easyweb.co.uk - OSX

OSX Leopard First Impressions

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 12:50:35 +0000

...first niggles mostly, but never mind.

Keychain

Existing keychain data (ie central password store for pretty much everything from Mail Accounts to Web Sites) appears to have been dumped, so I had to remember the passwords for everything.

Time Machine and Airport

Up until Monday this week, the Time Machine page promised that you could back up to a drive attached to an Airport base station. Well it happens that I have one of those, and I bought it with just this use case in mind.

But on the production release, it doesn't work — the functionality's been removed. You can connect an external drive to the machine you're backing up, or any other Leopard-running machine on the LAN with File Sharing enabled. Maybe it just missed the QA cut and it'll be back for future point releases, but it's not there now.

Iomega UltraMax

This was the drive I bought for Time Machine purposes. Ideally this would be in RAID 1 mode, so you've two mirrored drives automagically backing each other up. If one fails, you can replace it, rebuild the array and no data loss. Some online reviews claim that the drive can't do that under OSX, but that's daft as it's a hardware device. This isn't true, but what is hard is working out how to switch it to RAID 1 — certainly the supplied docs don't tell you. The trick is you need to first press and hold the Rebuild button on the front panel for 10 seconds or so. This will obviously (re)build the array, and it will then pop up in Disk Utility at half the JBOD size. You can then format and you're good to go.

Dear Friends and Relatives...

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 16:15:41 +0000

...in times gone by, you have asked my opinion on which computer to buy. Regardless of your previous experience with malware of many and varied kinds, and your need for easily configured systems which rarely if ever go wrong, you have consistently and steadfastly ignored my considered opinion of Buy a Mac, usually citing a need to keep some ridiculously outdated piece of software (Wordstar for DOS? Hello?) and retain access to your old files.

Now, leaving aside that there are plenty of Mac solutions that read old WP formats, or even run Windows programs (albeit a bit slowly), these were always just the excuses of the fearful.

So to these fearful friends and relatives, if you really need the comfort blanket of Windows, its security holes, its virii, its botnets, its rootkits and so on, you can now wean yourself off it slowly. Buy a new MacMini.

But what about my Spyware? I hear you cry? Well worry not - if you really want to run Windows XP on that shiny Intel Mac, you now can, with BootCamp.

10.4 Tiger RSS Screensaver

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 18:43:35 +0000

Here's a movie of the screensaver - to say I want this is an understatement. Fortunately, we pre-ordered Tiger way back on announcement day, so it should be landing on our doorstep in, ooh, 4 days' time or so. I just hope the headlines make "whoosh" noises as they go past.

http://media.weblogsinc.com/common/videos/engadget/TigerRSS.mov

Cover art plugin for iTunes

Thu, 26 Jun 2003 09:40:19 +0000

Uses Amazon Web Services to look up the album and display the cover art.

http://sprote.com/clutter/index.html