Alright, uncle, I give up. I’ve fretted about choosing an MP3 player for far too long, so there’s a shiny new 16GB iPod Nano on its way to me now.
There’s decent support for the iPod under amarok now, so it might be fairly painless to sync it up with my existing library on the Linux server. Or I might experiment with the ‘proper’ iTunes way for a bit too, especially if any of those games catch my eye, though it’ll be a bit more of a pain to keep the library synced then.
Apple announced recently that movies were now available online via iTunes in Canada, and I figured I’d try one out of curiosity since I’ve never done any kind of online rental before, and so I picked THX 1138.
The download went without problems, and I could even start playing it while it was still downloading, but the playback of it was rather no-frills, with a lot of the usual controls missing. No subtitles (which I occasionally like to use for muddy or quiet dialogue), no chapter marks, no stream info, no extras… The picture quality was about on par with a DVD, but HD was not an option, since you specifically need an Apple TV box before you’re allowed to rent those.
Overall, it worked well enough, but I think the price was a bit high ($4 rental, $15 to purchase, but most are even higher) for what you get, and I probably won’t be making a habit of it.
One thing that I’m going to try to do differently with my MBP is to use it on the battery more often. The battery on my old iBook permanently lost over 3/4 of its charge, and according to forums and Apple’s own advice, that was largely because I usually left it fully charged and on AC power nearly all the time. Who knew…
Having installed a few games to the Windows partition (already down to only 20 gigs free!), it was time to pop back to OS X.
Performance is definitely much better than the old iBook, of course, and I no longer feel as constrained about what I can run at the same time. It’s nice not having to worry about whether Firefox is chewing up too much memory or CPU to launch MythTV reliably, or if VLC is going to be choppy because of swapping. I should also now be able to run more things at the same time that I wouldn’t have bothered with before, like Skype.
There are still some hardware quirks I’m running into, too. The space bar is a bit insensitive in that presses on the very ends of it often don’t register, so I have to make sure I give it a good hard tap a little further in. Gaming might be a bit less feasible now that I’ve experienced it running at full load for a while; the fans aren’t too bad, and could be drowned out by the game’s sounds or by wearing headphones, but the CPU quickly makes my lap just a little warm…
I also had a weird time figuring out what was ‘wrong’ with the LCD’s backlight. It seemed like its intensity would fluctuate a bit, often noticed just out of the corner of my eye while typing, but if I sat there and stared directly at the screen for a while, nothing would happen. There were other weird cases too, where I would have the backlight at half-intensity, pick it up and carry it a bit, and the backlight would suddenly be set at full. What I didn’t realize though, is that the ambient light sensors on the Pro units aren’t just for the keyboard backlight; the LCD backlight is by default set to automatically adjust as well. I guess the ambient light in my living room and the typing of my hands were enough to make it a bit erratic, and it’s now stable after disabling the option in the system preferences.
Today was Windows’ turn on the MacBook Pro, as I partitioned off some space for Boot Camp, installed Vista into it, and did the usual driver updates, applied SP1, etc., and that part went fairly smoothly.
Some things are still weird when Windows is running, though. You have to double-touch the pad and click if you want to emulate a right-click, which makes it easy to accidentally trigger a scrolling action in the process. And the Alt and ‘Windows’ keys are backwards from where they’d be physically located on a traditional PC keyboard, which is being hard to get used to. I’ll have to dig around and see if I can adjust these, though there wasn’t any obvious settings that I’d noticed.
I also experienced the infamous Windows wireless bugaboos, with the connection cutting out in the middle of a file transfer and Vista refusing to recognize any more wireless APs at all, even though the iBook sitting right next to it could see them all just fine. That also hung the command prompt that was doing the transfer, forcing me to hard-power-off the system since it wouldn’t let me shut down while it was still hung, either. Wheee. That was pre-SP1 though, and it hasn’t reoccurred since, so far.
I still have to get around to installing apps and games on it, now. It’s not exactly blazing fast, as it only gets half the 3DMark06 score of my desktop machine, but on the other hand, the entire MB Pro probably weighs less than just the video card in the desktop… Since I don’t want to be dragging a bunch of discs around with me, I’ll be focusing mainly on games that can run without requiring one in the drive. Fortunately, I’ve got quite a few such games already via Steam and Stardock.
Well, my iBook G4 is now just over four years old and was starting to show its age, especially with more CPU-intensive modern video and the ever-increasing appetite of newer apps for more memory. So, I had to get it a buddy:
And by buddy, I mean replacement of course, since my iBook will probably now sulk in the closet while a fine layer of dust accumulates on top of it.
It’s just the base 15″ version, since I wasn’t really looking for a full “desktop replacement” model. I debated a bit about whether to get an upgraded plain MacBook or the Pro; the main functional difference between them now is that the Pro has a much better video chipset, but was that really worth the $700+ price difference… I finally figured that having the better video would probably let me squeeze an extra year or two of life out of it and in the end the per-year cost would be roughly similar anyway, so I may as well get all the frills of the Pro.
There are some things that are going to take a bit of time to adjust to, simply because they’re different. The bottom of the keyboard has a hard edge rather than a smooth ramp all the way up to the top, for example, and the gap between the keyboard and the trackpad is a little bigger than I’m used to. There’s no gap between some of the function keys like there was on the iBook, so my usual reference for finding F5 (the all-important Refresh key) is gone. The ports are laid out a bit nicer for the way my living room is set up though, so I don’t have to criss-cross network and mouse cables in the back when I’m using them.
As for new features, the multi-touch is nice, though I’m going to have to get into the habit of using it, since I often find myself still going to the scroll bars. The magsafe power port caught me a bit by surprise since it takes quite a bit of force to pull directly out, until I caught on to the bend-it-away trick. And I haven’t done much with any new Leopard features yet, though I did notice that Terminal has improved a lot, to the point where I don’t feel like I need iTerm anymore. I might not even bother with Time Machine, just sticking with my rsync-to-the-Linux-server scripts instead.
Now I still have to finish migrating most of my data over…
Another big Apple Event has come and gone, and in turn:
MacBook Air: Meh. Not for me, since I’m fine with the form factor and weight of my iBook as it is, and I’m more interested in having better performance and functionality. I don’t actively hate it though, since it doesn’t really replace the other notebooks, so we’re not being ‘forced’ to upgrade to it.
iTunes Movie Rental: Irrelevant right now as it won’t be available here for a while yet. It looks like pricing will be about the same as the XBox Live Marketplace, so it’ll come down to a battle between which has the better library of titles. I also don’t have an easy way to stream iTunes to a TV right now, but that might be resolved by the time it’s ready here, though there’s an implication that HD rentals are only available through the AppleTV, and I’m not buying one just for that.
iPhone updates: Looks nice, but I’m still not a cell phone person.
Time Capsule: Now this is actually interesting. One of the things that really annoys me about my MythTV setup is that it runs on a really large, noisy tower PC right now. If I could replace that with say, a Mac Mini as the server, stacked on a Time Capsule acting as the storage, and using a USB capture card instead, it would be a lot smaller and quieter… And then I hear my wallet go “OW!”
Otherwise, I’m still holding out for a MacBook Pro update, which should be due sometime soon.
Though I might not be picking up Leopard right away, it’s still fun to read about all the differences in this version. This article does a particularly good job of pointing out all the small details, less-obvious changes, why they might be that way, and what the future implications are.
Well, the release of OS X Leopard is imminent now, but I don’t think I’ll be picking it up.
At least not by itself. I’ve gotten a lot more use out of my iBook than I expected (browsing the web from The Comfy Chair is so much better than at the desk), but it’s almost four years old now, and is starting to show its age. It has trouble keeping up with even Youtube videos without a bit of stutter, the screen still feels a bit cramped, it bogs down a bit even with the maximum amount of memory in it, it would be nice to dual boot to Windows once in a while, and so on.
I think I’ll wait until the next hardware refresh though, just to make sure I get the latest-and-greatest, and by then there should be a dot release or two of Leopard out to help stabilize things, too.
I’m still not sure whether to go for a MacBook or a MacBook Pro this time around, though. The primary difference (based on the current specs, anyway) would really be in the screen size, resolution, and video chipset. A higher res would be nice to relieve the cramped feeling a bit, and it would be nice to have enough horsepower to run some games that are still usable on a laptop. But is that niceness alone worth the $600 difference? Hmmm.
And hopefully they’ll also adjust the prices to account for the recent currency surge. I’d actually save over $250 by ordering from the US Apple store instead of the local one, right now.
It can take me a while to catch on…
I was wondering for the n-th time whether Firefox was a lot more sluggish than it used to be or if it was just my faulty memory when it hit me. I set my account to use FileVault a while back. Encryption is slow. Firefox puts your profile in your home directory. Your profile contains your cache. The cache gets used a lot…
Fortunately you can move the cache to a different location by setting the browser.cache.disk.parent_directory property in the about:config page. I already had a /NonEncrypted directory used as scratch space for stuff I don’t want slowed down by FileVault, so I just made Firefox point at a /NonEncrypted/Cache/Firefox directory.
Firefox is now indeed a lot more responsive than it was before, and it only took me over a year to figure it out. :P
Like all good Apple zealotsgeeks, I kept checking the live updates of today’s MacWorld keynote. My impressions so far:
AppleTV: Looks nifty, and I’d actually be tempted by it if someone comes up with a proxy or backend support for it in MythTV. I record plenty of shows right off of cable, and don’t particularly need or want to buy them from iTunes. MythTV works great as it is, but the remote is a bit clunky and I’d rather shove the server into a backroom and have it act purely as a backend than have it tied to the TV, taking up space and generating noise. I guess I’d need an HDTV too though, so it’s still more of a down-the-road thing.
iPhone: The ‘revolutionary’ claims are a bit overblown, and it’s still a fairly regular PDA/phone in a lot of ways. But damn if it isn’t the most well-integrated, slick, highly-polished phone I’ve seen. Too bad about the price. And the lack of a carrier here yet. And that I’m too asocial to even need a mobile phone. :P
I was just about to give up completely on Firefox on my iBook. Flash applets would either perform poorly or do horrible things to the mouse focus, it would often chew up all available CPU time after a while, and I was still stuck with version 1.0.7 since the 1.5 series would reliably freeze on me within an hour or two.
Fortunately, I gave Firefox 2 RC2 a spin for a few days, and things are much improved. The tab freeze doesn’t happen, Flash performs better (about the same as in Safari now), and…it still chews some CPU, but not as much as it used to.
I didn’t even know about today’s announcements from Apple until I saw a “hey, it’s starting” forum post somewhere. The cases and Hi-Fi are kind of underwhelming and are really just more expensive and underperforming accessories.
The new Mini is a bit more interesting to me though. I’ve been thinking of putting together a home theatre PC for a while now, and this Mini slides into that role fairly nicely. The only sticking point is that it still doesn’t have video capture built-in, so it wouldn’t entirely replace my MythTV server, but it could act as a front end to it. It’s also not clear if it’ll be quite powerful enough to decode HD video, but that’s more of a future concern and there are still a bunch of other unsolved problems surrounding HD anyway.
Then it’s just a question of whether a home theatre computer is worth the cost…
My recent trip to Edmonton was the heaviest use my iBook has seen as an actual laptop. Although it performed admirably enough, after getting back home and putting it back in its usual spot I noticed something was slightly off. One of the little rubber feet went missing somewhere along the way and now it rocks slightly when typing and slides a bit when opening the latch.
Although there are apparently replacement kits available, they’re awfully overpriced for silly little pieces of rubber. Ah well, at least it’s properly broken-in now…
The iBook also finally has an AirPort Extreme card now, and more memory. Lacking wireless on the trip wasn’t too big a deal since there was plenty of wired connectivity where needed, but it’s still nice to have the option. The memory upgrade (from 256 to 640 megs total now) is a far bigger improvement. Previously, running multiple apps (and there’s generally always at least Firefox in the background) would introduce long delays as it swapped its brains out, but everything is much more responsive now.
My iBook is being weird again. Well, some combination of the iBook and the rest of the network, anyway.
If I fetch a file from the Internet, I can get 300+ KB/s down to the Linux server. I can get 300+ KB/s down to the iBook. But if I transfer a file between the iBook and the Linux server, on the same switch, I get 4 KB/s.
It *used* to work just fine, so I’m not quite sure where the problem lies. While the transfer is in progress, the ‘frame error’ count on the network interface on the Linux side increases, which generally indicates a hardware problem, but swapping around cables and ports doesn’t change anything. A second Linux box can talk to the first one just fine at full speed but is also slow with the iBook, which would seem to put the blame on the iBook side of things, but the iBook is fine when talking to the Internet at large. It happens under both OS X and Gentoo on the iBook, so it’s not something in the OS. It affects Samba shares too, so it’s not FTP-specific either. Duplex settings are consistent.
I’m running out of ideas here… About the only other thing I’ve changed recently is the firmware on the router (a Linksys BEFW11S4), but this is supposed to be a stable version and the trouble didn’t start back then.
To hell with it, maybe I should just get an iPod after all. The fourth-generation ones are out now, with the clicky-wheel from the mini-iPod, better battery life, and a lower price (I can live without the dock and case). It still doesn’t have the other features I’d like, but it’s better to have something at all than to chase a ‘perfect’ goal forever…
The problem then becomes one of management. I’d obviously need iTunes in order to load songs, manage playlists, and so on, but of the three systems I have, all of the songs are stored on the Linux file server, the one where iTunes isn’t available. There isn’t enough room to mirror the entire library on the iBook, and I don’t have FireWire or even USB2 on the Windows system (which I’d prefer to avoid and is also low on space).
Fortunately you can add songs to an iTunes library from a network share, so I can do all of the management from the iBook, but then that creates a couple more problems. First, it doesn’t seem to let me edit ID3 tags on songs in the library that are from a network share. Whether this is a limitation of iTunes or a permissions problem or what isn’t clear yet, so I still need to do some investigation there.
The second problem is that now I have a redundant data problem. Although I can’t fit my whole music library on the iBook, I *do* have a subset of my favourite tracks loaded on it so I can listen to them while roaming. Adding the songs from the network share makes the local ones show up twice in the library, and it’s not immediately obvious which one is the local one and which is the remote one (idea to Apple: smart playlists based on filename/path). What I really need is two separate libraries, one just for the networked songs and one for the local copies, but iTunes just has one big library per user.
There is a way around it though, if you cheat a bit. Since everything is stored in ~/Music/iTunes, all I had to do was take the existing directory, rename it to iTunes.local, restart iTunes and add the network songs to the now-empty library, quit iTunes, and rename the newly-recreated iTunes directory to iTunes.remote. Now all I have to do is make ~/Music/iTunes a symbolic link to whichever library I want to work on at the time before starting iTunes. (If I were really lazy I’d make wrapper scripts to do it automatically from the Dock or Finder.)
It’s a bit of a kludge, but should work well enough. Now where are all those pennies…
Though I’m not much of a Mac zealot, there were still a few things out of the WWDC announcements yesterday that caught my interest:
Cinema Displays: Oooo, widescreen. And, uh, HUGE — that 30″ screen is bigger than my living room TV! That one is overkill (meant for professional editing and such) and beyond my tech specs anyway, and the 23″ is still rather expensive, but the 20″ one is intriguing. I wouldn’t be able to use it with the iBook, but their switch to DVI makes it a viable choice on a KVM for the rest of the systems, and the hubs certainly don’t hurt. The new stand is also a lot better than the old ‘easel’ style that I thought was rather silly-looking and hard to adjust.
It is, though, just one more possibility out of a field of contenders for LCD screens, and I doubt I’ll be picking one up soon anyway. My ViewSonic 17PS may be getting old, but it still serves very well with a high-quality picture, so there’s not much of an incentive to switch to an LCD at the moment.
Spotlight: Hah, looks like Apple’s going to beat MS to getting metadata search capabilities (it won’t be in Windows until Longhorn in 2006ish). The devil is in the details though, and its usefulness will depend on how good it is at extracting useful metadata from files (will it be able to search based on GIF/JPG comments? EXIF headers? Comments in text-based files?).
Automator: Now this could be very useful. There have been times where I’ve wanted to repeat a task a bunch of times, and I knew I could probably do it in something like AppleScript, but I didn’t want to have to stop, refresh my memory on the scripting syntax, write the script, experiment, debug it, etc… This sounds like it would nicely cover that gap where something’s annoying to repeat by hand, but manually scripting it feels like too much work.
I like my iBook well enough, but dammit, whenever I’m typing I often accidentally hit the up arrow whenever I go to press the Shift key. If done in the wrong order, this causes the whole previous line I just typed to be highlighted and then overwritten by the next character I type before I notice what’s happening. Grrr…
Maybe I need to take proper touch-typing lessons. You’d think after all this time I’d be good at it, but my fingers are still mostly all over the place…
When I bought my iBook, I didn’t get many of the options or accessories with it. In particular, I didn’t get the Bluetooth module since I don’t have any other Bluetooth devices anyway.
I was recently investigating upgrade options though (I’ve got some new parts for ‘ekosiak’ on the way now), and I was curious just how much the Bluetooth module would cost, since one way of getting Net connectivity on the road would be to use a cell phone with Bluetooth capabilities as the connection. I was unable to determine how much it would cost though, because much to my surprise, it *can’t* be purchased separately at all.
It looks like the Bluetooth module is something that can only be ordered at the same time as the system itself, and the dealer has to install it. What really annoys me though is that there was no indication at the time I bought the iBook that this was the case. It was labelled ‘Bluetooth-ready’ in that you could add in the Bluetooth module, which to me implied that it was an upgrade that could be done at any time.
It’s not a fatal problem as there are third-party modules available (though then they take up a USB slot), and maybe I can convince a local dealer to order and install it separately anyway, but it’s still frustrating to discover this kind of information after-the-fact…
Another game that I’ve recently discovered I have the Mac version of is Quake 3. I knew there was a Mac version of it, but I didn’t know if it was on the discs that I had. I found the CD case and examined it, but it didn’t say *anything* at all about what platforms were supported. So, figuring it was worth a shot anyway, I slapped the CD into the iBook and sure enough, a Mac installer was right there.
I also have Team Arena, since it was the Quake Gold package, but right on the front of its CD it says “Windows 95/98/ME/2000/NT4″. Oh well. But maybe… Sure enough, after sticking it in, there was a Mac installer for it too.
Things get even stranger though. The first thing you do after installing any game nowadays is to go and grab the patches, right? Q3 was still running in Classic mode and was a bit choppy, so I hoped there would at least be a native OS X patch. Well, off to idsoftware.com I went, but oddly enough I couldn’t find any Mac patches at all. There were Linux and Windows patches to bring it to 1.31, but nothing for the Mac. Well, maybe the 1.30 included in the Gold package really is the final version for the Mac, I thought.
After poking around a bit though, there was a file named “Patches and Updates blah blah blah.html”, and it had a URL to quake3world.com’s files section. After a quick visit there I could see that they were actually up to 1.32 for the Linux and Windows versions, but there was only a beta version of a patch to 1.31 for the Mac. It was, however, a broken link. Well goodie. Starting from the front page of fileplanet.com I worked down to the Quake 3 files and, lo and behold, there was what I really wanted: a final, official 1.32 point release for Mac OS X. Ugh, it just had to be FilePlanet…
You’d think that the company’s own site would be the place to go for the latest updates. Or that the biggest fansites would have working links to the right places. No wonder people are wary of gaming on the Mac if they’re going to treat it like the red-headed stepchild…
