Entries tagged with “Apple” from Paul Holbrook's Weblog

My Mac Mini may not be the most powerful computer I have in the house, but it has one huge virtue: it's quiet.  I love that.  

The earliest Mini's didn't have a fan.  This one has one, but it is amazingly quiet. 

Nice work.

My experience with the the Mac Mini I bought in October has made me a convert.  Even though I built a new AMD-based Windows system at the same time that's faster than my Mini, I like the Mac environment.  And for those Windows applications that I can't live without, VMWare Fusion works just fine.   So since October, the Mac has been my primary environment. 

I've never spent my own money for a laptop.  I work in IT, and since 1996, every company I've worked for has provided me a Windows laptop.  But it seemed unlikely that a company would buy me a Mac laptop.  So in December the bug bit me, and I bought a black MacBook. 

I was never really in the market for a sub-notebook, and the specs on the air don't attract me.  1.6 Ghz processor vs my 2.2.  2 gig of ram vs the 4 gig I put in mine.  (From Fry's - only $90 with rebates!)  No DVD.  80 gig 4200 RM drive vs my 160gb 5400.  Higher res screen on the Air - that's nice - but not worth the extra money.

The lower weight and sleekness isn't necessary for me.  The Macbook is already thinner and lighter than the other Windows laptops I've had.   I like it a lot.

Mac OS 10.5 has a VNC server built in to allow remote access back to your Mac.  Many sites have claimed that standard VNC clients will work with Mac OS VNC.

Well, that may be true for some people, but I haven't been able to connect  back to my Mac outside of my local network using Apple's built-in server. 

It worked fine from a Windows machine on the local network.  But outside my network - no go. I tried opening port 5900 across my Buffalo home router.  I tried RealVNC and TightVNC, both from a Windows XP system, and both would let me get to a password prompt, but then died promptly. I tried tunneling port 5900 across an SSH connection to my Mac. I tried squinting and chanting "Apple is my friend."  Nothing worked. 

My solution was to download the Vine Server VNC server from Redstone Software.  I configured it to use a different port to avoid conflicting with Apple VNC server.  Vine Server is free.

It works very well. Vine Server also pays attention to other VNC options that Apple's server doesn't - it will work with 8 bit color, for example, which is important for speeding up the connection. 

I also went in and turned off the Dock animations.  (I wish there was a way to do that automatically when logging in via VNC.)

It still doesn't work as nicely as Remote Desktop does for the PC, but it's a good start.

I bought a Mac Mini a few weeks back.  I bought it just one week shy of Apple's release of Leopard, knowing that I'd have to do the upgrade myself and pay an extra $10 for the DVD, but the siren call of pretty new hardware was too strong to resist.

I did the upgrade the Monday after Leopard came out - a straight in-place upgrade - and everything seemed to be fine. 

But all was not well.  Emacs was my canary in the coal mine; when I fired up a terminal and started emacs, I got the cryptic message " Fatal malloc_jumpstart() error"

This discussion convinced me that something broke doing the Leopard upgrade in place, so I went back and reinstalled Leopard using the archive and install method.  Problem solved.

I carried a Treo 650 for perhaps 2 years.  When I first got it, I was pleased to have a true smart phone for a change.  I liked the Palm OS side of it - the calendar and to-do features, the third party apps.  But as a phone or network device, the Treo was frustrating.  The Treo had a quite nasty habit of freezing when I went to answer a phone call.  Not a good thing for a phone to do.  The Treo had a web browser, but using it was frustrating - too slow, and too many pages that didn't display properly.

When I left EarthLink, I knew I wanted a smart phone.  I briefly considered a Helio Ocean, but user reviews were lukewarm. 

Then Apple dropped the price of the iPhone from $599 to $399.  I went out and bought an iPhone the same day.

I like my iPhone a lot.  Web browsing and email are good.  The EDGE network is slow, but in metro Atlanta, web browsing is at least acceptable.  Calendar support is weak, but good enough for what I need right now.   But on the intangibles - the fit and feel - the iPhone is very good.  I like carrying it around.

My chief complaint is that the speaker isn't loud enough.  If the iPhone is in another room when it rings, I often don't hear it.  The same is even true if I have it on me and I'm in a noisy place.  I'm sure Apple's target audience has better hearing than me!

The other thing I miss is having an IM client.  I'm waiting for those Apple-sanctioned third party applications ...