External Drive for Time Machine

I have been wanting to get a external Fire Wire drive for my G5 iMac for a while now. Upgrading to OS X 10.5 gave me a great reason with Time Machine. I found a reasonable priced Seagate Free Agent Pro 320gb drive from Tiger Direct for only $109.00 it’s going to be used as my backup for my internal 250gb drive.

While I was at it. I decided to increase my RAM to 2gb another great deal for $104.00 from Tiger Direct.

Weird I just installed 10.5

This is weird. I just installed 10.5 and my keyboard back light started working. I never sent it back when I purchased it late last year.

Yeah!  

iPhone WOW

Apple released the iPhone today shipping in June. What can I say but WOW. It runs OS X and has a built in multi-touch wide screen. It’s and iPod and a Mac rolled up into a single slim portable device.

Apple estimates that they will sell 10Million of these babies in 2008. I believe that estimate is way to low. To date I have never purchased a mobile phone because of the bad user interfaces. To me it was just to much hassle. Apple has finally solved the problem, I guarantee I will be purchasing one in June.

Jobs was right. They did revolutionize the mobile/pda phone market. It will never be the same and other handheld makers have got to be shitting in their pants right about now.

Apple just might end up being the king of the hill for a long time to come.

 

Update: Why would Apple brag about the fact it runs OS X and not give it’s devlopers a mobile platform. Oyee! So Apple only get’s it half right. 

I should have purchased iPods

The saga continues with the SanDisk Sansa players. Now I know why everyone purchases iPods. Apple’s shit just works.

I went to install the software on my back-room computer which is Windows 2000 machine, it complained and said it needed Windows XP SP1. Oyee! I am not going to spend $300 bucks on an OS upgrade. So, I decided I would load it on my XP on my MacBook Pro, however it was a mini-cd and it won’t work with slot loading ROM drive.

Long story short I was able to get the software loaded on my XP install and then I had to update the USB driver because it didn’t recognize my SanDisk player.

However, the whole reason my wife and I purchased the SanDisk “Play For Sure” Sansa players is so we could let our kids listen to the free audio books from the “Net Library”. But when I downloaded the audio book(s) and tried to acquire the “license” it says I have already checked it out on another machine. It happened with 2 different audio books.

I booted over to the OSX and plugged in the player and it picked it up immediately (mass storage device). I copied some MP3 and I was off and running.

However if I wanted just MP3 players I would have purchased iPods.

Anybody want 2 SanDisk Sansa 1GB MP3  players hardly used. I’ll probably eBay the damn things and go buy a couple of iPods.

What a waste of time.

Grrrr! MacBook Pro going back to Apple for repair

I received my new MacBook Pro yesterday and this morning I noticed my back-light was working on my PowerBook but wasn’t working on the MacBook.

I turned off all the lights in my office and the back-light still didn’t come on. I put my arm over where the sensors are and it dimmed the screen but the keyboard back-light still didn’t come on.

I called Apple and I have to send it back for 5-7 days for service. What a pain! Day 1 and it needs a repair. Oyee

The Revolution

While at home sick on Friday I downloaded  and watched The Revolution by the History channel from iTunes.

It was excellent!

New MacBook Pro

I ordered a new 15 MacBook Pro last week to replace my 2 pesky Windows work machines which decided to permanently shutdown(unrecoverable hard-drive failures) taking with them all my Windows Development stuff. Thank goodness for backups and a decent de-compiler app I was able to recover. I am going to run Windows on my new MacBook Pro using Parallels.

BTW,

Oddly, enough my only PC at home has been in a state of Random Shutdown and reboot after applying the latest Windows Update. Argghhh! I am ready to toss it! I can only imagine that there are quite a few MacBook owners out there feeling the same way.

New .Mac Mail doesn’t work with FireFox 2.0 (update it works now)

I tried out the new .Mac Mail with FireFox 2.0 this morning and it doesn’t seem to work (cant read messages). Safari worked (no surprise). What’s up with that?

Update: All is good and it seems to be working now.

Apple MacBook

I was really hoping to get a new MacBook Pro. I have the 15″ G4 PowerBook that came out just before the MacBooks.

But it seems that so many people are reporting that there Macs are crashing regualary it makes me think that I should wait for Rev.2 or Rev.3. My PowerBook and my 20″ iMac have never crashed(seriously).

What really sucks for Apple is that there market share for Notbooks supposedly doubled when the MacBook came out. How many of those new Mac converts are going to go back to using Windows after dealing with random shutdowns and lock-ups.

It seems that MacBooks don’t have the credibility of the PowerBook. I’ll wait and see how this plays out.

Update: Apparently, Apple is going to fix all those MacBooks. Nice!

The Apple Open Source Snub

Tom Yager of InfoWorld posted and excellent article on why Apple's silent snub on Open Source matters to the average person.

My story got such wide attention because lots of people — whose numbers well exceed that fraction of a fraction who would tinker with or compile an OS kernel — understand why breaking a promise, and saying nothing about it, matters. It’s not about code. It’s about character.

- Tom Yager of InfoWorld