Tag: Mac

A pair of Apple miscellany

“Apple simplifies .Mac Web access”. So common sensical, I wonder why they didn’t think of this sooner.

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“Apple actively courting the Beatles”. I like the Beatles, but I’m not exactly chomping at the bit to download any of their music from anywhere. For the sake of Apple, I would love for the iTunes Music Store to carry their full catalog; I believe, as one online commentator wrote, that the Beatles could make up any lawsuit-related losses easily through iTMS sales. Unlike myself, there are lots of people, including TUAW’s Dave Caolo, who want individual Beatles albums.
Personally, I have all the Beatles’ songs I could want on my iPod already. It’s called “1”.

ATPM 12.05

The May issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available.
We welcome Mark Tennent to the ATPM staff this month. Mark’s been providing us plenty of reading material over the past few months, and we felt it only fair to reward him with the glamorous and career-enhancing position of Contributing Editor. Welcome to the team, Mark!
Wes notes the Boot Camp roundup from the Mac blogosphere, while going insane with award…er, awarding. Mark gives us a double-blast of his regular column, MacMuser, raising the concern over data composting, how valuable cultural artifacts might be lost to future generations, as well as hoping that Apple’s dual boot strategy pays off.
Paul scours the web for sites you didn’t know existed, so you don’t have to. Want to discover new music, solve an online puzzle, listen to the U.S. tax code via podcast, learn how to get to a human operator as quickly as possible in a phone tree, or explore the world of cylinder recordings? Paul’s your new hero.
Chuck delves in to text parsing with FileMaker this month. Ted shares his thoughts on using ConceptDraw in your outlining workflow, as well as noting how outlining concepts are showing up in myriad applications we don’t think of as outliners.
This month’s desktop pictures selection is brought to us by ATPM jack-of-all-trades Chris Lawson. A prophead with his sights set higher–and I mean that in all of the best ways–Chris took his Canon digital SLR to Oshkosh last year for the annual EAA AirVenture. Aircraft lovers are sure to appreciate Chris’s efforts.
We learn Cortland is a James Brown fan, and there’s a lot more to Brody than meets the eye. Much more.
Sylvester opens this month’s reviews with a look at Footlights Pro 2.1. Frank Wu chimes in, noting Axio’s Hardsleeve lives up to its name. It’s the Lee and Lawson show on the fifth-generation iPod, the daring duo bringing you the lowdown on Apple’s latest digital media player. Lee also has a solo act this issue, in a look at iTunes Catalog. Finally, yours truly closes out the issue with my analysis of Datadesk’s SmartBoard ergonomic keyboard.
As always, each issue is available online, or in one of three formats for your offline reading pleasure.

Miscellany

Dan Wade has too much time on his hands.

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Gavin Shearer:

If I were Sony, or Toshiba, or HP, I’d be freaking out right now.

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I cannot begin to express how broken up I am over the fact that Michael Jackson has to restructure his debt. Oh, look, something shiny…

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It’s about time. Pooh is certainly more deserving than most of the blithering glitterati that populate the Walk.
[With a wave of the phin to the Firewheel boys and John.]

Boot Camp

When I was in ROTC, our drill instructor told us…
Sorry, wrong boot camp. And we didn’t really have a drill instructor, since the drilling was done by the uppperclassmen. And there was never something called “boot camp” for ROTC. Anyway…
The web is ablaze with the news of Apple’s Boot Camp. (Not to mention Wall Street.) When I first heard the news–from my non-geeky wife, no less–I admit feeling a little sour. It’s one thing for hackers to find a workaround because Apple’s now using the same underlying hardware as the latest and greatest Windows machines, but to actually support it?
Blessedly, reason soon took hold. As I went about my day, mulling this over in the back of my mind, I came to look at this development as a good thing. Yesterday afternoon, looking through some of my feeds in NetNewsWire, I saw I reached conclusions similar to those of people I know and trust.
Michael sums it up perfectly:

[P]eople would have found a way anyway, so it’s better for Apple to make it work right and take the credit than to pretend it isn’t happening.
Amen. This is no third-party hack that could wipe out your entire system. This is a straight-from-the-source solution. (That could wipe out your entire system; but the odds are more in your favor with Boot Camp.)
Tom has a couple of theoretical examples of how the dual-boot nature of Intel Macs can benefit Apple.
I would have to agree with Erik, however, in that if I were to run Windows on my Mac, I would rather have it in the vein of Virtual PC, where I can switch in and out of the different OS environments with a keystroke. As Welch noted on the MacJournals-Talk list, having to quit everything in one environment and boot in to the other one gets old if you have to do it more than two or three times a day. Even then…
As for me, I have a XP box five feet away, on my wife’s desk in our study. It’s the PC I built for her, and I have my own account on it. The reason I have this iMac is so I don’t have to put up with such nonsense such as the USB driver we wrestled with earlier tonight on her machine for an IR receiver. Then again, why would I want to pass up the chance at something like seeing the blue screen of death on my iMac? That’s just aces.

Miscellany

To get back at phishers (as opposed to a phisch), use PhishFighting. It’s certainly a much better use of CPU cycles than looking for aliens that don’t exist.
[Via IM from Lawson.]

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Lee has no sense of adventure.

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Memo to Skip Bertman, Director of Athletics, Louisiana State University: in the future, Final Four-bound teams are not allowed to come back to Baton Rouge prior to the semi-final game. Apparently, there’s something in the water that results in “chucking”, better known as “the shooting of bricks”.
It was painful enough watching the men’s team lose the game last night due to their inability to put the ball in the basket (as opposed to UCLA’s winning by making it difficult for the Tigers to do so), but the ladies seemed to have the same problem tonight against Duke, a team which was making it difficult for the Tigers to put the ball in the basket.
Two shots at a championship, two shots blown. Kudos to UCLA and Duke. There’s always next year.
And it’s baseball season.

ATPM 12.04

The April issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available.
You’ll notice (hopefully) a new look to the publication this month. Simon Griffee put in time working on the design, and put in time with my and Michael’s tweaks. Thanks so much, Simon!
As Apple celebrates thirty years as a company, it seems more and more notable online personalities are joining the ranks of the Switchers, and Wes has a complete round-up. He also notes the booting-XP-on-Intel-Mac solutions running around the ‘net, but we’re not going to allow such blasphemy to darken our door, much less come inside for dinner with the family. Reader Heather Isaacson took advantage of an abundance of offline time to concentrate on her art, and now wants to build a web site to sell it from. Alas, her old Mac wasn’t up to the task, but she perseveres in a heartwarming tale of old Mac love lost, and new Mac love found.
We feature a double-shot of Mark Tennent this month, as he first delves in to how “Copyleft” software such as Firefox is changing the world’s perception of copyright, then does a little ego-surfing via Google.
We also have a double-shot farewell from Tom Bridge, who is stepping down as an ATPM Contributing Editor. This would be the part where I’d get all weepy and emotional over a staffer’s departure, but I talk to Tom practically every day, and I don’t see that changing, no matter how much he might like it to.
Tom likes the new calendar creation in iPhoto, and I believe I’ll be utilizing this later in the year for the annual family calendar featuring our little phisch. Tom also reviews the TV Mini HD, a ready-for-primetime (provided you get good antenna reception) “Mac TiVo”.
There are a pair of other reviews, with Paul weighing in on Password Retriever (not impressed), and yours truly getting my backup groove on with SuperDuper! (very much impressed). Consequently I have realized I’m not one of those guys who can really pull off a “getting my groove on” sort of line, but it’s late and I don’t feel like coming up with anything else, since my muse tucked itself in after a nightcap about two hours ago.
Cortland learns there’s no accounting for taste, as desperation sets in for Chad while Angie may find that love is even closer than she thinks. Finally, this month’s desktop pictures are of the English Lake District, courtesy of Mac user Andy Bannister. Andy’s work is remarkable; I spent hours on the site looking through photos. Thanks, Andy, for allowing us to showcase part of your portfolio.
As usual, the new and improved ATPM is available in three fruity flavors for your reading pleasure.

Put AutoPairs to work on your Intel Macs

Late last night, I received an e-mail from AutoPairs developer James Walker. James and I had exchanged some messages previously regarding AutoPairs working on Intel Macs. Now, he has discovered a workaround.
1. If you have a PowerPC Mac, which I do in the form of my PowerBook G4, copy the System Preferences application from that Mac to your Intel Mac. In my case, I copied the AutoPairs pref pane from the PowerBook as well, putting it in ~/Library/PreferencePanes.
2. Rename the copied System Preferences application. I renamed my copied app to “SysPref PPC AP config”, so I would know at a glance what it’s sitting on my desktop for.
3. Launch the renamed application.
4. The AutoPairs pref pane showed up and I was able to click on it to activate it and open its configuration window.
Quitting, I switched to BBEdit, and tried out some parentheses and quotes, and it worked like a charm! Thanks, James!

Miscellany

My favorite band contains big Apple fans apparently. Way cool.

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I downloaded the new iChat icons for .Mac members, but I’m fairly certain I won’t use any of them.

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Europe at night: a digital composite of archived satellite images.

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If you have a Nick-N-Willy’s in your area, and you haven’t tried a pizza from them yet, I encourage you to do so. No, they won’t hold a candle to those from a real NYC- or Chicago-style pizzeria, but the pizzas are way better than any you’ll get from the typical fast-food pizza guys. I’m now discarding all of the Papa John’s coupons we receive each week.

“But Macs are still more expensive…”

Winn Schwartau, on conducting a total cost of ownership (TCO) breakdown comparing a Windows PC to an Intel Macintosh, what he refers to as a “MacTel”:

The results of this TCO astounded me. For my small enterprise, owning a WinTel box for three years costs twice as much as owning a MacTel.
Somehow, this just seemed to go hand-in-hand with my previous post.

The greatest trick

John Gruber:

There’s a line in The Usual Suspects where Kevin Spacey’s character Verbal Kint says, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

The greatest trick Microsoft has gotten away with is convincing the public that the Wintel PC platform is open.
I think the familiarity John talks about in his piece is the main reason (coupled with the just-a-year-old PC they have) my parents haven’t switched.