Mac Pro, and other thoughts

Well, it’s over, and to be honest, it wasn’t very surprising. I’m not sure what to make of the Mac Pro’s yet. On the one hand, they seem very well designed and more importantly, a product that I’d be happy with. On the flipside, the cheapest one is $2200 (dual dual 2.0ghz). It’s not a […]

WWDC Predictions

Well, I guess all the blogs are making their own guesses, so I might as well join the fray. I’ll divide things into likeliness levels, L1 being the most likely, through L3 being the most unlikely: * L1: Mac Pro (desktop), some kind of expanded iTunes service, Leopard announcements * L2: iPhone, MBP or MB […]

F-keys on a mac

I guess this might be pretty obvious to long time mac users, but it’s a recent realization of mine, so I’ll write it down in case anyone chances upon it. On a Powerbook (as well as MacBooks and MacBook Pro’s), the F-keys double as functional keys that control hardware features like brightness, volume, and keyboard […]

Use it or Build it yourself

So there’s “this post”:http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2006/06/01/switching-back.html in which a O’Reilly tech editor writes about how he’s switching back to Linux after a stint with OSX. The gist of his post was that OSX did not fit the way he liked to work, and that he could not mold OSX into the tool he needed to be efficient. […]

Mac Community

Just saw “this post”:http://www.bryanobryan.com/?p=28 talking about how there are a lot of hostile and arrogant people in the Mac user community. It’s interesting to think about why that is the case. Maybe it’s cuz people realize they just got ripped off for their hardware ;-). I certainly don’t think I act the way that the […]

Flip it and Reverse it

In the name of due diligence, after bagging on the Mac for all the ways it let me down, I should also consider this reverse question: what aspects of the Mac and OSX did I find unexpectedly useful or valuable. * *Printing*: The whole printing subsystem works surprisingly well under OSX. The dialogs are simple, […]

Lightroom Beta 3 on a Intel Mac Mini

As an experiment, I uploaded some of my photos to work, and installed Lightroom Beta 3 on my Core Duo mac mini at work. The difference in performance is.. well.. depressing. As Lightroom doesn’t use CoreGraphics, it’s particularly dependent on CPU power, and the Core Duo just kicks the crap out of the G4 that […]

FTP App

It seems hard to find a good FTP/sftp app these days. But for some reason, I was searching around today and found Cyberduck, a fantastic open source ftp/sftp app for OSX. It seems to be active, feature complete, and polished. What more can you ask for? It also has a great feature that Fugu also […]

Using Monaco in an xterm

If you split your work between a mac and linux a lot, you may wish to try to have the same terminal font across the two. I like Monaco that comes by default on the Mac, and today I figured out how to use it on my Linux box at work too. (Disclaimer: you might […]

Entourage burns my hands

While from a compatibility-with-Exchange point of view, Entourage is pretty good, from a performance perspective.. it’s just plain horrible. It doesn’t even seem to be properly multithreaded. The UI thread will block up frequently as I’m typing a message.. and while I’m doing nothing, it’s constantly eating 40% cpu on my Powerbook, and making it […]