Moving On

I have outgrown the limits of Blogger and I am moving my blog to Hack-a-Mac at Wordpress.com where I can do more with the site and contents. I hope to see everyone over there where I plan to keep posting and now, in more detail.

MikeS

Me, Myself and I

Self Portrait,
originally uploaded by wybnormal.

Here I am working hard (HA!!) on my Powerbook while enjoying a well earned day of rest at sea on the MS Noordam. During our ten days of Geek crusing, I aquired something of a rep for fun shirts and socks. The Mac was a given since there was around 50 of us Mac geeks gathered there for classes. Made it nice for a change to be in the majority and not have to explain to everyone why I had a Mac.

I'm back, finally

Did you miss me? of course you did :)

I have just spent the past two weeks crusing around the med with Geek Cruises for Mac Mania which was so very cool. There were two tracks running on the ship, OSX and Mac stuff like iPods and automator classes and digital camera and photoshop CS2 classes. Plus on the tours, we had two professional photographers with us to encourage, tease, beat on, laugh at and overall have a great time with while wandering the ruins of Pompeii and stops like Barcelona. Did I mention the FOOD??? OMG, while the food was not "great", it was very good and there was plenty of it on the Noordam and the food in the ports was pretty cool. We spent a few extra days in Rome tasting expresso and pasta all over town and happily filling up our flash cards with pictures.

We meet some very interesting people (hello to the three twisted sisters! you know who you are), had some great times like the "Great Annual Barcelona Death March to the ship" and other events. And there are the new cultural phrases and lexicon like "stupid mode" which will be forever branded to Jack :)

As I get more pictures up, I will post more stories. I would have done this live but the @*@(!@ internet connection on the ship was crap and they filtered some sites and their "security" broke other sites unless I set up my VPN first. I was very tempted to find their IT and first beat them for being stupid and then show them how to really do a network.

And just FYI.. no weight gain inspite of the Sangria :)

Just Works

I had a VERY pleasant surprise today with my new/old Powerbook laptop. I bought a used Powerbook because:

A: It has a PCMCIA slot and
B: It was 2,000 dollars cheaper than the MBP I want

But the PCMCIA slot was the important part since I have an EVDO card. I heard a rumor that the newest OSX supported my EVDO card and sure enough, when I pugged it in, it came right up and I promptly connected to the Sprint network and spent the next hours zooming around in EVDO land. Now, I did activate the card first on my Windows machine and I have read that this is a requirement for it to work. Small price to pay.

I was also impressed that I was able to use Superduper to snapshot my iMac G5 and first boot from the image and then restore it to the G4 Powerbook and it just worked. Pretty easy upgrade from the iBook.

SpyMe has become my favorite remote control app with it's scalable window. And WriteRoom is the favorite for taking quick notes.

The more I use Parallels, the more I wonder why Apple doesnt buy them and just intergrate it into OSX. It makes dual booting so passe. I have excellent performance and stability with it, even running the IE 7.x beta and GreenBorder which is an IE virtualization tool to protect your Windows machine against IE's many security holes.

I am heading to Rome and Spain in the coming weeks and I plan to use Skype onboard the ship with their wireless internet and see if I can save a buck or two on the cellphone bill. It's a "Geek Cruise" which should be a kick in the butt.





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Microsoft still sucks

I'm grumbling, out of everything that runs on my Intel Mini, Entourage is the one that half assed works and ends up crashing. To precise, it gets "stuck" and I think it is because it has issues with Rosetta which works fine with everything else. But everything is working well on my Intel mini. My 17 inch iMac G5 crapped out but the power supply was replaced under an extended warrenty and it took less than one day at the Apple store. You have to love ProCare :) But since I didnt know how long or what it was going to take, I upgraded to a 20 inchg G5 and now will sell the 17 inch. I'm also "upgrading" from my iBook to a used 15 inch Powerbook. Why not a Intel? Cost and reliably concerns. My Macbook Pro is going into the shop for random shutdowns even though the battery was replaced at my cost and the power brick was replaced under Apple's cost. And it's HOT, too hot to keep in my laptop or any part of my body. ANd since with the portable, I use Photoshop and a word processor, I can get by with the 1.6Ghz G4 for the next year while Apple gets it together with V2 of the Macbook Pro.

Parallels has been just awsome to work with. I use almost daily without issues. Even writing MS scripts :)

I replaced my VNC client/server with something called "SpyMe" which has much better speed since it hooks directly into Quartz among other reasons. It costs 15 bucks but over the VPN and with the scaled view, it just rocks. It uses a different port than VNC so I have had both running concurrently without any issues.







We had a AC failure at the office and in order to monitor the temps, I used a remote indoor/outdoor temp sensor with an LCD screen. I then used my iSight camera and iGlasses with Evocam to kludge together a "webcam" with the screen shot of the LCD temp. Worked well all holiday weekend.

Parallel Universe

Well, what Apple should have done was completed by Parallels today. The production release of their OSX virtual computer software is out now. The WSJ had a great piece on it with much of the same opinion I have, why in the hell would you want to dual boot a Mac when you can run BOTH concurrently with Parallels :) It works well enough to run WebEX in the virtual Windows session. I have to say that it is very impressive how well Parallels works. I use it every single day running Office, Outlook and even Visio without issues. IE gets a bit flacky now and then but it's IE :) And this is running on an "slow" Mini of 1.6Ghz but still a dual core. I think I may hack it to put in a different chip for giggles. I'm also wondering how to put a mini cooling tower on it to handle the heat from something like a 2.1Ghz dual core or the like. The 1.6 runs really cool even in the small formfactor of the Mini so who knows.

I found a cool application called Cryptix which offers a way to encrypt files on the fly among other things using a nice GUI and almost any kind of cipher. You have several encryption selections on the top including audio files. In the demo, SAVE is disabled which while annoying, is not a real burden in testing. All in all, a very useful tool. To list some of the features:

• Password Generator
• RSA 512 bits Key Generator
• DH 512 bits Key Generator
• Encoding / Decoding Cryptix files via yencode
• Encryption /Decryption via "Aes128 bits, Ano, Blowfish 447 bits, MD5 C, Twofish"
• Encoding / Decoding via "Base 64, Binary, Hexadecimal"
• Hash via "MD5 H, Sha1, Sha 256/512"
• Common Unix Tools "Manual, Logs Analyser, Locate Files, Unix Infos, Whereis"
• Save all your hash, encoding & encryption in one file at ease...
• little frontend for openssl who ll be in the future transformed in a full gui
• Complete manual
• Mnemonic password generator
• some improvements...
• Rot 13 Scramble
• Steganography for images(pdf,png,jpg,etc...)

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Switching Minis

I love my new Dual core Mini :) It's small, elegant and fast. But what really impresses the heck out of people is when I use Parallels (RC2) to show off running Windows XP and then using YouControl:Desktops to "flip" the entire desktop to a new one with different icons and wallpaper and it's fast! There is a free switcher called "Virtue" and it's actually been included in Parallels. It's fine but I prefer YouControl even though you have to pay a small amount for it. I find YouControl to be a more polished product and less buggy but that is to be expected since I paid for it. But free is good and both rock on Intel or PPC Macs without any real problems that I've seen. In the screens below you see the configuration menu and the icon menus. You get an icon view of each desktop and you can expand it out as I did here. Very clever!!!





I have to say that I retired my Delmac today with the final configurations of the new Mini. It's nice to have real video that I can adjust and I stayed with the 24 bit Transit audio card even with the Mini. It just sounds better than the built in sound.. big surprise! I also went to a DVI input for the monitor and that made a nice difference in the sharpness on the screen. The Dell keyboard sucks so I will have to replace it with something else.

My new (daughter's now) MacBook Pro had an interesting failure. The two inner pins on the mag connector failed to pop out and the result was that the battery would never charge all the way or at all. It took a while to figure this out but the Apple store at the Irvine Spectrum replaced the brick without any reall issues so life is good again.

Cracked

I finally cracked and ordered a new, actually a refurb'ed, Intel based mini to replace my hackamac Delac (dell mac) wannabe. The past two months has convinced me that the Intel is a sweet design and the mini will what I need it to do at the office. So I found a nice deal at Apple for a 1.66Ghz refurbed Mini with a gig of RAM and a hundred gig drive for 800 bucks. That is the going rate for ebay queens and this one has a year of support via Apple. That was a no-brainer.

The 17 year old was just given her new MacBook Pro for college and while the notebook is very nice (she almost didnt get back from Dad), we had a failure on the power adapter after just a couple of weeks. Two of the power pins pushed in and would not pop back out so the notebook would rarely charge without alot of effort. Apple made good on the 90 warrenty at the store and replace the brick without a problem. No fan noise that I can but then I'm half deaf from too much rock and roll (or server farms)

I'm a big fan of Mahjong and I found a version that I really like at Bonehead. The registration is something like eight bucks. Cheap entertainment for me :)

I just tried the newest OSX version of Skype and it worked very well. I did a 30 minute Skype to Skype call for a podcast (In the Trenches) and the quality of the call was excellent. Maybe they finally got it right for the Mac.