know if this will work with Snow Leopard's built-in sync program or third party sync programs, but I'm happily able to move media back and forth which is HUGE for me.

Some of you may remember me complaining about pricing on Snow Leopard, but I broke down and upgraded anyway.

The install went smoothly. I downloaded Firefox (using Safari), copied over my profile from my back-up disk, and everything was beautiful. I downloaded Thunderbird, copied over my profile from my back-up disk and it seemed to work well.

There was just one hinky thing, and that was certain e-mails (most notably alerts from Facebook that someone posted a comment on your status) wouldn't wrap long lines. They just stretched sideways and required you to scroll. I looked for a wrap setting in the message display options and it wasn't there. Used to be there. Isn't there now. Not sure if it's Mozilla's fault or Apple's fault, but most of my e-mails display fine. The only ones showing this odd behavior are from Facebook. And oddly if I view the message source, it wraps nicely in the source view.

After that, I got tired of not being able to scroll through web pages and e-mails, so I went to Logitech's site to download the Mac drivers for my Trackman Marble Mouse to enable the scrolling functions. I downloaded the latest Mac drivers, updated in August... and they refused to install, saying my version of OS X was unrecognized.

After doing some research on Google, I found a thread in their support forums saying that you could get around it by right-clicking the install package, showing the package contents, and then clicking on the actual driver installer in the resource folder. This was "unsupported," so if I messed everything up, it was on me. I decided to try it rather than wait another couple of weeks until the next release of their drivers with Snow Leopard fixes. It worked.

Well, then it was on to setting up my web site development environment with Apache, MySQL, and PHP. I was overjoyed to read that Snow Leopard shipped with recent versions of Apache and PHP. To get Apache running, you go into your system preferences "sharing" section and turn on web sharing. I set up a simple php file in the default web directory so I could run phpinfo() and see the PHP configuration, browsed to it, and it displayed the script's source code instead of running the script.

Yeah, you get both, but PHP is turned off by default in the Apache configuration. Went down a dead-end about an improperly set timezone in the php.ini file before I found the httpd.conf file and saw that the line enabling PHP was disabled. Uncommented it, saved it, restarted Apache, and voila. I got my phpinfo() script working.

Now it was time to get my virtual hosts set up. I usually set up a few nonsense domain names in the httpd.conf as virtual hosts, point those domains to localhost in my hosts file, and voila, I've got a local testing webserver that acts just like I was out on the real web, with domain names and everything.

Now, to mirror the directory structure on a cPanel server, I was placing the domain home directories in /home/account_name/public_html. Only some new service they apparently implemented in Leopard reserves the /home directory as an alias for itself and if you want to use it, you're screwed.

So I put everything in /shome, adjusted my virtual hosts, and attempted to access one of my sites. "You do not have permission to access / on this server." Okay, I went down the road with permissions on the folders, the account and group IDs Apache was using... And this wasn't just my guestimating. I found people saying these were the fixes when I googled it, but none of them worked. Then I found someone saying the base <Directory> entry in the default httpd.conf has "deny from all" and needs to be "allow from all". Changed that and my sites worked... sort of. I still had to get MySQL up and running.

I downloaded the 32-bit version of the latest stable MySQL (5.1.37) from MySQL's site. I'd seen some sites advising to compile it from source, but I always seem to have bad luck with that option. I used the MySQL install... and it sort of worked. The system preferences pane for starting and stopping the server would sometimes freeze. And while I could get a GUI client and phpMyAdmin to connect via the socket method, connecting to localhost via TCP/IP would NOT work.

I used Time Machine to back out the previous install, then downloaded the latest 64-bit 5.4 beta version, as I'd googled for help on this and read someone saying that installed and worked well for them. It worked well for me... sort of. While I could now get the GUI and phpMyAdmin to connect via localhost, the Wordpress installer said it couldn't connect to the database. Examining the config files for phpMyAdmin and Wordpress, I noticed that phpMyAdmin and the GUI had you specify the port while Wordpress didn't. So, instead of localhost, I specified the host as "127.0.0.1:3306". Voila.

Itunes was great. I copied my Music folder contents from my backup to my new install and my whole music/podcast catalog was ready, willing, and able.

Productivity applications presented their own set of problems, some unrelated to Snow Leopard.

I use an old USB PC keyboard hooked up to a KVM switch that lets me double-press the Scroll Lock key to swap my keyboard, mouse, and monitor between two different machines (my MacBook Pro and an older PC). Since I'm used to the home and end keys from years of PC use, I use an app called Double Command to get "PC style home and end keys". This makes the home and end keys act as expected in my text editor, browser, etc. This time, instead of installing the Mac-centric redux of OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice, I downloaded the Mac version of OpenOffice.org.

Here's the fun part. OpenOffice.org makes the home and end keys work as expected without Double Command. But when it's turned on, they work to advance the cursor one word or back one word. So, either turn off Double Command every time I run the word processor, but turn it on for all my other apps, or install NeoOffice? NeoOffice. NeoOffice lags a smidge behind OpenOffice.org in features, but I can live with it.

Graphics... I'm trying to go all open source and freeware, plus not use any apps that require Rosetta. The downside of this is that the GIMP (Photoshop substitute) and Inkscape (Illustrator Substitute) run via X11. That means they have a Unix interface, use the control instead of command key, and don't drag-n-drop well, if at all. They can also be slow to start and have some other idiosyncracies.

I've read a lot about GIMP's confusing and unintuitive user interface. I'll confirm it after installing 2.6.7. It worked fine, and after a slow first start, I could boot it in about 15 seconds on subsequent starts, even with quitting out of X11 too. Drag-n-drop didn't work and while it would import my Photoshop files, the text layers were not editable, which makes it a deal killer right there. I've got a lot of label/icon/button templates where I just change the text as needed. If I have to throw all of those away or recreate them... I still can't afford to go with CS4/5, but perhaps a cheaper alternative like Pixelmator 1.5 which is supposed to have Snow Leopard support when it releases any day now...

Inkscape, which I love, won't boot on Snow Leopard according to the forums, and the only option is to try a development version which will work, albeit with some bugs. The next stable release is getting close, and it will hopefully support Snow Leopard.

Considering the huge number of apps that have issues with Snow Leopard, I'm definitely going to advise everyone to wait a couple of months to let all the developers get Snow Leopard support into their apps. As for Apple, well, you've let me down again. Perhaps I'm an edge case with my need for cross-platform tools and preference for open source apps. But when I switched from Windows XP to Tiger and now from Tiger to Snow Leopard, I have had VERY far from an "it just works" experience.