Tag: Apple & All Things Mac Posts

For all of you who have been waiting patiently for the new 10.5.2 update, the wait is over. 10.5.2 is now available on software update. I’m installing all 350 MB of it right now. For all of you about to update, I salute you. Oh, and for all you people on shitty broadband, you should know I just downloaded 352 MB in 4 minutes here.

Tomorrow I should be getting a brand new 8-core MacPro for my desk at work. In honor of that, I did up a little Mac desktop last night for anyone who likes to laugh from time to time. Enjoy.

This guy just did a huge Apple comparison with the new Air notebook computer, both with and without the solid state add-on drive. The verdict? The Air in general is slower than both the Macbook Pro and the Macbook, and the battery life is only average. Photo by John Biehler The writer was optimistic that the solid state drive would be a good investment. Unfortunately though, it provided rather lackluster performance, and hardly increased battery life at all. I’ve had my own Macbook Pro for a long time, and most of my friends have Macbook’s. I’m purposefully holding off the Air because it looks totally overpriced for what it is. Plus, Leopard has been a pretty big burden for me on my Macbook Pro and iMac since upgrading. I’m anxiously awaiting the 10.5.2 update that will hopefully fix a lot of my problems. Photo by John Biehler For friend John […]

I woke up to my phone ringing basically non-stop thanks to Hesty and Sean at work. There’s a big career fair out at UBC today, and I guess they are all going and wanted me to go too. I woke up with a nasty sore throat though, so I’m going to leave the recruiting to those guys. I’m going to pass around a bit of link-juice this morning. First, we have Rebecca and Keira, who are packing up and heading to the island for some licking and snowboarding. That means John is currently wifeless, so I think him and I are going to figure out something fun to do this weekend. Judging by the weather, I’m guessing we’ll be watching movies and nerding out on the laptops for some of it. If anyone is around and into nerd sessions, drop me a nerdmail. I’m pretty sure whatever we end up […]

As of October of 2007, Apple has sold approximately 120 million iPods worldwide. At approximately $250 each, that’s $30 billion dollars in revenue. It is without a doubt one of Apple’s crowning technical achievements, both for the ingenuity of the hardware and for the revolutionary integration with software on several platforms. And yet lately, as I’ve trekked the 30 minute walk between my home and work with my iPod blaring away, I’ve started to wonder what the impact of this technology really is. For starters, those of us who listen to iPods frequently are subjecting ourselves to potential hearing damage. Even at my age, I find myself frequently asking people to repeat themselves. I’ve also found that I have a great deal of difficulty hearing individuals in crowded places or bars with lots of chatter. And while my hearing has never been perfect (thanks to an uncle that went a […]

Eight easy steps: 1. Toss and turn all night 2. Fall asleep at 5am 3. Get up at 9:30am and try to head to work 4. Call a cab, and tell him to take you to work 5. Pay cab driver. Drop money all over the cab and look dumb. 6. Exit cab and close door, making sure to slam your iPod touch in the door 7. Stand there looking at iPod touch drive away with cab driver, only to fall off a half block away 8. Pick up iPod touch on the concrete, now without headphones

I’ve been using Leopard now for around 3 months, and to be honest, I’m really not impressed at all. It’s an extremely buggy OS with a bunch of mediocre improvements, many of which I haven’t really found a use for. Spaces? I actually thought these would be cool, but I just haven’t been able to find a good use for them. In fact, I find myself accidentally switching between spaces from time to time thanks to how heavily I rely on the control and option keys for other things. Stacks is another completely useless feature, mainly because you can’t really see enough icons. Plus, it’s generally a stupid idea to present multiple conflicting UI designs (the box in stacks and the curvy expandy thing) for the same feature, especially if you switch between them from time to time. I am currently on the 10.5.1 update of Leopard, which is basically […]

Apple just announced an ultra-think notebook computer called the Air. Photo by Gnackgnackgranck on Flickr Looks pretty cool, but it doesn’t have a DVD drive, and is sealed shut like a big iPod. Based on my experiences with my Macbook Pro and Leopard, I think I’m definitely pulling myself out of the “early-adopter” crowd with Apple and waiting a while this round to see what happens.

I know everyone is absolutely dying to know the current state of my laptop, so here’s an update. I called down this afternoon and they said the LCD is toast on it which is why I’ve probably been having a pile of problems with sleep and things of that nature. A new one has been ordered and hopefully I can pick it up in a few days. It will be weird having a laptop again as I’ve gotten fairly used to using my desktop machine at home now. Also, I’m going to do a blog entry tonight on the end of Heroes season two. Should be awesomely nerdy.

My iMac has been a bit slow when using photoshop or garageband, so today, after picking up Hesty from the airport, I stopped at NCIX and picked up some more memory for it. When I got home, I actually had a hard time figuring out just where the memory went. I finally found out where — there’s a little panel on the very bottom of the iMac that comes off easily with one screw. After that, you just slide in the SODIMM chip and you’re up and running again in just a few minutes. Pretty slick, especially compared to how much trouble it was to upgrade the Mac Mini at work (I actually had to use a cheese slicer to pry that thing open).