Google Voice, which lets users consolidate all their phones under one number, archive your texts and voicemails, and much, much more, is two things to most people: vaguely promising, and totally confusing. Here’s how to make the switch, in plain English.

The Pitch

It doesn’t really help to describe Google Voice in terms of what it is—a bizarrely fragmented hodgepodge of different telecom and internet technologies, drawn together by Google—so you just have to start with what it does. In short, it can completely change how you use your phones, more or less for free.

• It can give all of your phones the same number for incoming calls. Google will assigned you a new, Google Voice-specific phone number for free, which you can forward to as many phones as you want. What always drives the point of Google Voice home for people is when I have them call my number, which causes three of my phones to ring at once. You can keep this number forever, too, without ever having to worry about porting it from carrier to carrier.
• It can give your phones the same outgoing number as well, with which you can make free domestic calls (well, sort of—more on that later), and very cheap international calls. Since Google Voice routes your calls through their phone system, they can connect you directly to cheap VoIP services to the rest of the world. It seems like you're just making a regular call, but behind the scenes you're doing something more akin to Skyping. End result: money saved.
• You can send and receive unlimited text messages for free. To make things even better, they’re all all archived in your online Google Voice account, where they’re fully searchable.
• It's got the best voicemail system in the world. Leaving a message at a Google Voice number is nothing like leaving your voice on a regular voicemail service—that is to say, it's not like sending your voice into a barely accessible technological horror pit where it might get listened to, but will probably be ignored. No, Google Voice is different: It stores your messages online, and converts them to text (which can then be sent to you as an SMS or an email). You can archive, forward, delete or save these messages from a simple interface on your phone or computer. Think of it as Gmail, except with voices. Plus, it's flexible in lots of little ways—you can change your voicemail greetings on a per caller basis, for example, or opt to listen to voicemails as they're being recorded.
• This voicemail system isn't just for Google Voice numbers, either—you essentially replace your carrier voicemail with Google Voice voicemail, without using a new number. It's brilliant.
• You have full control over your calls. You can record them for later listening, and have them transcribed into text.
• You can screen callers. You can block numbers, or have callers record their names for your approval. You can have certain contacts only forwarded to certain phones,

Each of these features is compelling enough on its own—together, they'll totally change how you use your phones, changing you from a mere mobile customer to a full-on switchboard operator, self-spy, info hoarder and telco executive. It's like you run your own little phone company, just for yourself. For free. Spectacular.

The Catch(es)

Now that I’ve got you all riled, it’s time for me to pour an icy bucket of water down the front of your pants. Google Voice, as incredible a concept and service as it is, isn’t perfect. In fact, there are a few things you need to know and accept before taking the dive, and they might be dealbreakers:

• You can't use your own phone number. At least, not in the way you wish you could. In an ideal world, you'd be able to port your old cellphone number to Google Voice, and have that—the digits people have been using to get in touch with you for years—be your new all-inclusive point of contact. You can't do this yet. For now, the closest you can come is to port your voicemail to Google Voice. That means that your T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon or Sprint number's voicemail can be outsourced to Google, but not its calls. You can unify all your phones under your new Google Voice number, but that means you have to switch. Along with the basic inconvenience of telling everyone about your new number, you’re trusting an awful lot in a beta service, the terms of which could change quickly and without notice. It’s not something I worry about, but it’s not nothing, either.

• You can’t record calls that you’ve placed, just calls that you’ve received. And every time you initiate recording, Google Voice notifies the other person on the line. This is all makes perfect moral and procedural sense, but just in case you had the impression that there were no limits on your recording abilities, well, there are.

• The mobile app situation isn't ideal. There are apps for Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and iPhone via jailbreak, and they all work. That said, they're not perfect—they can be slow, poorly integrated, glitchy, or hard to figure out. And since they're supposed to replace the dialer on your phone entirely, this isn't wonderful. The online mobile interface is a good fallback for placing calls and sending texts, but navigating to that adds an extra step to any call or text that can get tiresome after a while.

• Lastly, the way American phones work, you’re still going to end up paying for your minutes, somehow. Just because Google Voice says you can make free domestic calls and cheap international calls doesn’t mean that you actually can: in both cases, you need to dial out to Google Voice’s external system in the first place, which means you’re still using your monthly minute allotment. There are ways around this which I’ll discuss later, but Google Voice, as good as it is, isn’t magic.

Discouraged? Don’t be. Google Voice is still well worth you time and effort, and it’s only going to get better. Now, for God’s sake let’s get started already.

The Process

Signing up. This is simultaneously the easiest and most irritating part of Google Voice: It’s still invite only. Lucky for you, “Invite” in this case doesn’t mean you actually have to wait for an individual to select you from the masses; it’s just Google’s way of saying their keeping the signup pace down at manageable levels while the service is still in beta. Just submit your address, after which Google “anticipate[s] that it will be a short wait before you receive your invitation.”

What's a short wait? My invite took about four days. Some come within 48 hours. At worst, they take about two weeks. Lots of you will have already received your invite, and just not done a whole lot with it—you guys can keep reading—while the rest of you should just bookmark this post, and come back to it once you get your invite. Protip: check your spam filters.

—

Ok, hello again, people I was talking to anywhere between two seconds and two weeks ago! How are you? Now that you’ve got your invite, you can log in to your Google Voice Dashboard. It’ll look familiar if you’ve used any Google Service before:

Logging in. Follow your confirmation link, or navigate here. Click around for a while to get a feel for the interface. This is how you’ll manage your phones from now on. It’s liberatingly simple.

Picking your number. You’ll be given a choice of numbers, which you can choose from practically any available area code. Choose wisely: this will be your primary number from here on out. Choosing your first number is free; changing it in the future will cost you $10. Boo, waah, etcetera! But really not a huge deal.

Adding your phones. This is assuming you want to forward a single number to all your phones, which is kind of the point here, so: Go to the Google Voice settings page (up in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. In the first section, called “Phones,” click “Add a Phone” or “Add Another Phone.” Give it a name “My iPhone” and enter its phone number. That’s it.

Now you’ll be given a passcode, which you’ll use to authenticate your existing phone. Clicking “Connect” will call your phone from your Google Voice number, and a friendly robot will ask for you code. Enter it. That’s it!

Setting up your voicemail. Now that the phone is added, it can accept calls directed to your Google Voice number. If the call is ignored, it will forward the voicemail to Google Voice, where it will be stored online. Alternately, if you only want to use Google Voice for voicemail, you can disable the calling feature (by unchecking the box next to the phone), and set up the service to hijack your actual cellphone number’s voicemails—even when the call didn't get routed through Google Voice.

This is much easier that it sounds: Just click “Activate Google Voicemail” next to your newly-added phone, and enter the number they give you exactly as it’s written, symbols and all. Once you “call” that number, you’ll get some kind of message on your phone. On the iPhone, it looks like this.

Your voicemail has been switched—all you need to do now is set up a quick bookmark in your mobile phone to Google Voice, which provides a functional, if sparse, interface for your Google Voice messages. It's like visual voicemail, except through your browser. (Or a mobile app, which I'll get to soon.)

Choosing the rest of your settings. Now you’ll see your phone listed under the “Phones” settings tab. The other tabs contain a few pages of settings for your Google Voice account. How you toggle these is up to you, but here are the most important ones: If you want to forward SMSes to email, you’ll have to enable that in the “Voicemail and SMS” tab; call screening settings are located under the “Calls” tab; and international call credit can be added under the “Billing” tab, from a credit card.

Finding your feet. Take some time to experiment with some of Google Voice's core features now. Place a call using the button at the top left of the Google Voice homepage. Enter your recipient's number, and choose which of your phones you'd like to place the call with. Google Voice will call your phone first, which upon answering will immediately call your recipient's phone, which will think it's getting a call from your new Google Voice number. It might sound odd in writing, but once you see it work, it just kind of clicks. You can also place these calls from the mobile web interface, without a computer. Texting is more direct—you can send those directly from the web interface without any intervention from your phone.

Placing calls. The aforementioned methods is the most obvious, and it will reliably work. It’s a little cumbersome, especially if you’re used to just tapping on a contact and placing a call. Thankfully there are a few more ways to place calls from your phone, and have it routed through Google Voice:

• Apps: This is by far the best way to use Google Voice. Android has an official Google Voice app, as does BlackBerry.These automate the dialing/texting out process, so you don't need to mess with a web interface—you just opt to make some or all of your calls through Google Voice, and the app takes care of the rest. Windows Mobile has unofficial clients that do the job pretty well, as does the Pre, in the App Catalog. iPhone clients are available, but they’re not approved by Apple: You’ll need to jailbreak your phone and install them from Cydia.

• The call-in method: Simply dial your new Google Voice number from your cellphone or landline, press 2 once it’s connected, then enter the number you want to dial. This is less convenient than the web interface method, even, but it’s vital to the next one:

• The contact method: This is a little cheat to automate the aforementioned process. What you’re doing, basically, is saving your Google Voice number, a pause, the number 2 (which selects “call another phone” from the Google Voice automated menu tree), a pause, then your recipient’s number.

Adding a pause is different on each phone—on the iPhone, for example, you need to save a number as a contact, and in the number editing screen, press the "+*#" button at the bottom left of the keypad. The zero will be replaced with a "pause" button, which when pressed inserts a comma into the number. Google is your friend for this one, though most smartphones make the option available in their respective contact editing screens.

• The 406 method: Have the person you want to text send a message to your Google Voice account. When you receive the message, it will be from a number you don't recognize, with the area code 406. It will be labeled with the sending contact's name, and any replies to that number will return to the person who sent them, but the number is completely new. This is a Google Voice alias, which you can use forever: Just save it as part of your friend's contacts—perhaps as a secondary cellphone or a work number, whatever you can remember—and use it as their primary contact number when call through GV.

Sending Texts. Again, using the web interface is a great way to send texts, as are the mobile apps. But the best solution? The 406 trick listed above works for SMSes too.

The Hacks

As you've probably noticed, Google Voice is kind of a loose system—and a system that's ripe for a little gaming. There are two methods that currently work for getting truly unlimited, free calls over Google Voice. This is where things get really interesting. Interesting in a good way for you; interesting in a terrifying way for the phone companies.

• The Calling Circle Method: You know how some carriers let you designate a few contacts that don't count toward your monthly allotment of minutes, like T-Mobile MyFaves, or the AT&T A-List? By making your Google Voice number one of your friends, you can filter all your calls through Google, whether they be free domestic calls or cheap international calls. Once your Google number is added to your circle, making free calls is simply a matter of dialing into your Google Voice number and, using Google's audio menu system, dialing through to your recipient. (The contact method listed above will work too.)

To make incoming calls—including outgoing calls initiated from the Google Voice web interface—free, you'll need to change your Google Voice settings under the "Calls" tab. Select "Display my Google Voice Number" under the "Caller ID (in)" setting, and you're good to go. A full setup guide for the calling circle method can be found here.

Note: Designating Google Voice as one of your preferred contacts may be against your carrier's user policies—check with them if you're concerned.

• The VoIP method: By signing up for a number with free VoIP service Gizmo5 and adding to to your Google Voice account as a phone, you can place unlimited free calls from your VoIP number to landlines. You can also forward the calls through to Skype, if you’d prefer. This isn’t a solution for mobile phones, but it’s a great way to make yourself an effectively unlimited VoIP landline for free. Lifehacker’s got the whole rundown here. UPDATE: Registrations for Gizmo5 have been closed. Sorry!

Easing the Transition

Lifehacker has assembled a fantastic guide for easing the transition from many numbers to one, covering everything from how to convince people not to call your old numbers, to coping with voice latency.

That’s pretty much it! If you have any tips to tricks for getting the most out fo Google Voice, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides.

And if you have any topics you’d like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy Voicing, folks!

This is a guide that, if followed, will unchain your Apple TV from its cruel iTunes tether, turning it into the useful living room conduit of music, video and web-based content it should have been all along via the media center software Boxee. Boxee can be installed fairly easily via the ATV’s USB port to bring Hulu and Comedy Central streaming, playback of any video or music file anywhere on your network in virtually any file type imagineable, and a bevy of internet A/V sources like Flickr, Last.fm, NPR and BBC podcasts and tons of others—all upping the usefulness and fun of Apple’s notoriously underachieving box by a factor of 10, easily. If you have an ATV, Boxee is a must-install, and it’s 100% free. Let’s get started.

The stock Apple TV has never been able to decide what it’s supposed to do. Is it a device to store all your videos? Its built-in hard drive would suggest yes, but the fact that everything needs to be piped through iTunes makes this a hassle if you store your videos in any other way. And why are we downloading and storing anyway? Streaming is the way things are headed, and for streaming, Apple TV doesn’t make a ton of sense, especially when a box a quarter its size and a less than half its price can bring Netflix’s massive library into your living room with zero download delays and zero added cost, soon in HD, even.

Aside from adding the golden goose of Hulu streaming, Boxee’s other main advantage is freeing your Apple TV from its direct connection with your iTunes library. No longer will it be necessary to convert all of your video files into iTunes compatible formats to get them to your TV—Boxee will let your Apple TV read just about any video codec you can throw at it (full list of codecs here – only thing it chokes on is 1080p video; 720p works fine) from any computer or network-attached storage device on your network, or read files off the Apple TV’s own hard disk—all while leaving the default OS untouched and 100% functional. So let’s do this.

What You’ll Need:

• Apple TV with software version 2.0 or higher

• A USB flash drive 512MB or larger

• ATV USB Creator [download: 1.0.b7 version - Mac only, for now]

• An invite into Boxee’s semi-public alpha (use this link especially for Giz readers to jump the line a bit)

Prepare Your USB Drive

Just like the iPhone, the Apple TV is basically an OS X computer (running a 1GHz Intel processor), so Boxee installs just like a regular desktop app in the Applications folder, which is hidden normally. Why Apple hasn’t opened up the Apple TV to third party developers is anyone’s guess, but thankfully, with a prepared USB stick it’s all pretty painless.

1. After unpacking the ATV USB Creator application, start it up with the USB flash drive you intend to use mounted. Select “ATV-Patchstic” as your installation option and “Boxee for Mac” as the installation type. At the bottom, select the BSD location of your flash disk. You can find this with System Profiler under the USB section (probably a good idea to unmount any other USB drives so you don’t accidentally wipe them).

2. Click "Create Using ->" and your USB stick will be formatted and loaded up with the appropriate software.

3. Power off your Apple TV (by unplugging it), drop your USB patchstick into the ATV’s USB slot, and plug it back in. You’ll see Tux and a bunch of code streaming on your screen as the software installs.

4. When it’s done, remove the USB stick and restart the ATV.

Download Boxee via the Boxee Launcher

5. The USB patchstick installs a launcher that can then pull down the latest version of Boxee from the web. The first thing you’ll want to do, then, to ensure you have the latest version, is update the launcher itself. Go to the new option “Boxee” in the ATV menu, choose “Update” and then update the Launcher.

6. Now, go to the new Boxee menu and choose "Update" -> "Boxee alpha…" to pull down and install Boxee itself. Once it installs, select "Boxee" from the new menu "Boxee/XBMC" menu to start it up.

Configure Boxee

7. Enter the user account you registered on boxee.tv (via our invite link above). Boxee also adds some nifty social networking features—if you have any buddies also using it, you can see what they’ve recently watched, added to their collections, or recommended to you via Boxee’s home screen.

8. First thing you’ll want to do once you’re in is make sure Boxee displays perfectly on your screen. Settings are accessible by pressing “left” on the ATV remote at any time, so go to “Settings – Appearance – Video Calibration…” to set overscan and sizing options.

Add Your Sources

Right now, under the “Videos” menu, you can browse and stream the complete offerings from Hulu, Comedy Central, Revision3, and a ton of other web video sources. But Boxee really shines when it can play your media files from anywhere on your network.

Add an SMB Share

This can be a network attached storage drive (you’ve read our guide for getting the best NAS setup, right?) or simply a shared folder on a Mac or PC on your network (to share a folder in OS X, enable File Sharing in your Sharing settings, enable SMB shares under “Options” and add your media folder. Boxee will then auto detect your shares.

9. In Boxee's Settings menu, select "Media Sources and Applications -> Network Sources" and choose "Add New Source." Select your share in the menu that comes up and mark it wither Video, Music or Photos. Boxee will now monitor this folder and add any TV shows and movies it recognizes (complete with cover art, episode descriptions, and the like) to the main videos menu (Boxee's full of little surprises like this). It won't catch everything though, so you can always access your added folders manually by choosing "Sources" under the main Video menu.

Access Apple TV via SSH For Copying Media Files

Aside from streaming from SMB shares, Boxee can also of course play files stored locally in its own file system. You can connect to the Apple TV via SSH/SFTP for copying files directly over your network and accessing your Apple TV’s main file system.

10. In an FTP program like Transmit or Cyberduck (but using SFTP), connect to appletv.local with the username and password both set to “frontrow” – this will log you in to your Apple TV’s file system, which has a structure exactly like OS X’s. You can also connect via SSH from the terminal if you prefer the geekier side.

11. In the folder /Users/frontrow you will find folders labeled Movies, Music and Pictures. Any media added to these folders will be automatically recognized and playable after copying.

Torrent RSS

Yeah, Boxee can also download Torrents. It comes with a listing of public domain movie and TV Torrents under the “Public Torrents” source, but you can also have your Apple TV download whatever Torrents you want.

12. To add a Torrent to Boxee’s download manager, simply copy the .torrent file to the Users/frontrow/Library/Application Support/BOXEE/UserData/Torrents folder using the SFTP technique above and it will immediately begin downloading. Awesome.

Uninstalling All Traces of Boxee

Should you want to wipe your machine totally clean of any Boxee related tinkering, it’s easy. Fire up a Terminal and type in the following commands, each on their own line:

ssh frontrow@appletv.local

sudo rm -rf /Applications/Boxee.app/

sudo rm -rf /Applications/XBMC.app/

sudo rm -rf /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/PlugIns/XBMCLauncher.frappliance/

rm -rf /Users/frontrow/Library/Application\ Support/BOXEE/

rm -rf /Users/frontrow/Library/Application\ Support/XBMC/

What’s Next For Boxee

Boxee is on the move. Over the course of three alphas I’ve used (I can’t believe this is alpha software) over only the last month or so, this thing has improved by incredible bounds—interface is getting better, weirdness and inconsistencies getting less common, all good signs.

Eventually, Boxee wants to be in set top boxes and on every platform (Windows is coming before the end of the year)—since it supports practically every audio and video codec known, it’s aiming to be the Firefox of multi-platform connected AV setups, featuring plug-ins and add-ons of its own. It doesn’t support DRM of any kind, so don’t hold your breath for Boxee to be picked up by any of the majors. Fine with me.

Feature wise, Netflix streaming (yessss) and ABC.com are first on the Boxee folks’ list.

Boxee’s an open source app, so its forums are a lively place to ask for help and suggest more features to the main developers, who hang out there often. If you run into any bumps, that’s the place.

When we first heard about EFiX—a simple USB dongle that'll let you magically install Leopard on your PC—it sounded too fantastic to be true. Well, I used it to turn my gaming PC into a Mac Pro over the weekend, and I’m somewhat amazed to say this, but it works perfectly.

I grabbed all the updates straight from Apple—including 10.5.5 last night, so you don't have to wait for a hacked patch like you would running a typical Hackintosh—installed a whole bunch of software and have been using it for several days. It runs beautifully, just like a real Mac Pro.

The Process
There are, of course, rules you have to adhere to, as there tends to be when using black magic. The major one with EFiX, and its only real “catch,” is that you have to use the supported hardware, not a very long list indeed. But outside of the Gigabyte motherboard requirement (reportedly some Asus boards using a P45 chipset also work), it’s actually fairly generic. I just happened to have everything on the list.

If you've got the hardware, the whole process is simple, so that even if you've never cracked your desktop before, you could still get this done with a quick search online for the requisite know-how. I plugged the EFiX dongle into a USB header on my motherboard—not, as you might have assumed, to a USB port on the outside. That's really it for getting your hands dirty, though. I restarted my computer, selected EFiX as the boot device—it was listed under hard drives, actually—and was greeted with a drive selector. After selecting the Leopard disc, it started installing without a hitch.

Okay, there was a slight hitch. My video card, an Nvidia 8800GT, isn’t supported by the firmware EFiX ships with. EFiX already has the update on the site, but its updater is only coded for 32-bit Windows. If, like me, you run Vista 64-bit, you will have to install Vista 32-bit on the drive you intend to put Leopard on, just to update the stupid firmware.

After I did that, everything was peachy. The only slight inconsistency is that my 8800GT shows up as a 256MB card, when it’s actually a 512MB card, and my 1066MHz RAM is only running at 800MHz apparently. But that’s sorta trivial.

The Numbers
Here are some benchmarks compared to some numbers Adam over at Lifehacker ran for his Hacktinosh vs. a MacBook Pro and Mac Pro. Obviously, my hardware is newer—a 3GHz E8400 Wolfdale Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM (running at the slower 800MHz, rather than 1066MHz) and an Nvidia 8800 GT (with the OS only recognizing half of the memory). The total guts of my computer cost just under $800 when I put it together in May, hard drive included. (Mac Pros start at $2,300.)

Day to Day
One thing to keep in mind is that EFiX has to interlope every time you want to boot to Leopard, so a cold boot takes at least two minutes, between booting to EFiX, picking Leopard, then loading it up. And when you go into Windows, EFiX will show up as an attached USB drive. These aren’t dealbreakers—once you’re up, performance is great. Overall, the experience is really incredible for how smooth and seamless it is. Updates, installing software, everything is just like a real Mac. The best way to put it is this: I’ve got a Mac Pro now.

I occasionally feel like Windows is running just a smidge more slowly, but benchmarks compared to before I installed EFiX don’t support that creeping feeling, so I chalk it up to paranoia.

Is the dongle worth $170? That's a personal question. Do you wanna go through the usually more complicated—but free—Hackintosh process? Perhaps the best way to look at it is this: If you've already got the supported hardware, it's like buying a Mac for $170, since you can still have your trusty PC just a restart away on the same machine. Also, even as simplified as it is, you still need to know what you're doing. There's no official tech support, though there is a very active forum that provides helpful answers to queries.

Updated: EFiX USA is handing all of the distribution in the US for E-FiX.com, who actually doesn’t do any of that. They were selling units on eBay but their main site looks like it’s up now. So far in our dealings with the company (who sent us EFiX to review) we haven’t had any reason to think they’re scamming anyone, but it’s understandable if you wanna approach this with caution. [EFiX, EFiX USA]

There’s never been a better time to void the warranty on your MacBook Pro and upgrade to one of those sweet 2.5″ WD Scorpio 320GB drives. That was what made me throw caution to the wind and attempt a Time Machine-assisted swap. The good news is, it works as billed. You get a bit-for-bit transfer to the virgin drive with minimal fuss. The bad news is, if you don’t use a little trick we discovered today, you probably won’t get it to work at all.

I said “void the warranty” and I meant it. The process I went through today means it’ll be harder for me to complain to Apple if things get weird, so be cautious! Given the experience I’ve had, I think it will get easier and easier to swap HDDs, like RAM, because on the software side, at least as far as Apple goes, installing a fresh 2.5″ SATA turns out to be straightforward, and ready for novices.

The key here is that there’s no preparation needed for the new drive. As long as you’ve backed up your old drive to an external disk using Time Machine, you can prepare for the grand opening. I won’t bore you with gory details, except to say that I found a good bit of guidance from this dude’s blog.
The Process
From here on in, this issue may just as well apply to MacBooks and even iMacs as well as MacBook Pros, so everyone should take note.

Once you open up the system and swap out the drives, you can set the old drive aside, hopefully never to use it again. Assuming all went well, you restart the system and insert an OS X Leopard installation DVD. You won’t need the OS installer on it, but you will need it to act as mediator between the Time Machine backup drive and the newly installed blank drive. Once it boots up (you may need to manually restart to get it to work right) follow these instructions CAREFULLY:

1. Choose your language.

2. At the main screen, choose Disk Utility from the Utilities pull-down menu.

3. Select the drive itself and click on Partition.

4. In the Partition menu, select 1 Partition and Options… where you choose GUID Partition Table. Click OK then Apply, then say “yes” to whatever warning comes up.

5. Once you have reformatted the drive, close the Disk Utility window.

6. Do Not Go Forward. Instead, when you see the main Welcome screen, click the Back button, which takes you to the language select page. It sounds silly but DO IT. This shakes the system into action.

7. Once you have reselected your language and are back on the Welcome screen, click Utilities and select Restore System From Backup…

8. The process should go smoothly from that point on. You simply select appropriate disks to copy your chosen backup data from your Time Machine drive to the new internal drive, as shown in the following sequence:

The Back Story
Originally I tried my swap without first clicking back to the language page, and the installer could not find my new hard drive. Disk Utility saw it and happily formatted it with the GUID partition, but even on the second pass, the installer wouldn’t show it as a target option. All I got was this hollow emptiness:
I spoke with Jeerun Chan at Western Digital and asked him to try the same process, which yielded the same results. Then I tried it with another virginal hard drive, this time a 160GB SATA from Seagate. Between the two of us, we ran this test on three different configurations, with the same negative results.

The obvious but depressing solution was to just run the Leopard system installer, then use the migration tool to back up from my Time Machine drive. It’s fairly smooth, and smart if you want a clean install on your new drive, but it’s boring: it takes a few steps, and they’re all obvious. I wanted a bit-for-bit dump from backup to new drive, fully automatic.

As I was installing Leopard on my second drive, the phone rang: it was Jeerun with the crazy back-button technique. I don't know how he thought to do it—I don't even think he knows, but the fact remains: when you have formatted your destination drive and are on the Welcome screen, click the back button and the process will work. If you don’t click it, well, in our experience, it seems you will fail in your objective.

Obviously, this won’t work if you don’t regularly do a full system backup in Time Machine. If the omitted folders in your Time Machine options include system files, you won’t be able to do this.

In truth, it might make sense to backup only personal files, especially since this process requires a Leopard install disk even to write the whole image back onto the new drive. Chen swears by SuperDuper, which is perhaps a better pro technique, one that doesn’t require a system-install DVD. Still, I wanted to see if this major boast of Time Machine was all that it was cracked up to be. It is, and the end result will be tasty, as long as you don’t forget that one little catch.

As with my last Time Machine HDD discovery, this one involves a little hocus pocus. While this method works, you may have your own trick, or a more scientific approach. If so, please share it in the comments below, and spare any fellow Mac users a frustrating afternoon.

Thanks to Jeerun and Heather at WD!

The bad news is, we have discovered a Leopard-related issue that may very well throw a monkey wrench into your Time Machine. Anyone trying to use Time Machine with a previously PC-formatted drive could be at risk. The good news is, there is an easy—albeit none-too-obvious—fix. Here's the dilly-o:

After I upgraded my MacBook Pro to OS X Leopard, the first thing I did was grab a brand-new Maxtor USB drive and format it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) using Disk Utility, just like I had countless times before. As soon as I erased the disk, Time Machine popped up as promised, and asked if it could use the disk for backup. I said yes, and was on my merry way. Only I wasn’t.

Time Machine ran for a bit, and then crapped out after about 10GB. I went into Disk Utility and saw that although the partition was formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled), the volume itself still said FAT32. I clicked Erase to reformat the drive, and got the format failure error you see above.

I tried this with FAT-formatted drives from Seagate, Iomega and HP as well. Each time I saw the same thing. I could reformat the partition to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and Time Machine would recognize it. Get Info would say that it was formatted correctly. But Disk Utility showed that the volume was formatted for PC. Inevitably, if the Time Machine backup was greater than 10GB, there were problems. Worst of all, if I dared try to format the volume for Mac, I would get the dreaded error, and the disk would be temporarily unmountable.

Not only did I vary drives, but I tested the problem on various systems too. I tried it booting from the Leopard DVD, with the same results. Ditto when I tried it using my wife’s Leopard-upgraded MacBook Pro. (Yes, his n’ hers MBPs. You can insert your “awwww” here.) The end result was that I couldn’t break the FAT grip on these damn drives.

I made some calls, I talked to some people, and eventually here was the solution: you wipe the hell out of the drive by creating new and different partitions. So, do not head to the Erase tab in Disk Utility to prep a PC-formatted drive for Time Machine. Instead:

• Go to the Partition tab. Create two partitions. Under Options, select GUID Partition Table (what you would use to make a Mac OS boot disk) and click OK then Apply.

• Once your partitions are in place, do it again, reverting back to just one partition, but still keeping the GUID Partition Table option. Click OK and Apply again, and at this point you should be cool.

• To be safe, you can then go to Erase and set formatting for Mac OS Extended (Journaled), then format it once and for all. But when you get there, you will probably see that your volume is already formatted in the right way.

UPDATE: Some people have gotten this to work without creating two partitions. If you like, try creating just a single partition, but using the GUID Partition Table option. This may be all it takes to break the chokehold.

Using this method, I have gotten all of the disks to work just fine with Time Machine, and I don’t anticipate any problems in the future.

OK, I know, quite a bit of nerdiness, but I wanted to get out there and tell you about the problem I encountered, in case you are having the same troubles, or plan on getting there sooner or later. Also, this solution is actually a workaround of sorts. My hope is that Apple can update Disk Utility with a stronger form of disk erasing that doesn’t require so many manual steps, but if I am missing something obvious, I’d love to hear it. Please share any troubles you’ve had, or any better solutions you’ve cooked up.

Special thanks to Dorian and Ken!

Normally I don’t get this jazzed about desktop PCs, but the Gateway One is special. From the sleek yet substantial design to the quiet, powerful core, it’s a real statement, especially from the cow-pocked South Dakota underdog.
Let me take you on a guided tour:

Setup is as easy as a laptop. Connect the power adapter to the main unit, and you’re rollin’. The wireless keyboard and seamless “river rock” mouse are pre-paired. The main unit has everything you need and nothing you don’t. Its beautiful 19″ widescreen LCD has a resolution of 1440×900. Beneath the screen are speakers hidden under the glossy plastic face. They are NXTs, but they sound better than any NXTs I’ve ever heard.

To the left side is a panel with three USB ports, a FireWire port, a 5-in-1 memory card reader, audio output for speakers and microphone in.
There’s a USB camera that sits on top, nestled into a mini USB port. It’s got a built-in microphone. (I guess I lied. Gateway could have gone even more minimalist: you really don’t need the speaker or mic jacks at all!) The camera makes the box look a tad dorky, but you only need it when you’re Skyping, so who cares?
On the right-hand side is a disc slot. The drive is what you'd expect on the premium end, a super multi DVD burner with double-layer capability—not that you'll ever use it to its full extent. Blu-ray and HD DVD read and write are not yet available.
The power brick serves a very cool function as outboard media hub. It’s got four USB ports of its own, plus SPDIF and optical audio outputs to connect to an A/V receiver (for up to 7.1 surround sound), plus an IR blaster jack and an Ethernet port. In other words, Gateway has smartly hidden all those ugly but essential wires at your feet, instead of letting them stick out of your computer. The One has but one cable, sticking out of its chrome-plated rear end.
Ethernet is optional. Gateway pulled an Apple and integrated serious Wi-Fi in there. It’s got MIMO, 802.11a/b/g and even N Dual Band, if you are so equipped. Good future-proofing. Another example of future proofing is the second SATA II drive slot, right next to the first slot, which houses a 500GB 7200rpm drive. (RAM access is just as easy.)
There’s more in the box if you want it, including a analog/digital TV tuner and a USB fax/modem. I skipped them for now, but you never know.

The remote reminds you that this, like every other Vista Home Premium or Ultimate system, is also a Windows Media Center Edition PC. So the tuner might come in handy, though I’d prefer CableCard.

For having a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and an ATI HD 2600XT video processor, it even runs fairly quiet. Gateway says under 30dB. It also uses a third less power than traditional desktops.

The premium Gateway One will be sold at Best Buy exclusively for $1,799. Two other lower-powered editions will be sold at gateway.com for $1,299 and $1,599. All of them will feature all of the pieces I’ve shown in this demo.

I may have some negative things to say later but for now, I am a true fan. It’s the thoughtful design elements make the Gateway One unique, and uniquely enjoyable, and I’ll leave you with three examples:
• You use the touch-scroll mouse intuitively, without thinking, even though it's not the typical mouse interaction.
• The Media Center remote's d-pad is all one piece, built for full-tilt thumb action.
• In the rear, a chrome hinge rests on a broad wheel. Not only does this allow you to tilt the seemingly immobile body, but it acts to brace the One in the event it gets jarred.
[Gateway One]

Sling Media rolled out Slingbox Solo, a set-top box that lets you watch a home-bound HD source from anywhere in the world on a PC, Mac, Palm OS or Symbian mobile device. It’s called “Solo” because it controls just one set-top box, instead of the four of its more-expensive Slingbox Pro brandmate.

The idea of a cheaper, single-source HD-compatible Slingbox is a great one. Before we got this Slingbox Solo, we’d been using a Slingbox Pro for a year, and its variety of inputs has proven to be way more than we’ve ever needed. (Really, why would we want to watch a DVD via the Slingbox? TiVo is all we want to watch remotely.) But this Slingbox Solo ($179.99), positioned in the Sling product line between the Slingbox Pro ($229.99) and the Slingbox AV ($129.99), hit that Goldilocks sweet spot: It’s just right.

The Slingbox Solo carries on that Aztec temple-like design of the Pro, but it’s about two thirds the width. If you care about such things, its shiny piano-black surface is definitely a fingerprint magnet, but after wiping it off with a microfiber cloth, it still looks sparkly, low-slung and sophisticated as it takes its place on our component rack.

Looking out back at the business end of the Solo, you’ll see that even though it only handles one input at a time, there’s no shortage of places to plug in. Whether you choose component, composite or SVideo, any source can be passed through so you can also plug it into your TV after that Sling magic has been performed on your video.

We plugged in our TiVo Series3 HD PVR, and the Sling Solo’s setup, functions and quality appeared to be identical to the Slingbox Pro. Just like the Slingbox Pro, even though HD sources go into the Solo at 720p, as long as you’re watching the signal over a high-speed home network they come out at 640×480 and then are stretched out to 16:9. That’s definitely better than standard definition but certainly not HD.

Using the system over the internet, its quality ratchets down to 320×240 but is stretched out to widescreen. Away from the home network, its video looks a bit blocky and suffers dropouts here and there, but picture quality is mostly dependent on the speed of the internet connection. In both instances, the Solo’s video looks just the same to us as the Pro model.

Solo is a worthy addition to the Slingbox line, and unlike the Slingbox Pro, requires no optional adapter to get it working with HD sources. Sure, we would've liked an HDMI port on the back of this baby (also lacking on the Pro), but component video will just have to do. And forget sending HDTV all over the world with the Slingbox—until bandwidth in the United States reaches that of Japan or Scandinavia, the Solo's kind of sub-HD resolution for watching TV all over your house or on the road will be just good enough for now.

Incidentally, Sling is also announcing that Solo also works in Canada ($199.99 looneys), and the UK (£129.99), calling it the company’s “first worldwide model.” The company’s also launching the Slingbox Pro in the UK for £199.99, and that’s packing a DVB-T tuner and includes an HD connect cable.

I’ve had the pleasure of testing out the fourth-generation Yamaha surround sound bar, the YSP-4000. You know, the box that sits under a TV and projects 5 discrete beams of audio using Cold War directional sonar steering from submarines. This generation has had its trapezoid- shaped array turned into a more of a hexagon, and the chassis is more rigid. There are HDMI inputs, and upscalers for analog content. And there are DSP modes for stereo music sources that did not exist before. Does the fake surround work? Hell yes, better than ever.

Unlike past YSP setups, this fourth generation is so good, out of the dozen or so demonstrators, from sound engineers to casual listeners, all sorts of CEDIA audio nerds were satisfied by the directionality of the sound beams. Each is so discrete, even in the demo room’s open top and back, all that could be seen were the heads of the audience nodding in approval. I love this thing, and I’d even be willing to place the tallish speaker in front of my table-mounted LCD, blocking the bottom few inches of my picture. That’s a bit crazy, I know, but I’m impressed. For more details, hit our last post.

Rather than just tell you what’s great (and terrible) about the hot new Vudu video-on-demand box, I thought I’d show you, so come on…

The setup experience is so amazingly simple, it makes TiVo look complex. (Of course, compared to what this simple, broadband-connected video server does, TiVo is complex.
Speaking of TiVo, Vudu’s remote is incredible, with five buttons and a clickable jog dial that you can intuit in record time. It’s weird how quickly you can use it without looking. By the way, the remote is RF, not IR, so you don’t have to point it at the box for it to work.

One of Vudu’s setbacks is that it is, alas, a set-top box. In a world where game consoles and cable boxes are inevitable, this box, though small, still presents a stacking challenge.
But there is a cool solution: since Vudu’s remote is RF, and talks to that little metal antenna you see at the back of the box, you can stash the box anywhere that you’d stash any device with a video processor and a spinning 250GB hard drive. Like a cabinet drawer…
Hiding it away (with or without my cat Wade) means one less thing you have to look at. While we can thank the RF remote for this, an RF remote does mean one more thing (*cough*PS3 Blu-ray remote*cough*) that you can’t replace with a standard universal.
The home screen, which pops on 20 seconds after you first power up, and is instantly on in most occasions, is a nice example of how organized the Vudu interface is.
Though it's the home screen that you see when you first get started, there are some tweaking options, should you dig into them. I loved the overscan adjustment—you'd be shocked how helpful it is.
When you scroll through the constantly changing promoted movies on the home screen, you can see which ones are for rent…
…and which ones you can buy.
I found that most studio films at this time are rentals, mostly at $3.99. There are plenty of foreign and/or “special interest” movies you can buy, and some of those that you can rent for less, say $1.99. Frankly, the rental aspect of this proprietary box appeals much more than the ownership one.

There are many easy ways to hunt for a movie in Vudu. The genre search is fun, because you can select more than one genre to find interesting combinations like Sci-Fi Documentary…
…and yes, Gay & Lesbian Horror. (You know you were curious.)
You can search for a director or actor by name. In this search of Spielberg, you can get a sense that the Vudu catalog is not totally up to snuff. Yes, that is the entire Vudu Spielberg collection.
Some actors and directors are missing entirely. Being a Back To The Future fan, I had to search for Robert Zemeckis, but typing in his name, or even just ZEME, yielded zilch.
My main criticism with the Vudu is that while there are plenty of extra-sweet options like these…
…there just aren’t enough good hits when you go searching. Here’s a clue: in a search for “Coppola,” Sofia had two movies, and Francis Ford had 3, none of which were the Godfather.

The good news is, Vudu has designed an excellent interface and a very satisfying alternative platform for delivering movies. I love browsing and watching movies on this thing—the instant gratification is awesome!

As we told you before, the system operates with both a central server and a P2P network, balancing each other to ensure an instant on-demand experience. During my week-long testing over both DSL and cable connections, I never once had more than a tiny video hiccup, and though you can’t fast-forward straight away, the video can get to be 20 or 30 minutes ahead of you as you continue watching, so eventually fast-forwarding is an option.

And the picture looks stupendous. Even though the source material is (currently) 480p, that little box upscales that stuff to your desired resolution. In both 720p and 1080p tests, it looked great, perhaps better than a DVD. Here’s a look, though even Ben Stiller getting slapped by a monkey doesn’t truly do this thing justice:
Beyond my loudly voiced complaints about content, all I can say is, I wish it were a lot cheaper. Yeah, that’s right, Vudu is selling these things for $400. So you can pay more money to buy or rent movies from them.

You could save the money by connecting your PC to your TV and renting from CinemaNow or Movielink. At the moment, both have slightly better catalogs, though that will change. Normally I don't whine about high prices, but I think $400 is a little too much for a box that doesn't come with any free content. There's never been a better case for the razor-and-blades model. With a pricetag like that, Vudu is certainly not going to scare the bejeezus out of Blockbuster Video—not nearly as much as it rightly should.