QUESTION: Fonts!

I have the hankering to make a font today. Anyone have any stories/advice/ideas?

TECHNOLOGY : Transferring Mac Fontbook Collections

Part of being "Design Mommy" has been answering technology questions. I'm lucky enough to have live-in tech support to go to when things get too tough, and he had made me better at asking the right questions of the all-knowing internet. I thought this would be a good addition to the blog. (Full disclosure, I'm an Apple girl.) If you have an experience you'd like to share, or a question or problem, let me know!

I've been encountering a few blips lately, upgrading to a new computer and working with applications in new ways. Hope my experiences help with yours- and if you know a better fix, please please tell me.

Extra Fonts can break things - I have a handful of extra fonts that I use for various projects and inspiration. Over the years I have found that adding them to your system makes things run slower and sometimes makes them run not at all.

My solution is to have an extra user account on my Mac that has all the fonts loaded. I use this only for typesetting free/extra fonts. It keeps the applications on my main account running smoothly.

Transferring Font Collections - Over the years I've had my computer, I've slowly sorted through the fonts and put them into handy-dandy collections in Font Book. Since I am transferring everything over to my new computer manually, I was losing these collections. My solution (a clumsy one) was

- Export each custom collection into a folder on my old machine.

- Transfer that folder to my new machine.

- Drag each folder to the collection pane of Font Book.

When you do that, there might be conflict with the fonts it is already seeing. I allowed it to make copies of the fonts. After it is all done, there will be duplicates.

- In Font Book go to edit>Look for Duplicates. Click "Resolve Automatically"

and tada, now you have your collections back.

Sorry for the lack of eye candy! Let me know if you ever have this problem, and/or need further clarification.

QUESTION: Buying A Digital Camera

So, I've asked Santa for a new point-and-shoot digital camera this year. Of course, I need to decide what kind of camera I want so I can send Santa a price & link with online ordering info. What do you suggest I get? I already have a fancy Canon Rebel. I want a pocket-camera I can carry with me more easily, but still get good quality shots.

Technology Question: Reviving a broken laptop

So I recently bought a brand new Macbook and it works great and I love it. This post/question is for my boyfriend, who has a 4-5 year old Macbook Pro that has been pretty abused being hauled across the country. The keyboard no longer works (he plugs in a normal keyboard to work off of) and recently he tore the battery clean out as it stopped working and only uses it when plugged into a power source. Anyway... despite all that it was still usable up until a few days ago. Now when you turn it on, it gets stuck starting up (it never makes it past the grey screen with the apple logo and a loading wheel). Is there no hope for getting it to turn on completely?

If it is completely broken, is there a way to turn it's hard drive into an external hard drive? Or is there a way to get what he needs off of the hard drive?

Help!