My Macbook has a slightly irritating fault somewhere in the screen or connecting cables. When pressure is applied to the back of the lid, or the screen’s angle is altered a pattern of “incorrect” pixels appears. It looks like the machine decides all the ‘red’ pixels should be ‘green’ for no obvious reason.

Given the choice between sending the machine to PC World who’d simply look confused, go “duh it’s a Mac… err…” and end up shipping it off to Apple and to finding a real Apple store, I chose the second option.

My Mac is now checked into the Genius Bar in the Meadowhall Centre on Saturday. I will show the fault, and hopefully something useful will happen afterwards. Go on Apple, give me a good customer experience. Don’t do a PC World and ship my laptop off to Holland for three weeks and not tell me much.

Spending the weekend at Amy’s. As usual I have my Macbook with me, and once again it’s being really rather useful. This time it isn’t remotely connecting me to a VPN, or anything special like that; this time it’s doing some video editing with iMovie.

Amy’s digital camera records video, but only in 1 minute segments. She’s recorded some video from a live music session in a local pub and wanted a way to stitch them back together to put onto YouTube. My first reaction was to use Windows Movie Maker since it comes free with XP and is fairly easy to use. However, after half an hour of faff we came to the conclusion it didn’t like her computer or camera’s video.

First we had to find the software which, unusually, wasn’t available by default on the machine. Then once it was installed, it happily complained that .mov files aren’t valid Windows Movie Maker files. Yeah nice one Microsoft!

iMovie, on the other hand allowed us to glue the videos together, add cheesy titles and render back to a video suitable for sending to YouTube.

My Mac seems to be developing a fault, or is just being strange. If I show a fairly complex image on the screen and twist the lid hinge (as though adjusting the screen so I can see it better) the display corrupts. It’s not major screen corruption, but the odd random pixel will display the ‘wrong’ colour. It’s as if the screen draws all pixels of one colour the inverse of what they should be. I have a feeling it’s a heat issue.

Here is Todd. Todd is a dog. See Todd run, run Todd, run!

From Random

Except earlier on today Todd couldn’t run in the sun, he had to wait, which was no fun. No fun at all. He was stuck in the kitchen with nothing to do.

OK, enough of that before it turns into a warped version of The Cat in the Hat

I’d been asked by my parents, who are off in Spain at the moment being rained on (the rain in Spain falls mainly on the tourists), to look after the dog for two days while my sister was at work doing long shifts. They’d agreed to leave me a key so I could get in. This suited me, I needed to visit Steve, who I used to work with and he lives down the road from my parents. So off I set.

I arrived at my parents and obtained the key. Then things went a bit pear-shaped as I discovered the back door was bolted from the inside, and I only had a back door key. Oh dear. The irony of this situation was not lost on me - here I was on the wrong side of a locked back door contemplating whether I could break in - not to steal laptops and Xbox 360s but to let out a by now rather wound up dog.

I texted my parents to let them know I was at home, but locked out. I also texted my sister asking where she worked so I could call her a moron in person, and maybe get the front door key. Making it fully clear that any dog mess found in the house was her problem to deal with.

She rang me back and gave me directions. We’ll skip the driving to her work and collecting the key, it was as boring as it sounds and contained no interesting drama. I came home and let myself in.

Wanting to get off to Steve’s to do some important stuff I let the dog out so it could have a crap. Only it wasn’t interested, and after five minutes of being prompted to go and pee, I put it back in the kitchen and said I’d be back later.

Off I went to Steve’s, I showed off my Macbook and we did some work. It got dark and I came home about six pm. It’s quite fun walking a black dog in the dark, it wanders off and waits for you to catch up. If you’re not paying attention it’ll remind you by nipping at your kneecaps.

I will take it out for a proper walk tomorrow to make up for being stuffed in the kitchen all day.

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 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.

Aaand I need more ram.

I just tried to boot XP inside VMWare Fusion. It sort of worked in that it booted and Windows moaned about needing to be reactivated (that’s one thing I like about OSX, it doesn’t want to talk to Apple every time you do something to your computer. Not that a Mac can be substantially changed like a PC can). Then it tried to use a gig of ram, causing everything to grind to a halt as a swapfile was filled with useful things like OSX and Finder.

It was like using my old 286 and Windows 3.11 Fortunately the Mac manual tells me what RAM to buy and how to fit it.

Firefox and Google Browser Sync work nicely, and OpenOffice is good enough.

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.