Cool Feature

Most of you who use macs on a day to day basis probably already know this, but today was the first time I’d really seen this little feature used. Aside from how we used it today, I’m not sure what else it’d be useful for…but it was pretty damn useful for what it was:

Essentially, my (boss? employer?) Steve Broback and I needed to trade files that were each about 800-850 megs---just large enough to be incredibly frustrating. After a few aborted attempts at sqeezing them on to CD’s, Steve whips out a firewire cord, and tells me to reboot while holding down the “T” key.

So what happens? Apparently, my PowerBook will boot up as an external hard drive that he can access from his, just like you would any store-bought external hard drive. About two painless minutes later, we’d exchanged data, and I was rebooting my machine into normal mode.

Now, while the result is essentially the same as hooking two computers together through a network and transferring a file over Cat5 (minus the reboot), the thought of turning an entire computer into a really fancy external hard drive was pretty funny to me.