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.