Benz Blog

You download a DMG file, double click it to “mount” the disk image, and up pops a window that usually contains instructions to drag the app to your applications folder. Fine, I click the Finder in the dock to access my Applications folder and nothing happens because I’m already IN the Finder! THIS is supposed to be intuitive? I must be missing something obvious.

I’m not a fan of using tapes for backups, so recently I went out and bought a Seagate external Firewire/USB 160GB hard drive (ST3160024A-RK). At the time, I had no plans on returning to the Mac world, so I formatted it as NTFS.

The drive has been great and I highly recommend it. You just plug it in and go. On XP, I had it hooked up via USB. On the Power Mac, with only 3 USB ports (which I think is rather cheap), I have it hooked up via FireWire. I can’t really tell which is faster – they are both quite speedy.

The first thing I learned is that when you hook up an external drive to the Mac that has been formatted with NTFS, it’s read-only, and you’re left with a few choices:

1. Reformat the drive as FAT32 to be accessed by both XP and OS X
2. Keep the drive as NTFS and access it from the Mac over the network.
3. Reformat the drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), which I think is HFS+ (don’t quote me on that), and access it from XP over the network (more on this later).

Since my goal is to switch as much of my digital life over to OS X as possible, I chose #3. Using the Disk Utility program that comes with OS X, I had a bit of trouble repartitioning the disk, having to quit the program twice, and then getting it to work only after deleting the mounted volume.

Once I had the disk remounted, I copied all my files back to it, and then setup a share using a wonderful program called SharePoints. This allows me to share the entire drive with XP, and it’s definitely worth getting (and making a donation!!) if you need to share anything other than your Home directory.

As for the backup software, I’m trying out BounceBack Express from CMS Products. This came with the purchase of my Seagate drive, and it looks like it’s going to be able to do everything I want, which is to simply back up (and verify) several groups of folders of my choosing every night at a certain time.

This keyboard double strike problem has been ongoing, and after a quick Internet search, I found a suggestion to enable the “Slow Keys” feature in the Universal Access preferences, and to set the slider just left of the “short” setting. After doing this, I launched TextEdit and started typing, and the system immediately froze. 100% locked up.

Power off/Power on.

Try again. Same thing. Recycle power again. Try turning off the key click sound. Freeze/Recycle power. Move the slider a little further left of short – and suddendly it worked.

Ok – fine – so it seems to have solved the double strike problem, but now it’s dropping characters. It happened 3 times while typing this message, so I’ve had to turn the Slow Keys setting off. Time to request a new keyboard.

I wish I had more time this weekend to continue my switch effort, but at least I managed to import my entire iTunes library with no problems. Only thing that was strange was that when I plugged in the iPod for the first time, over 800 songs that already existed were updated. I would have to guess that something in the file name changed, because the total number of files remained the same.

Now about QuickSilver – I only JUST installed this app this morning, and after 5 minutes of use I can already see that QuickSilver is going to change everything. What an incredible app. If you haven’t checked it out yet, read this, then this. Then you may want to read an interview with QuickSilver’s creator here.

Here they are! As expected, the dual 2.5GHz Power Mac bested all the other times, so Java compilation performance is perfectly acceptable.

Dual 2.5GHz Power Mac G5
6.1 3:52
8.1 :54

Dell Precision 350 3.06gHz
6.1: 5:05
8.1: 1:09

Dell Latitude D800 1.7gHz
6.1: 4:56
8.1: 1:25

1.8GHz PowerPC G5 running Mac OS X 10.3.7 (512MB SDRAM)
6.1: 6:00
8.1: 1:25

AMD 2200 running Mandrake Linux 10.1 (older box)
6.1: 7:46
8.1: 1:49

Microsoft Remote Desktop v1.0.3 hangs whenever I close it, and it can’t maintain a connection if the computer goes to sleep. If my Windows XP notebook can do it, why can’t the Mac? And WHY can’t it remember my most recently used settings? Why do I have to keep loading the same settings every time I start it? What a joke. I hope I find a way around this.

edit: Funny – immediately after I typed this entry I discovered that I could just double-click the RDC settings file to launch RDC. I can also add this to my dock for fast access. Also, it doesn’t hang when I launch it this way.

Well here it is, my first post on the Mac.

The initial setup went very smoothly with no problems whatsoever, but unfortunately I am not happy with the VGA output of the Mac through the KVM switch. I’ve since switched to a direct DVI connection, and on THIS computer, I can really notice a difference, so it looks like the KVM switch is going back.

My browser of choice these days is FireFox, so I downloaded the lastest version from mozilla.org. I also installed the excellent Bookmarks Synchronizer plug-in, and the only glitch with this was that I had to re-create my folder of live bookmarks because they were created as regular bookmarks.

I suppose I should read up a bit on Panther because I can’t remember how to install applications downloaded from the Internet. For FireFox, I have a file called Firefox 1.0.1.dmg on my desktop, as well as an icon that looks like an external drive called Firefox. After downloading Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection, I have 3 objects: the bin file I downloaded, a dmg file, and the external-drive looking icon. I’ve got the apps installed and working, but I have no idea if I can delete these files or what I’m supposed to do with them. We’ll see.

Let me stop right here and say THIS KEYBOARD ABSOLUTELY SUCKS. While typing this message, I must have accidentally typed a double character 10 times, and this NEVER happens to be on any other keyboard. I’m going to stick with it for a while and see if it goes away. If not, it’s going back, and if that doesn’t help, I’ll get a new one. I expected better from Apple.

Somtimes a FedEx truck in your driveway can really make your day.

It arrived 9 hours ago and I’m just now getting around to plugging in for the first time. If you’re not impressed by beautiful looking machines then skip over this part – none of this will matter to you.

I think that one of the best parts about buying a Macintosh has very little practical value: aesthetics. I’m reminded of my experience with the Powerbook a couple of years ago – I couldn’t help but admire how GREAT the computer looked on the counter or in the living room. I just liked to look at it. Everything from the sleek case to the soft, white, pulsating light while it slept. I always told everyone who asked me about it: if a notebook computer could be gorgeous, the Powerbook was it.

The Power Mac will give you the exact same feeling. You can’t help but appreciate the packaging, the sheer weight of the thing (the total weight of the box as shipped was 58 pounds – the FedEx guy was happy to see me standing at the back of his truck when he opened the door) – the smooth anodized aluminum case – man even the single button mouse looked good to me! (I’ll probably wind up tossing this and going back to a 2-button mouse with a scroll wheel, but much more on that later).

Alas, (alas?), computers are not meant to be put on a shelf when they’re brand new. I just couldn’t let this go by without mentioning it.

Onward…but first, yours truly:

Last entry before the Power Mac arrives – it’s on the truck for delivery!

I wired up the IOGEAR MiniView Extreme Multimedia KVMP Switch (GCS1732) and my first impression was: “oh s**t, I can’t live with this”. My monitor, a 20″ ViewSonic VP201mb LCD, was previously hooked up to my Dell via a DVI connection. I knew I’d lose this with the KVM switch which only supports VGA, but I read reports from people that couldn’t tell the difference, so I thought I’d try it out. DVI switches are very expensive (except for the Linkskey LDV-202AUSK which is out of stock everywhere I look).

Then I configured my monitor settings by first letting it auto-adjust the image, then I manually adjusted the contrast and brightness, and now I have to say – it looks just fine! I’m honestly not sure if it’s any different than the DVI connection, although theoretically it should be. Before the adjustments, the picture was really fuzzy, but now it’s quite sharp. So I guess I’ll stick with it for now. I figure within 30 days I’ll know if I want to keep it, get a DVI switch, or live with accessing the Dell via Remote Desktop.

One of the things I expected to have to get used to in OS X is the different key combinations to maniuplate text. I’ve gotten so used to how this works in Windows that it’s almost Zen-like, but I promised myself that I’d give the Mac-way suffucient time to sink in. However, now that I know that the default key bindings can be changed (see below), this is going to be very difficult to resist.

Apparently, the home/end keys don’t work as they do in Windows, moving the caret to the beginning/end of the line, but apparently, this can be changed! I won’t be able to try this until my Mac arrives (in 3 days, btw!), but here it is, courtesy of Slashdot:

Create a file ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict with this content:

/* Home/End keys more like Windows */
{
“\UF729″ = “moveToBeginningOfLine:”; /* home */
“\UF72B” = “moveToEndOfLine:”; /* end */
“$\UF729″ = “moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:”; /* shift + home */
“$\UF72B” = “moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:”; /* shift + end */
“^\UF729″ = “moveToBeginningOfDocument:”; /* control + home */
“^\UF72B” = “moveToEndOfDocument:”; /* control + end */
}