m2cw – my 2 cents worth

unofficial switcher’s guide

Jon Fortt’s Technofile: Why Apple really matters: With Macs and iPods, Apple for years has boldly set the trends others follow

just one quote:

But any given Macworld is probably just as important than any given CES for this reason: For real people, Apple is possibly the most important tech company around.

43 Folders: OSX inventories, tips & hack collections

this is probably the single most interesting list of applications people use on the mac.

note to myself: put together a list of my apps…

macs do well in a corporate environment

as always john gruber gives an excellent opinion on Software Update Tips and Voodoo

his main steps and points:

1. wait at least one business day after the release of the update
2. run a full backup (if you don’t have an automated update process anyway)

personal note: when finished with the backup remove all external hard drives (if those are used for automated update processes you might want to keep them removed until your system is up and ok for a couple of days… – see step 6.)

3. log out. then log back in holding the “Shift” key
4. run the software update
5. restart
6. after working with your mac for a while without experiencing problems, run another full backup (or get your automated backup running again)

running Cocktail’s pilot (repair permissions, run cron scripts, prebind system and clean system, user and caches) is actually nothing but voodoo (it doesn’t really help, but it doesn’t really hurt either – in most cases)

excellent advice!

i have been doing most of this (including cocktail’s pilot step) anyway, but i have now a reference to go back to for every major update!

some useful knowledge about the mac from Tom Yager

the more i use an “all-in-one” pda-type mobile phone, the more i’m convinced: it just sucks! this article hits the nail on the head!

a couple of days ago, i sent an email to elgato’s support. as always, they have been very quick in responding to it.

my email was a holiday wish list for their eyetv and their eyehome products both of which i’m using at home.

i really like the “eye-system” but there are a couple of quirks that need some update or revamping. so here goes my list:

1. true timeshifted viewing (i.e. start viewing a program even when it’s still recording – that’s principally possible but it doesn’t work very well)
2. start recordings via eyehome (currently it’s only possible to record via eyetv – if your server is far away from your tv this is not very convenient)
3. a jump button (for 30sec, 1, 2 and 5 minutes) for eyehome (available for eyetv but not for eyehome)
4. using the VPS signal for eyetv recordings
5. “eyetv to go”, i.e. i could transfer some shows to a laptop in order to watch the recording time- and locationshifted (it’s possible to do that but it’s awkward)

here is elgato’s response:

Joerg,

Thank you for contacting Elgato Systems.

We will try to integrate EyeTV with EyeHome more in the future, so that the features you and other users have requested will be possible. The points you have brought up are already on our “to do” list.

Sharing recordings from one location to another (like from desktop to laptop) will be made easier in future versions of the EyeTV software.

Linux News: Commentary: You Know You Might Be a Mac User If…

hmm, this one will make you think:
Apple of IBM’s eye?

just for the record: in 1993/94 when applying to business school, one of my essays was about my life in the future and in this i predicted that IBM and Apple would merge late 90s. well, well, let’s see what happens. i might only be off on the timing…