Mactastic

I FIXED IT!

2007-04-17T15:03:00.000-04:00

As the proud owner of a Apple PowerBook 17 I never expected to run into any problems, especially something as odd as what I am about to tell you. This article is about a strange little issue that sprang up about a year ago with the screws located under the battery.

A Problem Arises
Last year I was doing a lot of design work and everywhere I went, my PowerBook was right beside me. Hey, you never know when you will be inspired or just need to surf the Internet at the local Starbucks. Well one faithful morning while sipping on my Americano, just before a client meeting, I could not get my laptop open. The release switch somehow became jammed, and after repeatedly trying to open it, I resorted to a business card. Like a criminal with a credit card breaking into a locked room, I wedged the business card right above the switch or button that you would normally press to release the screen and moved it from side to side. Luckily this worked and was able to proceed to my meeting without delay. However this did not solve the switch problem.

A New Routine Was Formed.
Now with the dawn of each day I was forced to break out a business card to open my PowerBook. What a disgrace. I tried to fix it a couple of different times over the course of a 6-month period and failed every attempt. I know! I know! "I should have taken it to the Apple Store. They would have known what to do." But the thought of forking out $500 big ones kept me from doing that one. I asked friends, search the Internet and the only thought that seemed to be left was to open it up and look at the locking switch. This however would have been more trouble than it was worth. So I dealt with the problem the best I could. It really wasn't that bad, annoying and somewhat embarrassing, but not bad. The computer worked great and after awhile I became pretty good at opening the computer with out anyone suspecting a thing.

A Moment of Greatness.
Back in early March a colleague of mine dropped his Ti-book and snapped the monitors hinge. What an awful moment, right! He was lucky it wasn’t worse. With the help of the Internet he found a replacement hinge and after about a week of hooking his laptop to a plasma screen he was able to fix it. I was beside myself when I saw the job he did and thought, wow, if my colleague can fix his monitor, I can certainly fix my problem. So that day as he was describing to me how he had to take his computer apart, like separating the titanium alloy frame from the monitor in order to get to the shredded hinge. I began to open my PowerBook up starting with the battery. This is where I noticed 2 very small screws were loose and 2 others were missing where a plate conceals the mouse pad components above from the battery. Dumbfounded I called my colleague over to have a look only to discover one of the screws had lodged itself near a magnet that keeps the latches tight. Talk about a AH-HA moment. My colleague and I were blown away how these screws could have come loose, but on further investigation we found that these screws were thin and must have become out from being moved around so much.

So moral of this story is don't get screwed by your laptop.
Every once in awhile remove your battery and give all the screws a little tighten to be sure they stay in. Consider it a tune up or a rotation of the tires.

MAC PRO Dream Machine.

2007-04-04T16:11:00.000-04:00

The latest addition to the Mac Pro family: was added earlier today to Apples superb product line. The world’s first 3.0GHz, 8-core Intel Xeon-based Mac Pro. On Apple.com they say "Consider the bar officially raised". I would say, that bar was officially raised awhile ago.

Like many other geeks out there, it's always fun clicking that buy button and tricking out a dream machine. Ah... to imagine that much raw processing power for CS3 and other graphic aplications. So read on and lets see what my screaming fast Mac Pro would have in it.

First stop processor. This is a NO BRAINER, of course I would have the 8-core power with two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Clovertown” processors. We are talking Howling Fast.

Now we are on to the memory. I went with 16GB, this is a must when you are working with 10GB image files or like to have every Application open you own.

Storage is the next must have. If you are like me you have a large music, video and image library so lets go with a 500GB in Bay 1, 2, 3 and 4. One is the applications drive, two is for music/audio, three is for video projects and four is for images.

Now it is time to speed the rest of the way through my build out. Lets ad the top of the line display card money can buy. What is this you ask... Well is is the NVIDIA QUADRO FX 4500. This card has 512MB of onboard ram, with Stereoscopic 3D support(http://www.nvidia.com/object/3d_stereo.html), and of course the 2x dual link DVI for the TWO 30inch displays I am going to add to my dream package.

Finally to finish the system out. I will need two 16x Superdrives and of course Bluetooth 2.0+EDR and Airport Extreme.

Now I am ready for my total. It can't be two expensive, because I only got 2TB of storage and did not add on the wireless keyboard, apple care, nor OSX SERVER. Oh boy, Oh boy.

THE GRAND TOTAL IS...... $15,037.00

Not awful, Not in my budget either. But it was fun non the less. What's your dream machine got in it? Leave a comment and let me know.

MAC Prius

2006-02-19T21:58:00.000-05:00

Now that is what I call a fat carputer. With apple Front Row installed and the Prius's touch sensitive screen. Navigating your movies, Music, and photos is a breeze. This is by far the best integration I have seen. Read all about the Mac prius here http://www.kusnetz.net/prius/

Back from the dead... Happy Festivus!!

2005-12-18T21:54:00.000-05:00

Well, it's been quite a long time since our last post. Nate and I have been busy little bees. Don't fret, we'll be back with gusto, in the new year. Perhaps a podcast and or vid-cast. We'll nail things down in January... I have also been working on a post about the iPod +Video and will share my thoughts soon. Until then, Happy Festivus y'all!

Apple Store Tiger Event pics

2005-05-02T12:01:00.000-04:00

Hey folks! Here are some cool pics I took of the North Point Mall Apple Store Tiger event. Enjoy!

The_Line.jpg

The_Door.jpg

The_Door_2.jpg

Steve.jpg

Nate.jpg

Catch the Tiger by the tail!

2005-04-30T18:36:00.000-04:00

Well folks, Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" is finally out! The long wait is thankfully over. Nate, Steve & I took our families to the Northpoint Mall in Alpharetta, GA for the Launch event at the Apple Store last night at 6:00pm. The store was closed when we got there and they were routing traffic to the store to a nearby store that was closed for remodeling. When 6:00pm hit, the mall security got us to the store pretty quickly and the line of Mac-nuts filed in ready to purchase.

Now, no real schwag to give out this time - re: no tee-shirts . Instead, upon entering, diligent Apple Store employees handed out a scratch-ticket for a cool contest for each shopper. The big prize was a PowerBook G4. I got a Free iTunes song and found another ticket for 10% off of a total purchase price for anything bought last night in the store. I handed that to my friend Steve to use when purchasing our 5 License Tiger Family Pack as well as Adobe Creative Suite 2 and Macromedia Dreamweaver, for Nate. Came in handy! My coolest girlfriend Julie, gave me her scratch-ticket for another iTunes song. She is the bestest! From what I have gleened, the event was a great success! Still, I wish I won that PowerBook...

I installed Tiger today on a firewire external drive that was a clone of my 1 GHz PowerBook G4's hard drive. Once again, my sweet girlfriend Julie came through and let me use her 80GB Que drive for my install. Installation was flawless once my drive was cloned and ready to go. I highly recommend using Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper to clone your drive if you want to go that way. I find that doing a "test" install on a cloned drive is the best way to work out any app conflicts and or work out bugs without destroying your working system. Thus far, I am highy impressed with the speed of Tiger and the neat new Spotlight and Dashboard apps. One caveat on my approval of Dashboard - where the hell do you configure the new widget toolbar? Downloading new widgets will automatically install them to your ~/library/widgets folder, but support in the System Preference pane for Dashboard/Expose is nearly non-existent. All you can do is chose a keyboard shortcut key to launch or close Dashboard. This needs a fix in my opinion.

The built-in RSS feed reader in Safari RSS, is pretty neat if that is what you look for in a web browser. It renders this blog quite well and I will continue to evaluate it. Thing is, I really don't know about the whole idea of it. I mean, If I want to surf, I will surf sites on the web. Using a web browser, no matter how nice it renders RSS feeds, is still not an aggregator/rss reader. The aggregator is all about saving browse time by putting all your news subscriptions in one easy to find place. Safari RSS doesn't do that. Someone will have to convince me that this feature is really a feature. That being said, this was the least impressive new item in Tiger. I am still very impressed with the new feel, speed and finder improvements.

I will take a look at Automator and see just what is possible with this workflow processor. I think that for the Mac enthusiast, this will be a great timesaver. For the Mac Pro however, it looks to be not configurable enough to be a huge boost for productivity. Time will tell. Anyway, Mactastic people from all over, go out and get yourself a copy of Tiger and get to it. It's worth the wait. More to come as Nate and I fiddle, fool and experiment with Tiger.

Adobe to swallow Macromedia whole...

2005-04-18T10:07:00.000-04:00

Wow, looks like the folks at our friendly neighborhood graphics conglomerate, have decided they need to be larger by a whole bunch. Macromedia has finally succumbed to the hive and will now be known as 6 of 7. Or something like that. In an all-stock purchase in the amount of $3.4 Billion, Macromedia will be swallowed-up like Johah by the whale. Check out the Adobe press release here. You can also check out Macromedia's release here. I guess it's a wait-and-see on just how this will effect Mac graphics users in the long run. Hopefully, the fusion will create some truly spectacular new software - or at least, some better integrated ones.

Safari 1.3 update

2005-04-17T02:18:00.000-04:00

Looks like there are more serious issues with Safari after the 10.3.9 update. Crap. Get yourself over to Macfixit for more info...

Panther 10.3.9 is out the door. Tiger, here we come...

2005-04-17T01:47:00.000-04:00

Well, 10.3.9 is out as promised. I upgraded and encountered no real issues other than one. Safari 1.3 apparenly is not very compatible with browser add-ins like AcidSearch. Sure enough, I had it already installed and after doing the upgrade, Safari wouldn't launch. Actually, it crashed immediately after launch. I figured I would rule out any prefs problems and add-ins, and sure enough, removing AcidSearch did the trick. I also did some searching around on Macintouch and MacNN and found a supporting post from Jason Overby on Macintouch.

"After installing the 10.3.9 update, Safari crashed repeatedly. Only after some poking around, I found that AcidSearch was the culprit. This normally resides in the SIMBL folder created in ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL. I also have Safari Source installed there but there appear to no problems with that. So, if others are having trouble with Safari crashes, check to see what, if any, third party add-ons you have."

I recommend that you check out the Apple Tech article on 10.3.9 before installing About the Mac OS X 10.3.9 Update (Delta).

Also, we got updates for iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto and the iSight cam. I am especially fond of the iPhoto update, as that baby launches like ten times faster now! Thanks Apple. Can't wait to get my greasy little mitts on Tiger. Just 12 more days...

Heya!

2005-04-14T09:52:00.000-04:00

Hello and welcome! CD here. Nate and I look forward to discussing everything "Mac" in the coming days, weeks & months. We welcome your suggestions on topics of interest for this the greatest computing platform on the planet. Gadgetry, software, Apple hardware, periphs and more will be our bread & butter, but we will also stray into various other miscellany as well. Hey, we're well rounded geeks! Anyway, we look forward to "gettin' it done for the Mac"!

P.S. Look for a Mactastic Podcast to come shortly...

Welcome

2005-04-13T15:41:00.000-04:00

Well here we go. The first post to our new site title Mactastic.com. What is Mactastic you ask... Well, it represents anything that we fellow uber-mac geeks see as being a cool product developed for the Mac platform or incredible stories of uses for the Mac. Let me take this opportunity to thank everyone that has happened upon this new site and to let you know that this is only the beginning. Check back often and stay up to date with the mactastic things happening in the world of Apple.