My Macbook is back from being repaired in the Apple Store. The LVDS cable has been replaced and the screen doesn’t do any random pixel errors any more. When I booted it in the Apple Store the screen had a large sticky line across it which looked like they’d stuck a label or something to it. The man behind the counter gave it a clean, but I hope he doesn’t use glasses from the amount of smear left on it.

Me and Amy then wandered around the Meadowhall Centre for a while looking at random stuff. I needed to get my hair cut so went into one place, and promptly walked out when they said “Our haircuts start at £29…”. £29 to get my hair cut? What planet do you think I come from? I went for a £16 SuperCuts job instead, it took 45 minutes of waiting before I could be processed, and I am unsure about just how much hair they have chopped off. Still, it was cheap.

The parking in Meadowhall was awful. Only livened up by two people trying to reverse into the same space at the same time, and by one moron blinding us with the lights on his giant 4×4… who as we passed a few minutes later had forgotten to turn his twin portable sun-lights off. Hopefully he’s stuck in the carpark with a car that won’t start.

Oh, and there was a trip into the Disney Store where I bought Amy an Eeyore plushie. She also bought some fairy stickers and has now stuck them all over her iBook.

This is nuts!

Here is VMWare Fusion running Windows XP on my Macbook. I’ve got it in “Unity” mode where the Windows desktop is not shown; all Windows apps run seamlessly on the Mac desktop. It’s a bit like how OS/2 Warp could show Windows apps by themselves - only not as crap

Once I have installed all the apps I need and confirmed the VM is working I can back it up to a DVD for safe keeping.

I will be using this VM to run Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server Express, so I had better increase the amount of RAM available to the Windows installation. VS 2005 isn’t happy in half a gig of RAM, its dialog designer grinds to a halt.

My work laptop has had its network identity branded into it. It now connects and drags down my roaming profile data - most of the time. And I can use it for doing Proper Work on again. My Mac’s new RAM upgrade is currently sat in my local Post Office waiting for me to collect it tomorrow. We live in  weird country where Post Offices shut at half past five every evening except Wednesdays when they shut at half twelve. Since I buy stuff at the weekend mostly, it always arrives on Wednesdays.

It’s hard to explain the frustration of having shiny new tech a mere five minutes walk from my house, with the only thing stopping me from having it in my possession being random Post Office rules.

I learnt some new keyboard shortcuts today…

• Cmd-W to close windows
• Cmd-Q to quit
• Cmd-’ for preferences
• Cmd-left/right for home/end
• Cmd-up/down for pgup/pgdn
• Alt-left/right to jump one word to the left or right

I can’t work out the shortcut for Force-Quit though. Well, I can see it, I just don’t understand the heiroglyphs Apple use to describe their keys. It’s weird, like learning a new language.

My work laptop is now running like it should. I found its driver CD contained XP drivers as well as Vista ones. Strangely the hardware actually in my laptop is nothing like what its manufacturer’s website says it should contain. For example the Advent website says it contains an Intel wifi card, but it really contains a USB Ralink based card-thing.

It’d be great if the manufacturer of a piece of hardware could actually tell its owners what’s in it.

Now I can give it back to the technicians so they can attach it to their network and install my profile.

My work laptop has been de-vistaified and now has XP on it. Unfortunately, because this is a cheap laptop made for dribbling goons, the only drivers we can download are for Vista. This isn’t so helpful when it needs to run XP Pro to talk to our Windows Domain and Exchange Server; things Vista Home won’t do, thankyou Microsoft.

SYMPTOMS

If a computer is running Windows Vista Home Premium, you cannot join the computer to a domain.

CAUSE

This behavior occurs because Windows Vista Home Premium does not support a scenario where you join a computer to a domain. Windows Vista Home Premium is designed as the foundation for a home entertainment system.

STATUS

This behavior is by design.

I’m now having an enjoyable afternoon printing out student work while trying to find said drivers. I have found many that don’t work, but nothing that my laptop actually wants to use. I will look on the CDs it came with when I get home. If that doesn’t work it’ll have to be upgraded to the version of Vista this place uses.

My Macbook comes with a wonderful invention called Time Machine which is a clever incremental backup system. If an external HDD is connected to the Mac, Time Machine will ask if you want to use this as a backup drive. Saying yes then starts the backup running. It’s all automatic and keeps hourly backups for a day, daily backups for a month and then monthly backups until your external HDD fills up. And since this is a Mac, the backup is bootable without having to do anything special.

The only problem I have is that this is a Macbook, not a desktop machine. I don’t want to plug an external disk into it just to run automated backups, I have a perfectly good Linux server that I store backups on.

Unfortunately Time Machine doesn’t support network shares. Well, actually it does, it’s just an undocumented feature, and like it says on this blog you have to type the following into a terminal

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Then you go to Finder - Go - Connect To Server, connect to a network share and it’ll appear in the Time Machine list of volumes. The clever part is that a disk image is created on your network share, the disk image is then mounted on your Mac, and Time Machine does its thing. Apple like disk images

I’m currently on 13GB of 21. This is on a freshly bought MacBook that I’ve only installed OpenOffice and Firefox onto. There must be a way of stripping this down and removing some junk.

I gave my new work laptop to the technicians at work. They were in the process of scrubbing Vista off and replacing it with XP last I saw. Vista Home won’t connect to Windows Domains so it had to go.

I am posting this from my brand new Macbook. It’s the 13″ Core2Duo 2Ghz version with 1 gig of ram and an 80 gig hard disk. It’s really quite nice, and has some curious little features that I’m sure will drive me totally nuts.

Like the missing mouse button, the missing # key, and the whole host of fun features they don’t tell you about, more leaving them to be discovered. One such thing being how to do a proper ‘delete’ in a text field rather than backspace. That’s  Fn-Backspace btw.

I like the magnetic power connector, the slot-loading CD drive and the really high res display. It’s light and contains no ventilation holes on the bottom either; I can use it on my bed without it going into meltdown.

Installing apps is weird. In fact the Mac concept of an application is quite strange. Rather than splattering files all over the place each app is a self contained icon. It makes uninstalling the preinstalled junk quite easy.

Oh, that’s another thing - the bloody ‘i’ prefix. Windows users, you think the “My” thing is a bit irritating? Let me list things on this Mac:

iTunes,  iCal, iChat, iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto, iSync, iTerm, iWeb

What’s wrong with dropping the ‘i’ prefix and just calling them by what they are? Word is Word, it’s not mWord.

Now I need to fill it with lots of applications and stuff. Trying out VMWare and XP is also one of my next fun tasks.

Earlier this weekend I ordered two gig of DDR2 ram for my PC. It cost a whole £30 including free postage, which I thought was nice. It’s been despatched and will no doubt arrive tomorrow when I’m not in. I also bet the delivery bloke leaves the calling card wedged in my door frame, rather than walking around the back to my letterbox.

I used the slightly frightening Google Checkout system to buy my RAM from CCL Online. It’s a bit like Amazon one-click shopping, but for anyone who uses the Google system. I’ll just pretend one of the largest information gobblers on the planet doesn’t have my bank details, and will instead see if more online companies adopt it.

I intend to take the RAM currently in my PC out and put it into my laptop, turning it into a portable dev machine. A task it is handling with a much better success rate than when it was my only machine. I uninstalled some random crap from it and things are much more responsive. The HDD is still awfully slow though. I took it out the other day (it’s under the same flap as the RAM slots) and the HDD is a 4800RPM drive designed to consume hardly any power, at a cost of severely slow data transfer rates. I don’t quite know if it does ATA133 either.

Laptop’s all better now :-)

After opening the case, tightening all the screws, straightening the screen supports and applying copious amounts of Araldite to anything that looks Important And Vital I have a nicely working laptop hinge again.

No doubt it’ll break again one day, but providing I don’t cause any actual damage to the electronics or totally bugger the lid, I can fix it again… and again. It’s tempting to fibreglass the lid, but I’d then not be able to get inside again, and I’d probably get epoxy on the screen. The thing I don’t like is that the plastic back of the screen is structural, as is the main body of the laptop, and they flex quite a lot when bending the lid.

Mind you, given a bit of time and elementary fibreglassing lessons, I could probably make a new case to put the guts in (or just find somewhere selling cheap laptops and get a new one).

Hmm… I suppose it’s just the right size for making some sort of display panel - kind of like a tablet PC, but without the touchscreen.