Caught In The Whirlwind
Posts tagged os x
Toys Galore
Aug 29th 2009
Yesterday was a day where I got many new toys to play with. My copy of the OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard upgrade arrived exactly as hoped for and, like I mentioned in my last posting, I swung by the college bookstore to grab myself a copy of Adobe Creative Suite CS4 (Design Premium).
I started doing the upgrade stuff after I got home from work which meant I spent all afternoon installing and then resetting up OS X how I want it. I’m really enjoying Snow Leopard. I’ve only encountered one software incompatibility so far (Curse you logitech!!!) and the rest of my stuff has worked flawlessly. I’m enjoying all the little enhancements over Leopard, like the application specific Expose support if you hold down your mouse on the dock icon. The entire OS is much snappier now and the install, as promised, took up much less room so my hard drive actually has free space now.
CS4 was neat. I’ve never actually owned a copy of Photoshop despite using it for things over the years. I think a lot of folks are in the same boat, honestly… But now it feels weird to have an actual, legit copy of that and all the other adobe apps. I have more design type software than I ever thought I’d have installed on here. I haven’t had a chance to use much of it but I’ve used it enough to know I really like the new interface in CS4. I also like the little photoshop improvements, like if you zoom in far enough it puts up a faint grid of pixels so you know where all the boundaries are. Neat stuff.
The only thing bad about yesterday was I wish I was able to go with my friends to the State Fair 
I Hate Computers Sometimes
Aug 25th 2009
I’ve been plagued with technical issues today…
Well, it all started last night when I realized that…ok, hang on a sec, I need to explain my computing setup here for this to make sense. My main machine is my MacBook Pro, 3 years old. It’s got a 80GB hard drive in it. My music collection is about 25GB large, and my tv shows and podcasts expand that outward to 60GB. Which leaves no room for…well…anything else. So when I switched to using my MBP as my main machine, I got myself an external drive to house all of my media files and such. It’s worked pretty well, up until last night.
Last night I went to sync my iPod and I noticed that as soon as I plugged the drive into the computer, OS X froze. It seemed to do that whenever I plugged the external drive in. I thought something was screwed up in OS X and I’d have to reinstall (and then re-install again on friday when snow leopard arrived). But as it turns out the filesystem on the drive got corrupted somehow.
I managed to get OS X to mount the drive in read only mode so I could get stuff off of it. Which lead me to another problem…where am I going to put this stuff if it won’t fit on my hard drive? I suddenly remembered I have an 80GB iPod hanging around…and that can be used as an external drive too. So right now I’m copying all my music, video and large downloaded files over to my old iPod. It’s painfully slow, but it’s better than nothing.
Next up I’ll reformat the drive and put everything back. And now I’ll heed the warnings about ejecting a drive before unplugging it…
It’s been a rough day all around really. I realized today that I probably won’t be able to go to the state fair like I wanted to. Stupid broken foot. It’s not healing as fast as I would like and it looks like I’ll have to bow out of the trip and let my friends go on their own. Too much walking and I didn’t want to stress it that much unless things got back to normal. My mom said she’d go with me next week (she enjoys the fair a lot) if my foot allows so hopefully that works out. I really wanted to go this year.
Great Lengths To Watch A Movie
Nov 12th 2008
Many apologies for the lapse in blogging. I'd like to say I was out partying because Obama won the election but I just haven't really felt like typing something up in a bit. Every time I thought of something I didn't have the time…well, anyway…enough excuses. This is a post about Netflix.
Netflix has had Instant Watching for a while, allowing netflix users to stream a decent selection of movies and documentaries over the Internet along with your normal DVD rental activity. This has been restricted to only to Windows users, using Internet Explorer. Until recently that is. As a Mac user, I was happy to see that they had started testing a OS X version of the software. It works pretty well.
Except this Saturday. Wassy was over so she could get out of her apartment for a bit and get a change of scenery to do some work, and we decided to watch Immortal Beloved (which was a really great movie) on instant streaming. I started the movie up and it seemed to be going well, but then the aspect ratio got screwed up. There was much fiddling, but nothing could get it to work right. So I restarted into windows, thinking it was an OS X bug. A note about the way the Netflix streaming beta works. Once you opt in, you can't opt out and it changes your player software everywhere. So in windows, it was now doing the same thing.
I really wanted to watch the movie, so I was thinking of a way around it. Then I remembered my dad had a netflix account, and I probably knew what his password was going to be…so I tried it and it worked. At this point, my conscience took over and I decided to call my dad to make sure it was ok…but finally…we were able to watch the movie. All of this took about 20-30 minutes of screwing around to get it to go. But it was so worth it…
I haven't had that happen on any other movie since. It was just that one specific movie…other than that, I'm really happy with the new streaming experience.
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OS X Leopard Screenshots
Aug 13th 2006
It was only a matter of time really. Apple gave out developers copies of Mac OS X Leopard to all the attendees of the World Wide Developers Conference, so it figures that there’s going to be some leaked screen shots of the new features.
There’s a forum post over at AeroExperience which has a whole bunch of screen shots.
I’m eagerly awaiting this update, as I just jumped into the world of Apple in April with my MacBook Pro (possibly the best laptop I’ve ever owned). I’m really looking forward to the Spaces virtual desktop stuff. I already use Virtue to do it, but it has some rough edges that I hope apple will address.
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