Ha. I got rid of my black 2.1 MacBook this week and hooked myself one of those gucci 2.9 unibody MacBook Pro’s. Very nice. I am having sexy time right now as it happens.
I like the touchpad thingy, glass apparently. I like the bright screen and the backlit keyboard. And I like the way I appear 10% smarter when I type on it. Chur, chur, chur.
I am cool enough to be a Mac guy I swear.
About six months ago the top case on my MacBook began to crack, under the wrist rest on the right hand side. Distressing enough to a type A whack-job such as myself but then a couple of weeks ago the other side started to do the same.
I can see that it is an impact stress fracture from the top of the screen where the magnetic catches strike the top case when it is closed. An indirect effect of this is that shit gets inside the case.
I would be spazzing out about this except I have a new MacBook Pro arriving on Wednesday. This little fella can go to the Mac hospital and then to the Mac home for abused and unwanted laptops. $99 for the part, $40 for the labour.
George Patton urinates into the Rhine River, Germany, March 1945
Alright, now you can buy drm free music from iTunes. Boo-yah. Typical of Apple, some of their content is still only available as M4P files. That is, they are still crippled with DRM and unable to be shared between computers easily. The official route for re-encoding these puppies is to burn them out to a CD as .cda’s and then to re-rip them using iTunes as MP3’s. This is a tiresome bore when you are dealing with more than a couple of songs.
So, having had my lazy gland™ tickled I decided there had to be an alternative out there. And thanks be to Crom, there is here. It’s called M4P Converter, rather unimaginative I know. But the solution is rather cool. The software creates a virtual cd drive on your Mac. You drag the files you want to convert to a playlist in iTunes, right click the playlist and send to the virtual cd drive. M4P converter takes over and uses the virtual cda’s to create DRM-free MP3’s. Double plus good. The licence is stiff for a single task bit of software but the agro you avoid makes it worth it.
As a side note, I couldn’t be fucked finding an appropriate image to use as an illustrative metaphor for this article so here is a photo instead of General George Patton pissing in the Rhine River in March 1945.
My friend Jim had a 20″ iMac, modernish one. I think he bought it about two years ago? He is a brilliant photographer and an absolute idiot when it comes to computers.
So when he told me the other day that he had bought another iMac because his old one had died I explored a little deeper. He said it had started running really slowly and would die in the middle of doing something. Additionally he offered that sometimes it wouldn’t turn off or alternatively, turn on.
He told me that he had taken it to the local Apple repair shop and that while they originally said they couldn’t find anything wrong with it, after he had told them what he said it was doing they replied “oh that’s a logic board, please give us $1400 and we will fix it”. Of course he didn’t as a new one was only $50 more.
So, since I am the family computer fixer, I offered to have a look at it. Worse case scenario and it was the logic board I thought I may be able to pick one up off the tubes for a lot less than 1400 and save him a couple of dollars. I haven’t ever done hardware work on a Mac before, aside from hard drives and ram on my MacBook so it was with some trepidation that I approached it.
First up I thought, lets see what it is actually doing. Try as I might I couldn’t get it to misbehave. So I thought, bugger it, I’ll just re & re it (the time honoured Microsoft troubleshooting step) and see where that gets me. While I was at it, I swapped out his RAM for a couple of sticks I had here from Con’s upgrade. A few hours later and it’s all done and it appears to be operating just fine. I called Jim up and told him that I couldn’t see a problem with it. That’s when he offered up the tid-bit that he had been “shifting files around” and thought he may have shifted stuff to the wrong place.
God. End point is his iMac works, it’s got 10.5 on it instead of 10.4 and he had some new RAM. Now if he can only stop himself from “shifting files around” then he may be good to go.
If you have a Mac in your house as well as a Windows network then you will know of .DS_Store files. They are apparently little thumbnail stores that OSX creates on disks that save time for the next time you want to preview a file or look at it in that funky cover flow view.
They are hidden when you are using OSX to view the share but are annoyingly visible to any Windows machine that may use that same resource. It annoys me at home, it annoys Howard at work even more as he sees his SVN repository filled with what he calls “Mac droppings”.
In searching for a way to avoid creating these on Windows shares I came across the perfect solution, it’s called Blue Harvest and it can be found here. It runs on your Mac and you can set it up to not create ds_store and resource forks on whatever storage volume you want. Beautiful.
By the way it also cleans up those annoying Thumbs.db files that Windows O/S’s create going the other way.
Stoop and scoop!
After having given Vista a crack (and I mean a whole year of it), I have finally given up and removed it from Bootcamp on my MacBook. I have gone back to using Windows XP in VMWare. Simply put, it was just impossible to work in it. The whole thing where the active window freezes for minutes at a time and gives me the dreaded [Not Responding] message was just too damned annoying.
Now I delight in the fact that my XP virtual machine running in 2GB of virtual ram is at least twice as fast as Vista was with 3GB on real hardware. Farewell Microsoft Fista, you worthless piece of sh!t operating system.
Okay, so now almost three weeks have passed since I made the jump to a Mac. Just this last weekend I did the unthinkable and finally moved my Windows XP box off my desk and set it up so that my laptop is now my primary home machine as well as my work one. It was a hard thing to do, emotionally. The XP box was pretty sweet, dual 256MB Radeon video cards, a Saitek flight control set and three monitors. I had to face some facts, primarily the one where I just don’t have the time to play games anymore. I think it had been at least three months since I last fired up a flight simulator and at least twice that since I last played a war-game. I don’t know what I do with my time but it’s certainly nice to have the desk space back.
Since then I have been cruising the Mac software sites and I am truly amazed at the high quality of the freeware that is out there. I am used to Windows freeware which generally sucks and sometimes also blows so it was a shock to discover that a community of elitist snobs like Apple volk could be responsible for such a cornucopia of goodness. I guess they just don’t put up with the crap to the degree that Windows guys will. Of course I have been busy corrupting the faith by inserting into my Apple the little things that I miss from my Windows box. Like “My Computer” and “Show Desktop”. For the latter I use this cool bit of donationware from here.
Overall I am getting over some of the “what the fuck was that” that comes with using a new operating system. I understand now how to install, uninstall (important when you are trying to find the title that works how you want it to) and where the fuck my file just went to. If I could just get over the fact that my last MacBook hosed me in the ass with a power fault I could almost begin to enjoy all this. What I am enjoying is the fact that there isn’t anything I needed to do so far that I couldn’t find the software to do it. Beautiful. It’s almost like discovering girls except my new friend boots up faster and doesn’t puke in the bathroom after drinking a quart of Southern Comfort.
I own a Mac, call it a homo-devil machine if you will, but it’s my homo-devil machine.
I am forced to use the Cisco connection client at work. If you have seen this for the Mac you will know that it is a clumsy and ugly example of how not to implement a UI in OS X. In addition the designers make it impossible to access except through using up valuable dock space or sticking an alias somewhere. Instead try Shimo. This neat little implementation piggy backs off the Cisco client and reduces the interface to just the essentials. Additionally it lives up in that little Mac taskbar thing at the top (yeah I haven’t learned all the Mac buzzwords yet). It’s donationware so your investment is as low as you want to make it.
Round two of the Mac Migration begins tonight. I struggled with my new MacBook all through the weekend, wiggling cables and holding my tongue between my teeth but to no avail. I have the local Mac guy sourcing me a new power supply, not that this will do any good because by borrowing a friends “known good” I can tell you the last thing wrong with this is the power adapter. It’s the bleeding motherboard (or as Mac freaks would have you say, logic board”). No power and no laptop make me go something something.
So if there is one thing living in North America has taught me it’s that I don’t have to put up with this sh*t. I made a clone of my hard drive using this wonderful piece of software, SuperDuper, and shit-canned the whole laptop back to the retailer I bought it from. 16 days working and then for a main board to die is not good enough for my money, let Apple take the hit on it’s bottom line.
So then it was just a case of popping out the supplied hdd and sliding in the clone and et voila! I am up and running. Thank Crom for that! And yes, I know this is probably my last attempt at this, OS X is the r0×0r! Apple hardware is the sux0r!
Bugger. This morning the mac repair guy calls me an tells me the mostly good news that my MacBook is not dead. It’s apparently just pining for the fiords. He says that when he put the battery on the tester it was dead flat. So either my charger is faulty or the connector on the logic board that detects AC connect is somewhat no f*cking use.
Great. Anyways I have the RMA in my hand from the retailer so I will give the laptop some loving this weekend and see if I can induce it again. If I can then I can swap out the power supply next week and give that a crank. If that doesn’t give me goodness then I will use the RMA that I have and shit-can the whole thing back to Apple.
I bleed. Mike says I am such a victim. I think Mike eats too much starchy food.
