Dave’s Personal Blog

My replacement PowerBook G4 batteries arrived this morning…. discharging the old ones now. I’m so glad they thought to include a note reminding me to unplug the power before discharging… wtf?

Update:

I’m actually very impressed with Apple. It only took a couple weeks for my new batteries to arrive. Given the number of batteries involved in the recall, that’s not bad at all.

Just awesome.

I just finished watching the video of Apple’s new product event of today.

I grabbed the new iTunes and it rocks. Good job folks. It really is a great leap forward.

I liked how Steve Jobs said “What do you think? Do you like it?” after demoing the new iTV product. Well.. I like it. Apple again shows how it kicks ass with class & cool. I’ll be in line when iTV is released.

I love watching these Apple events. It never ceases to make me realize all over again why I’m such an Apple fan.. and why I have been since my first Apple ][+. (OK.. there were some dark years when Steve Jobs wasn’t there).

Nice.

This is a bit of a retort to Nancy’s post earlier this evening, but it’s also an honest show of appreciation for a great system.

What I usually love about my Mac is that I hardly ever have to duck under the covers and use UNIX. It’s messy & crude.. I’d rather keep my hand on the mouse, thank you very much. But there are times I’m thankful for my SunOS & Linux background…

I was fiddling with an iTunes export of my collection and was wondering how many different kinds of files there were. An iTunes export is a big property list file, encoded in fairly lame XML. Each track has a “kind”, MP3, AAC, Protected AAC, MP4 video, etc. That information is stored in a key value pair where the key is “Kind”. Ok, just go through the file looking at the “kind” tags. Well… it’s over 14M of semantically barren XML. UNIX to the rescue. Drop into a terminal and start playing.

grep "<key>Kind" ../data/Library.xml

That gave me who-knows-how-many thousand “Kind” lines. Now to boil it down.

grep "<key>Kind" ../data/Library.xml | sort | uniq

Bingo. The 9 lines I was looking for.

You have to love having the sexiest hardware and sleekest GUI system… with all the raw power of a UNIX system just a terminal window away

The local Apple Store got their first shipment of the new iLife & iWork today. I called and had them set a copy of each side to make sure I got them. I’m looking forward to exploring the apps over the next week or so.. but I’m quite excited after seeing the MacWorld keynote.

I’ve spent this evening using Keynote to work on slides for SD West. It’s a joy. As I’ve gotten used to since getting my first iBook almost year ago.. it just works.

So.. I was in an Apple Store near my client in the Detroit area last night to get a short, white firewire cable for my external travel drive (why it came with a long, thick, black cable is beyond me).

Well, I had seen the cable there before so I just got it off the rack and got into line to pay for it.

Now, it strikes me that supermarket designers must had a bolt of lightning style epiphany when they came up with the idea of putting the candy racks right at the tills.

And Apple is not one to pass by a good idea.

So… back to last night… I’m standing there in line with my short, white firewire cable.. waiting my turn. It’s a nice looking place so I glance around at the shelves, the latest iPod gadgets, the other ubercool people buying mac stuff.

Oh.. what’s this? A table next to the till with “stuff” on it. iPods and such… marked down… ah-ha… they have a clearance table.. demos & refurbs… nice discounts too.

Oh. Oh my. Oh dear. What’s that underneath the table? Oh. I feel the sweat start.

It’s a pile of powerbook boxes. 12″ powerbooks.. bah.. nothing interesting.. my 14″ iBook will go head to head with that. 17″ powerbooks.. gangly monsters… laptops on steroids.. abominations… nothing interesting there. iBooks.. got that covered already.

But what’s that? That in between sized black box? Could it be? No.. it couldn’t.. but alas, it is.

A 15″ PowerBook. hmm.. it can’t hurt to just look at it…

It’s nicely discounted. But still, it’s probably an entry level.. with a wee hard disk, and a combo drive. Nope… it’s top of the line… 1.67GHz, 80G, SuperDrive, Bluetooth 2.0, wifi, gigbit ethernet.. blah blah blah. 512M installed.

“You want to have a closer look at that unit?” GULP! “Um.. ya.. sure… it prob doesn’t have tiger installed”.. turn it on.. it dives into the perky tiger installer.

“And it’ll take 2 1G sticks?” “No I it has 512M soldered in and room for 1 stick”.. oh.. I’m off the hook.. but yet.. “Can you verify that….” “My mistake.. the 12″ has 512 soldered in.. this one takes 2 sticks.. there’s a 512M stick in it”. Damn.

Feebly.. “it has a superdrive?” “Yes”.. ok I give up. I resign myself to fate, destiny, the will of the gods… and hand over my credit card.

So now I have in front of me a shiny, almost new, 15″, fully loaded, Aluminum PowerBook

And a short, white firewire cable.

When I got the new iBook, I picked up a couple iSights as well… so Nancy & I can video conf when I’m onsite in Detroit.

These things so rock… very sweet.. a run of the mill webcam, they ain’t. Built in dual element noise reducing mic, auto focus, 640×480 resolution, 30 fps video at 24-bit colour, built in image processing, mounts for various applications… cool stuff.

One beef though.. the mount that is for use with a laptop screen (sort of hangs on the top of the screen) takes up a cubic space… think 2 arms that are perpendicular… one across the top of the screen, one sticking back & up on which to mount the camera. This thing does not flat pack! It’s an awkward shape. So i did what any geek would do.. I hacked it. One of the mounts is magnetic with a nice powerful magnet (no.. not got mounting it on the top of a CRT), and it just so happens that on Saturday we bought some super-strong disk magnets.. the same size as the base of the magnetic iSight mount. A couple minutes with a saw, a file, and some superglue and I had McGuyvered the laptop screen mount to use the magnetic mount to hold the camera. Now I have two pieces that will pack flat. Nice. I’ll get a pic of it up here shortly.

My new iBook arrived last week while I was onsite in Detroit. We cracked it open after I got home and transferred the contents of my previous iBook.. everything is good.. Apple has done a great job for people moving to a new Mac.

Sat morning i did a bit more on getting it setup and shut it down. We went out for the afternoon.. when we got home I popped in the 1G ram stick.. put it back together and pressed the power button…

nothing.. nilch.. zip.. nadda…

not so good

strip it, take the ram out, reassemble, power

still nothing

shit

really, really not good

(this is where title comes from).. ok.. i said “near” didn’t I… read on

ok.. gotta call apple… i could use the other iBook.. except that Nancy’s already done a fresh install since the new one was up & running fine already. Anyway… look in the manual at the trouble shooting section first… nothing applies.. they give an URL to Apple’s service site.. try it.. (no.. we’re far from a one computer household) hmm.. “if your iBook won;t power on”.. worth a try… apparently the Power Management Unit can get confused.. perhaps by wome errant static or cosmic ray when I put the ram in?.. press Shift-Control-Option-Power with the computer powered down. Wait 5 sec.. press power.. IT’S ALIVE!!!!

Nice…

So everything is good now.. i’m just in the process of making the final tweaks to the new iBook.

Apple’s article on resetting the PMU

I liked my iBook so much that I got another one

Well.. not exactly.. really

I had a 14″ iBook 60G/1.25G/superdrive/802.11g. My new one is the same except it’s completely loaded… same thing but with an 80G disk and built-in bluetooth. Nancy scoffed at me somewhat … with my gushing Macheadedness… but then we beefed up her old (circa late 2000) iMac with a gig of ram & an 80G disk she started playing around with it. So one thing led to another as they so often do. I bought a second iBook, handed my previous one (only 2 months old) on to Nancy and we’ll ripple laptops (albeit Windows based) through the food chain.

Nancy will be writing about her “Switch” elsewhere. BTW, just so that she is completely clean of the taint of Microsoft, I picked up a Palm Tungsten T5 (like mine) to replace her iPaq PPC. So she’s gone from Linux/PPC to OS X/Palm… though her server farm is still running Debian.

The iBook is turning out to be a nice gaming system.. I’ve begun playing WarCraft III on it this week. Very nice. Now if more game companies would put their games on Mac! Like Dawn of War or Battle for Middle Earth!!!

Sure.. I know the arguments about market share & all. Hopefully the MacMini will boost Apple’s marketshare to the point where it becomes a significant player in the gaming market.

On a related note.. DOOM 3 for Mac will be available in stores shortly.. but with massive hardware requirements.

Well, I keep getting deeper and deeper into that which is Macintosh. My latest discovers (thanks to Steve) is a blogging app called MarsEdit.. by the same folks that wrote NetNewsWire. I use NNW for blog reading… and I think I’ll be using MarsEdit for posting from now on as well.