January 08, 2008

Leopard is spinning

A month or so has passed since I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard. Upgrading my iMac to Leopard took less than an hour, and after that everything was ready and fine.

One ugly problem however, after I downloaded and installed the first fat Leopard Security Update (35mb), but that was entirely my own fault. When the reboot took a little longer than I expected, and I assumed nothing was happening at all, I hard yanked the iMac into a reboot, and that was ooh soo wrong. The machine booted up into a fresh new welcome screen, wanted me too enter a new user, but kept rebooting up in a loop.

The result was that I had to do a safe reboot, and a complete reïnstallation from the Leopard CD. Having done that (went smooth again in an hour or so) I fired up Time Machine for the first time on a clean 250 GB external hard disk. After that disk was formatted Leopard started copying files and told me the first back-up process would take more than eight hours. So I went around to do other things and when I came back late at night the iMac was sleeping, and behaved very well when woken up.

Check out the video from Walt Mossberg and read his article: Leopard: Faster, Easier Than Vista.

Posted by Leon at 10:12 AM | Comments (0)

August 30, 2007

Coming soon: VWApple iCar?

According to different sources, like AP this morning, Apple and Volkswagen are discussing the possibility of building an "iCar" that would feature products by the producer of the ubiquitous iPod personal music player.

Several Newspapers and magazines - try to Google iCar on Google News - Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Volkswagen chief Martin Winterkorn have met on several occasions in Cupertino and are planning to meet for further discussions. Said Hans-Gerd Bode, spokesman for Volkswagen.

in Dutch @ DutchCowboys

Bode stated that there are 'scores of ideas', but not too many concrete plans right now.

According to market experts a compact car upgraded with Apple products would be of substantial interest to young target groups.

Apple is already working with VW and other automakers to offer an integrated in-car hookup for iPods.

For instance electronics, satellite navigation machines, cup warmers, dvd, e-mail, inbuild sound systems are an increasingly selling point for automakers. Take Ford Motor, that's soon going to present an in-car communication and entertainment system developed with Microsoft Corp (so let's hope they leave the blue screen of death option out).

This system, called Sync, would allows drivers, using either voice recognition or steering wheel controls, to listen to their digital music players and have text messages on their cell phones read aloud.

Right. My with the black fenders, that I'm enjoying since 1986, started it's life in 1969 in the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg as a standard white 1300. Maybe it's time to deliver Dorus at the painter once again, this time for an all white makeover, including some iPoddery.

Posted by Leon at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)

August 06, 2007

The Fake Steve Jobs Is Busted

For about a year and a half I've been enjoying the work of an anonymous blogger who was acting as Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, one of the world’s most famous businessmen, and certainly on of the worlds best salesman.

On 'the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs', Jobs came out like a difficult and egoistical leader. 'Fake Steve',” attracted also many famous readers, the real Mr. Jobs as well as Bill Gates acknowledged reading the blog, though the latter probably enjoyed it more than the main subject of the blog.

Turned out the writer wasn't living in the valley, nor is he an Apple employee, but a tech writer and editor living and working on the East Coast; Daniel Lyons, from Forbes Magazine.

Mr. Lyons was pulled out of his hidden closet last weekend by the New York Times' Brad Stone.

Check out the report at the NYT website.

What I really like is the comment of his boss, Richard Karlgaard, who said he had a good laugh and holds no grudges; 'I think it is the most brilliant caricature of an important part of American culture that I’ve seen. We’re really proud that he’s one of ours.'

Right! (Do ya read, up there?)

The comment of Mr. Jobs are less funny. By now we all know that one of the worlds best sellers has an en ego that's so big it doesn't fit in his fattest Pro Mac.

A pity, bit stupid also, because with just al little bit of wit, a small piece of self-referential humor, Steve Jobs could have gained a lot of sympathy, courtesy of Steve Fake Jobs.

in Dutch at @ DutchCowboys

Posted by Leon at 10:49 AM | Comments (0)

August 04, 2007

Windows on my Mac?

No matter what Walt Mossberg does, shows or tells, I'll never ever!

Posted by Leon at 01:46 PM | Comments (0)

May 08, 2007

The Meanest Mac in History

The renovation finished in four years and ten days (only the new shed to be built somewhere in summer) I'm sitting and thinking on this first rainy day after seven weeks of fabulous weather, most of it spilled painting and finishing.

What now? I'd promised myself a new iMac when the renovation would by over and done, but the 24 inch looks so 2006 already. In a few weeks there will be another keynote somewhere, and right now only God and Steve Jobs know what kind of white rabbit the latter is going to pull from his hat once on stage.

A 30 inch iMac? Or some new box filled with things we haven't heard of yet? By the way, there's a Mac Pro - to be connected to two 30 inch screens of course - running two 3gigahertz Clovertown Xeon processors!

Here she is: an eight core OS X machine, a.k.a. The Meanest Intel Mac in History.

So: the 20 inch G5 with 1 gigabyte memory, that I'm enjoying for eighteen months now, isn't a future classic anymore: it's an old-timer.

Now what?

Posted by Leon at 10:16 AM | Comments (0)

March 09, 2007

H.264 in every Mac?

After eighteen months of happy Maccing, I've become a Mac maniac, and I'm never going to use anything else but OS X. That's the good news, at least for those who also use a Mac. The bad news is that one never knows when to upgrade.

I know that I'm going to swap my 20 inch G5 iMac for a brand new Intel powered 24 inch , but the big question is: when?

I'm not waiting for a 30 inch, because it wouldn't fit on my desk under the open stairs in the living.

But behind that bigger screen, a lot of hardware might always change very fast. There's always an Apple event or keynote dawning behind the horizon, and I've learned the bad way not to buy anything in the months before super seller Steve has left the stage.

Yet faster Intel chips, who knows an iMac with two dual core processors, quicker than the quickest Mac Pro.

My choice as well as my timing are even more difficult now that I've read that Cupertino plans to add H.264 hardware support to its entire line.

At least, according to Robert X. Cringely: The Great Apple Video Encoder Attack of 2007.

Now what?

in Dutch at @ Dutch Cowboys

Posted by Leon at 11:39 AM | Comments (0)

May 05, 2006

Moving house and the FlashMac

My complete computer content has moved to the web, I realised this week.

Over time my machine has become nothing more than an interface between my living room and the Internet. Everything that's valuable is somewhere out there on that evil web, but I don't bother at all.

I trust Verio, the keeper of my virtual magazines, I trust Google, my digital amanuensis, I trust Apple, my mechanic.

Behind my blog at Verio rests what I want to keep safe and hidden, Google saves other things, indexes and searches, distributes, receives and sends, and on the iDisk at my Dot.Accounts is a system backup ready, in case things go wrong.

The web has become where I live and work: for what do I need a hard disk?

Translation @ DutchCowboys

For the five thousand or so mp3 songs in the iTunes folder? Matter of time; bandwidth and web space are already almost so gargantuan as well as cheap that my music collection will be streamed to some disk in some rack in some data center as well, to be streamed to wherever I want to listen to it. Beat it.

In a lot of offices they have arrived: machines without hard disks, no more than keyboard and screen. The hardware is hidden in the screen (I'm typing this on my iMac) or in a matchbox sized box, and everything is connected to a company server and/or the Internet.

Soon you will be working on such a thin client at home. Don't invest any money in hard disks or DVD recorders, because you won't need them anymore.

If anything important dies on a computer - Mac or PC - it's a hard disk, eight out of ten. Number nine a fan fails, causing the processor to overheat, and in mentioning the occasional cup of coffee over the keyboard the top ten of computer failures is complete.

On a machine that's nothing more than a screen and a keyboard nothing more can fail, it costs no more than, well, as keyboard and a good screen, and as a bonus the machine is really quiet.

So all I really need - let's forget about my music for a moment - all I need that hard disk for is for booting OS X.

My guess is one or two more keynotes and Steve Jobs will present one: the first FlashMac - laptop or desktop - without a hard disk, but with one or two gigabyte flash memory. And no more super drive, cause nobody needs disks anymore because nobody will burn anymore. You will save your stuff on the web, or you will save it on flash memory.

OS X will be waiting for you in flash and will boot up in a flash, in one or two seconds.

Every picture, every document, every file, every keystroke, will instantly be saved, somewhere on the web. That's what I'm doing already, while I'm saving some money for my FlashMac.

Posted by Leon at 03:45 PM | Comments (10)

April 14, 2006

Airport Express streaming

As I'm working a lot on my iMac a these days, decided to buy an Apple Airport Express, and was suprised again (twice) by Apple.
The day before a colleague gave me a baseball dvd; Astros - White Sox, impressive stuff, all about power pitching. Tried the dvd in my XP machine at the newspaper, but gave up, frustrated, after fifteen minutes of typical Windows behaviour; crashing media player, crashing XP, crashing machine. Took the dvd home, slipped it in the side slot of the Mac and it started playing.

Aiport; same story. Bought it because I wanted to stream music from the Mac to our 25 year old Pioneer stereo set. Plugged it into the power outlet behind the stero, and connected two old banana plugs (one red, one black) in what looked like two right connections in the back of the old Pioneer. Walked to the computer at the other side of the living, started iTunes, and opened the manual to check out how to set up the wireless connection.

I swear I hadn't even found the right page when the Mac started streaming, and the old stero started playing the Carlos Libendensky tango that we bought in Buenos Aires!

I'm beginning to wonder why anybody in a right state of mind would install any Windows on any new Mac with the Pentium processors. I can think of only one valid reason: to prove that even XP runs fine on a Mac. Even XP!

Posted by Leon at 04:47 PM | Comments (1)

February 19, 2006

How to make a Mac invisible?

My logs show that since I'm a happy Mac owner, the percentage of visitors using a Mac has risen. The average of Mac users in unique sessions is approximately 50 a day now. Must have something to do with search engines. Anyway; this might be the right place to ask the question: how do I make my Mac invisible?
On my previous old XP and Win 2K platforms, my machines passed the Shields Up test at Gibson Research with flying colors: totally stealth, totally invisible. The Norton Suite did the job wel, Firewall and anti-virus.
While I'm using Little Snitch and Virex I feel pretty safe, and all logs so far haven't showed anything that should worry me.

Having said that; I want to be invisible again. A quick search on the internet showed that I should check: Sharing/Firewall/Advanced/Stealth Mode.

Having done so, inviting Gibson again to touch me, see me, feel me, (and heal me!) the results were the same:

File sharing and common ports no problem, all closed. So far so good, but now in probing all service ports the machine fails:

Solicited TCP Packets: RECEIVED (FAILED) — As detailed in the port report below, one or more of your system's ports actively responded to our deliberate attempts to establish a connection.

Ping Reply: RECEIVED (FAILED) — Your system REPLIED to our Ping (ICMP Echo) requests, making it visible on the Internet.

Now I know there's an awful lot of information on the Gibson site, but some of the stuff is right above my head, and apart form that, I havent't got the time to seek it all out.

I kow too that my problems will probably be fixed by installing Norton Internet Security for the Mac, but there must be a quick fix.

Probably a simple terminal command wich results in denying a ping request, and another one doing the same for that port response.

Anybody?

> > > > > >

Going back to Gibson after Garrett's post:

---------------------

Report created on UTC: 2006-02-20 at 06:33:30


Results from scan of ports: 0-1055

    0 Ports Open

    0 Ports Closed

 1056 Ports Stealth

---------------------

 1056 Ports Tested

ALL PORTS tested were found to be: STEALTH.

TruStealth: PASSED - ALL tested ports were STEALTH,

                   - NO unsolicited packets were received,

                   - NO Ping reply (ICMP Echo) was received.

---------------------

Thanks, Garret, and Little Snitch

Posted by Leon at 11:48 AM | Comments (1)

January 21, 2006

FatCat

Goede of slechte timing? Vijfentwintig jaar geen haar op mijn hoofd gehad die erover piekerde om een Mac te kopen, en nu ik er een heb, stopt Apple er Intel processors is. En beweert Steve Jobs met een opgewekt gezicht dat de nieuwe Intel-versie van de iMac, waarvan ik amper een maand de trotse bezitter ben, minstens twee keer zo snel is.
Is FatCat, de naam waaronder mijn witte tornado op internet rond raast, een kat in de zak?

Ach, het zal allemaal wel, dacht ik altijd als Apple weer eens met ebenchmarks naar buiten kwam waaruit zou moeten blijken dat iedere machine waar het Apple-logo niet op prijkte, een miskoop was. De eerste de beste Pentium op de krant liep ongeveer twee keer zo snel als de Power Macs op lay-out en beeldredactie, maar de grafieken in Mac magazines wezen precies de andere kant uit.

Hoe dan ook, ik voel me bepaald niet gekocht of genaaid. Ik kan me eigenlijk – even op mijn eigen schouder slaan – niet voorstellen wat mijn FatCat nog sneller zou moeten doen.

De belangrijkste reden van mijn migratie is het besturingssysteem en aan dat OS X is met de vrijpartij tussen Apple en Pentium niets veranderd. Wat is dat operating system een genot om mee te werken, en dan zal het waarschijnlijk ook nog zo zijn dat de mijne met zijn 2,5 gigabyte geheugen snel of sneller is dan de nieuwe Pentium instapmodellen. Mijn plezier is niet bedorven.

Wat zou kunnen is dat straks iedereen die nu Windows gebruikt op een Dell of een klassieke machine van een andere dozenschuiver, de keuze krijgt tussen Windows en OS X.

Of dat illegaal dan wel legaal is, weet nog niemand. Apple ontkent dat het zijn prachtige besturingssysteem beschikbaar zal stellen voor iets anders dan een Mac. Terwijl ze bij Microsoft hun hart vasthouden, blaast op internet de ene na de andere hacker op de loftrompet: ik heb OS X draaien op mijn Dell!

Het wachten is op de volgende radicale koerswijziging van Apple: een mooie doos met een cd erin: OS X voor iedereen.

Laat maar komen.

Posted by Leon at 11:41 AM | Comments (1)

December 16, 2005

Bekeerd

Ter bescherming van mijn geloofwaardigheid ga ik even geen discussies aan over computers en besturingssystemen. Wie wil weten wat ik vroeger over Apple geschreven heb, duikt in mijn archief en denkt er het zijne van. Grijnzende Mac-gebruikers zullen het voortschrijdend inzicht noemen, maar er prijkt een hagelwitte platte machine op mijn bureau; toegetreden tot de Mac-parochie.

Toch bekeerd, want tot OS X klaar was, moest ik er helemaal niets van hebben. Maar toen dat besturingssyteem klaar was, en ik las dat het een grafische schil rond een compleet Unix systeem was, begon het te kriebelen. Vooral omdat de systemen waar een internetredactie mee werken moet, zoals in vrijwel iedere vaderlandse kantoortuin, gebaseerd zijn op spullen van de firma Microsoft.

Er zijn maar twee servers van de tientallen waar ik dagelijks mee moet werken, waar nooit problemen mee zijn. Niet mijn verdienste, want beheerd door nerds die er verstand van hebben, maar ze hebben godzijdank niks met Windows te maken. De een is een Linux Red Hat server die in vijf jaar nooit plat geweest is, de ander Krijnen.Com en dat is Unix (HP-UX 11i).

Een mooi grafische schil op Unix, dat sprak me wel aan. Maar ja, drie jaar geleden had ik mijn nieuwe Pentium net opgetuigd met XP toeters en bellen, dus besluit en investering, zoals dat in de politiek heet, in afwachting van betere tijden gereserveerd.

De toekomst is nu gearriveerd met een iMac g5 met 2,5 gigabyte geheugen. Na een weekje wennen, appeltje inplaats van control, paar ingeslepen futiliteiten, weet ik zeker: nooit meer terug naar Windows.

Na het uitpakken werden de eerste door Apple gewekte verwachtingen rap ingelost. Het opensnijden van karton en cellofaan nam de meeste tijd in beslag. Het ging zo: stekker, netwerkabel, muis en toetsenbord aansluiten; klaar.

Alles werkte, inclusief internet en eerste update van de software. Misschien moet je te lang met Windows gewerkt hebben om dat op prijs te stellen, maar ik kan u verzekeren dat het een lekker gevoel is en dat het snel went.
Dit stukkie is als eerste in BBEdit getikt, binnenkort meer.

Posted by Leon at 04:20 PM | Comments (13)