There's many ways to skin this cat. Previously I used the Raspberry PI installer to burn the image onto a 4Gb SD card. This time around I see that there is a distro especially for hardware hacking.
I found my way from the Adafruit learrning's lesson one
From there I ran into the occidentalis distro as an alternative to wheezy
http://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-raspberry-pi-educational-linux-distro/
Which led me to the RPI easy SD card setup
http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup
which recommends using the SD associations SD formatting tool
https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/
which I installed on our Mac
but this is confusing because the formatting tools referenced in the NOOB method. The command line tool method does not mention the formatting tool.
