Category: Mac

Articles dealing with Macs, OS X, and Apple in general.

Partially Surprised

I didn’t even know about today’s announcements from Apple until I saw a “hey, it’s starting” forum post somewhere. The cases and Hi-Fi are kind of underwhelming and are really just more expensive and underperforming accessories.

The new Mini is a bit more interesting to me though. I’ve been thinking of putting together a home theatre PC for a while now, and this Mini slides into that role fairly nicely. The only sticking point is that it still doesn’t have video capture built-in, so it wouldn’t entirely replace my MythTV server, but it could act as a front end to it. It’s also not clear if it’ll be quite powerful enough to decode HD video, but that’s more of a future concern and there are still a bunch of other unsolved problems surrounding HD anyway.

Then it’s just a question of whether a home theatre computer is worth the cost…

Missing A Foot

My recent trip to Edmonton was the heaviest use my iBook has seen as an actual laptop. Although it performed admirably enough, after getting back home and putting it back in its usual spot I noticed something was slightly off. One of the little rubber feet went missing somewhere along the way and now it rocks slightly when typing and slides a bit when opening the latch.

Although there are apparently replacement kits available, they’re awfully overpriced for silly little pieces of rubber. Ah well, at least it’s properly broken-in now…

The iBook also finally has an AirPort Extreme card now, and more memory. Lacking wireless on the trip wasn’t too big a deal since there was plenty of wired connectivity where needed, but it’s still nice to have the option. The memory upgrade (from 256 to 640 megs total now) is a far bigger improvement. Previously, running multiple apps (and there’s generally always at least Firefox in the background) would introduce long delays as it swapped its brains out, but everything is much more responsive now.

Need More Goat’s Blood

My iBook is being weird again. Well, some combination of the iBook and the rest of the network, anyway.

If I fetch a file from the Internet, I can get 300+ KB/s down to the Linux server. I can get 300+ KB/s down to the iBook. But if I transfer a file between the iBook and the Linux server, on the same switch, I get 4 KB/s.

It *used* to work just fine, so I’m not quite sure where the problem lies. While the transfer is in progress, the ‘frame error’ count on the network interface on the Linux side increases, which generally indicates a hardware problem, but swapping around cables and ports doesn’t change anything. A second Linux box can talk to the first one just fine at full speed but is also slow with the iBook, which would seem to put the blame on the iBook side of things, but the iBook is fine when talking to the Internet at large. It happens under both OS X and Gentoo on the iBook, so it’s not something in the OS. It affects Samba shares too, so it’s not FTP-specific either. Duplex settings are consistent.

I’m running out of ideas here… About the only other thing I’ve changed recently is the firmware on the router (a Linksys BEFW11S4), but this is supposed to be a stable version and the trouble didn’t start back then.

The Never-Ending Search

To hell with it, maybe I should just get an iPod after all. The fourth-generation ones are out now, with the clicky-wheel from the mini-iPod, better battery life, and a lower price (I can live without the dock and case). It still doesn’t have the other features I’d like, but it’s better to have something at all than to chase a ‘perfect’ goal forever…

The problem then becomes one of management. I’d obviously need iTunes in order to load songs, manage playlists, and so on, but of the three systems I have, all of the songs are stored on the Linux file server, the one where iTunes isn’t available. There isn’t enough room to mirror the entire library on the iBook, and I don’t have FireWire or even USB2 on the Windows system (which I’d prefer to avoid and is also low on space).

Fortunately you can add songs to an iTunes library from a network share, so I can do all of the management from the iBook, but then that creates a couple more problems. First, it doesn’t seem to let me edit ID3 tags on songs in the library that are from a network share. Whether this is a limitation of iTunes or a permissions problem or what isn’t clear yet, so I still need to do some investigation there.

The second problem is that now I have a redundant data problem. Although I can’t fit my whole music library on the iBook, I *do* have a subset of my favourite tracks loaded on it so I can listen to them while roaming. Adding the songs from the network share makes the local ones show up twice in the library, and it’s not immediately obvious which one is the local one and which is the remote one (idea to Apple: smart playlists based on filename/path). What I really need is two separate libraries, one just for the networked songs and one for the local copies, but iTunes just has one big library per user.

There is a way around it though, if you cheat a bit. Since everything is stored in ~/Music/iTunes, all I had to do was take the existing directory, rename it to iTunes.local, restart iTunes and add the network songs to the now-empty library, quit iTunes, and rename the newly-recreated iTunes directory to iTunes.remote. Now all I have to do is make ~/Music/iTunes a symbolic link to whichever library I want to work on at the time before starting iTunes. (If I were really lazy I’d make wrapper scripts to do it automatically from the Dock or Finder.)

It’s a bit of a kludge, but should work well enough. Now where are all those pennies…

Does It Get HBO?

Though I’m not much of a Mac zealot, there were still a few things out of the WWDC announcements yesterday that caught my interest:

Cinema Displays: Oooo, widescreen. And, uh, HUGE — that 30″ screen is bigger than my living room TV! That one is overkill (meant for professional editing and such) and beyond my tech specs anyway, and the 23″ is still rather expensive, but the 20″ one is intriguing. I wouldn’t be able to use it with the iBook, but their switch to DVI makes it a viable choice on a KVM for the rest of the systems, and the hubs certainly don’t hurt. The new stand is also a lot better than the old ‘easel’ style that I thought was rather silly-looking and hard to adjust.

It is, though, just one more possibility out of a field of contenders for LCD screens, and I doubt I’ll be picking one up soon anyway. My ViewSonic 17PS may be getting old, but it still serves very well with a high-quality picture, so there’s not much of an incentive to switch to an LCD at the moment.

Spotlight: Hah, looks like Apple’s going to beat MS to getting metadata search capabilities (it won’t be in Windows until Longhorn in 2006ish). The devil is in the details though, and its usefulness will depend on how good it is at extracting useful metadata from files (will it be able to search based on GIF/JPG comments? EXIF headers? Comments in text-based files?).

Automator: Now this could be very useful. There have been times where I’ve wanted to repeat a task a bunch of times, and I knew I could probably do it in something like AppleScript, but I didn’t want to have to stop, refresh my memory on the scripting syntax, write the script, experiment, debug it, etc… This sounds like it would nicely cover that gap where something’s annoying to repeat by hand, but manually scripting it feels like too much work.

Fat Fingers And Laptops

I like my iBook well enough, but dammit, whenever I’m typing I often accidentally hit the up arrow whenever I go to press the Shift key. If done in the wrong order, this causes the whole previous line I just typed to be highlighted and then overwritten by the next character I type before I notice what’s happening. Grrr…

Maybe I need to take proper touch-typing lessons. You’d think after all this time I’d be good at it, but my fingers are still mostly all over the place…

Oh Sure, Now You Tell Me

When I bought my iBook, I didn’t get many of the options or accessories with it. In particular, I didn’t get the Bluetooth module since I don’t have any other Bluetooth devices anyway.

I was recently investigating upgrade options though (I’ve got some new parts for ‘ekosiak’ on the way now), and I was curious just how much the Bluetooth module would cost, since one way of getting Net connectivity on the road would be to use a cell phone with Bluetooth capabilities as the connection. I was unable to determine how much it would cost though, because much to my surprise, it *can’t* be purchased separately at all.

It looks like the Bluetooth module is something that can only be ordered at the same time as the system itself, and the dealer has to install it. What really annoys me though is that there was no indication at the time I bought the iBook that this was the case. It was labelled ‘Bluetooth-ready’ in that you could add in the Bluetooth module, which to me implied that it was an upgrade that could be done at any time.

It’s not a fatal problem as there are third-party modules available (though then they take up a USB slot), and maybe I can convince a local dealer to order and install it separately anyway, but it’s still frustrating to discover this kind of information after-the-fact…

Hidden Quakes

Another game that I’ve recently discovered I have the Mac version of is Quake 3. I knew there was a Mac version of it, but I didn’t know if it was on the discs that I had. I found the CD case and examined it, but it didn’t say *anything* at all about what platforms were supported. So, figuring it was worth a shot anyway, I slapped the CD into the iBook and sure enough, a Mac installer was right there.

I also have Team Arena, since it was the Quake Gold package, but right on the front of its CD it says “Windows 95/98/ME/2000/NT4”. Oh well. But maybe… Sure enough, after sticking it in, there was a Mac installer for it too.

Things get even stranger though. The first thing you do after installing any game nowadays is to go and grab the patches, right? Q3 was still running in Classic mode and was a bit choppy, so I hoped there would at least be a native OS X patch. Well, off to idsoftware.com I went, but oddly enough I couldn’t find any Mac patches at all. There were Linux and Windows patches to bring it to 1.31, but nothing for the Mac. Well, maybe the 1.30 included in the Gold package really is the final version for the Mac, I thought.

After poking around a bit though, there was a file named “Patches and Updates blah blah blah.html”, and it had a URL to quake3world.com’s files section. After a quick visit there I could see that they were actually up to 1.32 for the Linux and Windows versions, but there was only a beta version of a patch to 1.31 for the Mac. It was, however, a broken link. Well goodie. Starting from the front page of fileplanet.com I worked down to the Quake 3 files and, lo and behold, there was what I really wanted: a final, official 1.32 point release for Mac OS X. Ugh, it just had to be FilePlanet…

You’d think that the company’s own site would be the place to go for the latest updates. Or that the biggest fansites would have working links to the right places. No wonder people are wary of gaming on the Mac if they’re going to treat it like the red-headed stepchild…

Say Hello To My Little Friend

The newest member of my little family, ‘ebotona’:

It’s an iBook G4, and although I’ve occasionally used Macs before, this is the first one I’ve actually ever owned. Why an iBook? Well, I always like to have something new to tinker with. My knowledge about Macs is about 10 years out of date, so it couldn’t hurt to get back up to speed on them, especially since I may get nailed with doing our OSX client port at work. I don’t really need a new full-blown desktop system, but I could occasionally use a laptop, so the iBook fills both needs; it’ll fulfill my travelling requirements, and still give me something new to fiddle with when at home.

So what was the first thing I did? Wipe OSX off and install Linux, of course… :-)
Continue reading “Say Hello To My Little Friend”

Biting the Apple

Looking around at a lot of people I know, it seems like I’m the only one *not* using or at least praising the Mac. Why haven’t I taken the plunge yet? Well, it’s not any “OS A sucks, B rulez!!1!” mentality; OSX sounds just great from most reports so far.

I already have two working systems, a full-time Linux server for ‘work’ and a dual boot XP/Linux system for gaming and other CPU-intense tasks, and between them I have pretty much all of my needs covered. Whenever I upgrade it’s almost always to get better gaming performance, not for experimental systems. I don’t really have the room for a new system and I’m not about to *replace* a whole system with a relatively unknown (to me) one. I just don’t have any big incentive to switch or add in a Mac yet.

Except maybe in one spot… The one thing I’m still missing is a laptop. It’s always been a fairly low priority item for me since I don’t travel much, but there’s the odd time it might be useful. Since the tasks it would need to be able to handle would be pretty basic (store files, access USB devices, basic net connectivity), a Mac would cover those basic tasks pretty well while still letting me have one to tinker with.

Will I? Eh, depends on how lazy I’m feeling when/if I ever get around to it. :-P It probably wouldn’t even be a top-end model; something like the 14″ iBook would likely suffice. I’m certainly not about to shell out $4300 for this one…