Entries tagged with “mac” 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.

Last week I gave into temptation.  I'm now the owner of a bottom-of-the-line Mac Mini - the 1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo model.  80 gig disk, 1 gig of RAM.

I couldn't stand the idea of paying Apple $150 for one more gig of memory, so instead I spent at least that much and time and energy by getting 2 gig of RAM from Fry's and installing it myself.  Jonathan Young supplied the putty knife and the company.

It's the second Apple device I bought in the last 2 months.   When I left EarthLink (company-wide layoff) in September, I needed a cell phone, and Apple was kind enough to cut the price by $200, so I bought a phone that day.

It's not the first Mac for me, though.   We bought a Mac SE in '86 or '87 for Jen to finish her PhD thesis.  I played with a first generation iMac when I was at CNN in about 2000, and I had a first generation Mac Mini on loan from EarthLink for a couple of months.  Both of those machines were just too underpowered compared to the PCs I was using.  My new Intel Mac is on the lowest rung of the Mac line, but hardware has improved enough that even the  Mini easily trumps my Intel 3.0Ghz P4 Windows system.    

I'm pleased.  The Mini is low end hardware - built in integrated graphics, 5400 RPM hard drive.  It comes with built-in Bluetooth (which cost extra on the original Mini), WiFi,  4 USB ports and a Fireware 400 port.   But especially with 2 gig of RAM, that's plenty to make a system that works very nicely indeed. 

Even better, I've been playing with a copy of VMWare Fusion, and it runs Windows XP well enough to handle the PC applications I'd like to run.

If this were my only system, I'd like something with more power.  But for everyday use, it's fast enough, and the polish of OS X makes it all the better.