I just found out that the recruiting station I'm being assigned to in West Sacramento has a Fry's Electronics just over 2 miles away, and an Apple Store within 5 and a half miles.
I haven't even seen the place yet and I'm already in love. *sigh*
March 2006 Archives
Alright... I can almost see the usefulness of this little applet called ChargerChecker, which brings up a Growl notification on your iBook, PowerBook, or MacBook Pro display when your power cord gets disconnected. I say "almost" because odds are, unless you've got an extreme case of tunnel vision, you're likely to see that your power cord has been unplugged without a notification on your monitor.
That being said, in the space of one day this innovative little gem has already spawned two 'me-too!' clones, one of which sports the exact same 'Alerts you when your PowerBook power cord gets disconnected' one-line description on MacUpdate. The only added feature? It plays a sound in addition to the visual notifications when power is disconnected/reconnected. The other clone? No sound, but the author claims a smaller memory footprint and less CPU usage than the other two apps.
I'd be willing to bet that there are no less than a half-dozen more clones of these apps before month's end. Lousy copycats.
...pi. Specifically, 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459.info, containing 62 decimal places of pi. Not surprisingly, the website's sole contents are a cool-looking ASCII graphic of the pi symbol (composed of, you guessed it, a long sequence of decimal places of pi) and a link to the Wikipedia article for pi.
Someone must've had a lot of time on their hands.
Anyone paying even the slighest bit of attention to the Mac scene over the past few months has probably heard mention of a little contest to see who would be the first to get Windows XP running natively on the newest Intel Macs. Well, about a week ago, the challenge was met; a pair of hackers (and I mean this in a good way), through a bit of ingenious software trickery, were able to get a modified version of XP running on a Core Duo iMac. Within hours of the release of the patch, folks around the world (including yours truly) were downloading and installing Windows XP on their Macs.
Well, for my part, I'm glad I was able to get XP working without destroying my MacBook in the process; now I'm just waiting for working ATI video drivers so I can play games (other than Solitaire and Minesweeper, anyway). More in a future update...
...CUTE OVERLOAD!!! (The site's name should be the first clue; I can almost feel the cavities growing just from seeing the first two pictures...)
As a test of sorts, I used a PR image of the MacBook Pro to, with a little Photoshop magic, create a customized version of the 'Made on a Mac' banner that used to be in the bottom-right of each page. The finished banner has replaced the old version in the same spot. The whole thing was basically an excuse to test Photoshop CS2's performance in Rosetta for (very) light image editing on the new machine -- a test that was passed with flying colors, as I experienced no problems and only a minimal performance hit over my PowerBook G4.
As a side note, I also upgraded my MBP to 2GB of RAM (yay for acronyms!); while I've yet to run up against the RAM ceiling at 1GB so far (except for one freak incident where Safari went berserk loading a random website a couple days ago), I figured that, since this is going to be my primary machine for the foreseeable future, I might as well get the upgrade over with, since I was bound to get the extra chip eventually. While I was out, I also grabbed a 1TB OneTouch III Turbo Edition external HDD from Maxtor. Mmm, overkill. :)
Against my (and others') better judgement, last night I became the proud new owner of a shiny new MacBook Pro. Why this particular machine and not, say, the iMac I had been contemplating a few posts back? Well, the main reason is simple: I need (alright, desire...'need' is such a strong word) a machine that I can fold up, stick in a bag, and take with me. I've only ever owned one actual desktop machine at any given time; all the rest have been laptops (my current collection is comprised of the aforementioned MacBook Pro 2GHz; a 15" PowerBook G4 1.67GHz, and a Toshiba Portege Tablet PC).
My first impressions of the MacBook Pro have been good ones: this machine is fast, much more so than the PowerBook it is (eventually) destined to replace -- at least, with software designed for the new Intel architecture. As has been reported by everyone else reviewing the new MacTels, the slim majority of my software that is currently PowerPC-only either runs slowly, or not at all. A few examples include iSwiff (slow, crashes when a window is closed); Photoshop CS2 (yeah, everyone knows about this one); and Virtual PC (ditto). PowerPC software that runs well enough for regular use, on the other hand, includes ecto (which is being used to compose this post); Ragdoll Masters v3 and N-Ball v2, by Ragdoll Software; and (surprisingly) Google Earth, despite its CPU-intensive nature.
Universal software, as expected, simply screams on the MacBook Pro. For instance, Adobe's Lightroom beta runs oh-so-smoothly on the new hardware, where on the PowerBook it simply ran acceptably (but only just). Of course, Apple's iLife and iWork apps run blazingly fast as well, and Mac OS X itself (the hardware shipped with 10.4.5 pre-installed) is much more responsive than on my older hardware. I'm looking forward to the day when most (if not all) of the software I use on a regular basis has been made Universal.
I've got more testing (and goofing around) to do with the new machine, so I'll post more observations as I think of them (eventually).
