Mac

Boot Camp

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Every news site on the internet is talking about Boot Camp. It is an awesome idea. It really is, but since I am very picky I will be honest when I say it is not what I wanted! Really. I think having Windows on a Mac is a necessary evil. I just don’t want to have to dual boot. I have 2 Windows XP desktops at work (as of today, that number does change week by week) to augment my Powerbook for things like MS Access, Visio, Active Directory tools (when I am lazy and don’t want to use remote desktop), and other Windows only software. I honestly don’t use those machines very often. The main reason I use Windows at work is to run Vmware admin tools for my ESX and GSX servers, and Workstation to test desktop software installs. For home use I use Windows for 1 thing (not counting my dvr) and that is Quicken. I can’t stand quicken for the Mac. To dual boot for one or two applications would be a pain.

What would really be fantastic is a virtual machine running in OS X that would load up Windows. Lets face it, you own a mac for reason. I don’t want to deal with Windows if I have to, but I don’t want to run it all the time. Having a virtual machine that you can turn on and do one or two things with, and then turn off would be better to me than rebooting into XP. I tried virtual PC 5, 6, & 7 on the PowerPC, and it was so slow. Now that Apple has an Intel chip a virtual machine could be a viable option. Don’t get me wrong, Boot Camp is a great idea. I just think there are better things to come, I hope!

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Mac Linux Tools

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Yesterday’s issues did have one positive (well sort of) piece to it. I had the need to install a bunch of network monitoring tools on my powerbook. I know that allot of software from Linux/Unix has been ported over to the mac. I have used a bunch of it, but when you actually go looking for stuff and almost everything you try to find has been compiled to work on the mac you have to think, cool!

Some of the new tools on my Powerbook are now: NMAP, XNMAP, Etherreal, MTR, and more. I of course have the Darwin Ports install on the computer, but I honestly haven’t even cracked the surface of what I can run on it.

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The New Webpage

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Over the past few years I have focused my web presence on my blog. I have a website but I just haven’t been keeping it up. For that matter I have been blogging less, and I know it. I just have been busy and too tired to write when I normally like to. Just as I was writing this post I realized that I missed this blog’s anniversary. March 23 marked my 3rd anniversary blogging. My other website I maintain existed in some form or another since December 1995. Last year marked the first time I truly used no windows computer and maintained my electronic existence on a Mac. This posed a problem that I just ignored. I haven’t found a good web editing / site editing program for the Mac. I had Dreamweaver MX 2004, but I never got into using it. I had always used Frontpage since like 1997. I know it sucks, but it was easy to use for page creation. it was also easy to make site wide changes. With my move to the Mac full time I had not used anything to update my website. With blogging taking up most of my free web time, I ignored the other site.

Today I felt like updating my site and began to backup my existing site. Long drawn out process because of several issues I don’t want to go into. While that was happening I decided to search for a decent Mac web editor. iWeb was too basic. I found on Maczot a link to Rapid Weaver. The demo looked cool, even though you could only make 3 pages. So for $34.95 I gave it a try. I am creating my first photo page now. If it looks good I will start the process of redoing my site using it. I know it will require a total redo of the site, throwing out everything. I don’t think this is a bad thing. Hopefully it works out. I am going to stage the new site on my .mac account to see how it looks and then when I am done, or at least substantially complete I will post it to my main site.

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Powerbook #5

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Today I got my a new powerbook. I know I just got one back in December but when you get the opportunity to upgrade you take it. Someone in my group was getting a laptop and he was going for a powerbook. He was going to be happy with any Mac laptop so I had the chance to go to the same 12″ powerbook I had but get a bigger hard drive. I figured why not. Now I have a maxed out 12″ powerbook with 1.25 gigs of ram and a 100gig hard drive. I should be ok for a while! Andrew is also happy sporting my old (4 months) 80gig model. This new computer is my 5th (if I counted correctly) 12″ powerbook, and most likely my last since the Macbook Pro’s hopefully will have a smaller model soon.

Moving to this Powerbook was a breeze. I have upgraded mac’s before (as you can tell by the number of Powerbooks I had), but I never used the migration tool that Apple has when you register the computer. This time I figured I would give it a try. Man will I use that tool again. All you do is plug in the old computer to the new one with a firewire cable and it copies anything and everything you want from it. It got all my applications, my user profiles and settings, misc files on the hard drive, and anything else I could think of. The only issue was 3 applications required re-install’s. Besides that it worked flawlessly. And it took about 2 hours to copy 50gigs of data. It was amazing. Yet another reason I am a Mac fan over Windows. Wow, a few years ago I would never have believed I would say that let alone put it in writing.

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Offsite Meeting

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I spent the morning with a potential vendor discussing network designs and Call Manager configurations. It was very productive, but I am always backlogged when I spend half a day or a day out of the office. I spent the afternoon catching up on paper work while most of my team went to the data center to mount a new core switch we are trying to deploy.

I ended up at Dan’s with Jayson after work to upgrade the ram in his new iMac. We got dinner out of the deal and I also moved over his files from his old windows machine and setup his iPod on the iMac. Now I am iTired.

My scheduled trip to our Call Center for tomorrow is canceled. I didn’t want to chance the trip in the snow they predict. I will try to reschedule for sometime next week.

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RAM & a DVR

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I ordered a 1 Gig RAM upgrade for my new iMac. It finally arrived and I installed it today. It was actually pretty easy to do. I was happy about that. The machine is noticeably faster now. Especially when I have several apps open. With the original 512megs on board I noticed the system would freeze up when I was doing some intensive stuff this weekend. The added memory is a nice solution to my problem. Now all I need is more apps that are run on the intel chips natively.

I also got a new USB DVR adapter for my DVR machine. The goal is to have 2 tuners running on the same computer. Snapstream says it will work. The problem I have is that I have 2 different revisions of the same USB DVR hardware. One driver version works with one unit but not the other. When I get the second one to work the first one decides to stop working. I gave up after several hours of messing with the system. I am RMA’ing the unit and will probably just go out and buy a PCI tuner card. I didn’t want to do that, but in order to do what I want I will need one. I may also just move the DVR setup to my HP desktop since it is not doing much right now. Still pondering my options.

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Intel iMac

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I thought about it for a while and said I would wait. I really said I would hold off. I said I didn’t need another computer that was all in one. I said the mini was perfect. Then I heard great things about the new iMac. Office ran great dan said. Then I tried some new applications on my mini and stopped using them because the mini was so dam slow (man it is a great little box, but it really is slow). The final nail in the coffin was my tax return. I got around what I thought I would get. That meant disposable income. I could save it, but returns where meant to be spent.

I think I may have a serious problem. I think it is called eBay. eBay is my enabler. It allows me to sell stuff and buy newer stuff. It has gotten me into this mentality that I can buy stuff and sell it in a year or so and buy something else. It is more than a mentality. It is a reality that I have been living since like 2000. When this iMac gets to be not enough computer for me (and it might not for a while) I can goto eBay like I did with my last 20″ iMac.

I got picked up the iMac last night after work. Jayson (always willing to go with me to spend money) and I hit the apple store in soho after Danny, Jay and I had some dinner and drinks. It is always better to spend money after drinking! I had the new machine setup in like 15 minutes. The rewiring of my desk took all of today.

First impressions are good. So far Office installs and runs fine in rosetta. Cisco’s VPN which didn’t work at all finally came out with a universal binary on Friday. It was if they knew I went out and bought a new computer. Toast works fine even using rosetta, and they promise an update to universal binary soon. The only program that I want to install that may have a problem is the Missing Sync for Palm. Mark/Space does promise a universal binary by the end of march. For now I will sync with my work Powerbook.

More thoughts on the new computer soon.

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Archiving

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I finally broke down and bought Roxio Toast Titanium 7 today. I really wanted some of the advanced features it offered over the plain old burning of disks of the Apple finder. I am now able to take MPEG-2 files I DVR and back them up onto DVD’s. Not just as a file, but playable dvd’s in any normal player. My digital archiving and clean up continues. I probably should clean my apartment, but physical cleaning is less interesting!

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Video Redux

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I finally took the time to look at an article that shows how to convert video from my DVR program to a format that works with my video iPod. Turns out it is a free video extractor (windows only) that will convert almost any video file (i am using a generic mpeg-2 file that worked flawlessly) into a compatible format for use on the video iPod. I ran a test this morning and it worked flawlessly. I programed my DVR computer to convert a bunch of other shows I have. I also programed my desktop to convert a bunch of misc video’s (a lot of them) to the same format. The conversions take allot of time so I am going to let them run overnight. While I sleep they will perform.

I also broke down and bought an Elgato EyeTV 200 for my Mini. it is not as elegant a system as my Beyond TV, but I wanted to use my Mini as part of the home entertainment center. Since my DVD player was going I removed it and now I have my Mini & my Media Center PC as my only components of my home entertainment center. The Tivo is now in the bedroom, and it will be gone as soon as I watch whats left on it. Tomorrow I hope to go through video’s I have and encode what I want to keep for use on the iPod and get rid of the rest. The other advantage of this conversion is the space savings. An hour long video in MPEG-2 is about 2 gigs, in the H.264 codec it is less than 500 meg. Not a bad savings.

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