As seen as I shirk from all human contact I’ve never had much use for mobile phones, except in the odd emergency such as “I’m at the train station will you pick me up?” You know the sort of call. But even with such infrequent use my phone has been getting more and more embarrassing, it was large, heavy and had a dreadful monochrome display. So I finally ordered a new one the other day from orange. Since Nokia went to pot by stopping with all the elegant, simple and obvious looking phones, instead deciding on fugly and stupid looking contraptions i settled on motorola, they seem to be the only mobile company with any idea at the moment and they do a not too bad cheapo phone called the v220 so I went for that. Obviously it had to be a payg phone, no point with a contract when you don’t use it, ever.

I wanted a data cable so that I can sync stuff, does anyone know why it costs 18 quid for a usb cable? Nah me neither. Ah well, oh and yeah, of course the software that came with it was windows only! Luckily, and with no help it seems from motorola, Apple have done their best to support the phone. At first it doesn’t seem good, when you connect the phone to the mac sod all happens, unlike windows, mac-os doesn’t give any indication that a device has been connected but after reading a few pages on the web i discovered that all I need to do is load iSync and it will find it… and it did! Awesome, so syncing contacts and my calendar is easy as pie on the mac. I also found a great site here which gives you some ppp connection scripts for using gprs, and they work! So that could be handy if i ever end up with my iBook in the middle of nowhere.

The only problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to transfer media files between the phone and the mac, its all proprietary, you have to use special software on windows and it doesn’t mount as a drive. iPhoto doesn’t recognise it so i’m a bit stuck as far as camera phone stuff goes. Not totally bothered though, the photo’s that the phone takes are repulsive beyond all comprehension.

In a few moments my iBook will probably be super-ceeded by something incredibly cheap and powerful. So for the time I still have left to feel I own something half-decent i’ll talk about my macs trip to the vets. As i’ve mentioned before there’s no shortage of staff at the apple store, as I entered the sweet smelling ikea clad store the staff all ran over each other trying to get to me “he’s mine!” “No! I saw him first!”. I just marched past them all to the “Genius bar” and slapped my iBook on the desk and grabbed a stool doing my best clint impression. Now things started to get a little surreal, I’m used to having to argue my case in PC stores, having to explain that it isn’t too much to ask to expect something to be repaired when it’s under warranty. But at Apple I showed them the slight skewed display and straight away he said “Oh we’ll take the whole screen off and attach a new one, we’ll have to order one in, if you’d like you can bring it back in when we have to part and we’ll fix it whilst you wait. That way you won’t be without it for days.” I was actually speechless, you just don’t expect service like that from PC companies. And this isn’t the expensive warranty, just he bog standard freebie! And it was my fault that it’s broken, though obviously I didn’t tell them that. lol. What a pleasant trip.

UPDATE: Phew, looks like there isn’t a new iBook after-all. It’s a new intel iMac and an all new replacement for the powerbook called the revenge of the macbook 2097 or something. Either-way, they’re things i couldn’t have afford anyway.

Did you ever believe I’d be trading such exclusive merchandise as cheap mints? Could this blog possibly fall even deeper into the realms of fantasy? Only time will tell.

I’m going to take my injured iBook to the vets tomorrow. I guess i’d better copy anything i might need off it tonight just incase it’s kept in for further observations, poor thing.

Best for last, guess what! Go on Guess! Gowaaaan, sheesh how hard is it to make a guess. No. Try harder! That’s right, i’m going to be an uncle! Uncle Mark! I haven’t yet decided on what kind of uncle I want to be. Funny Uncle? Or Scary Uncle? Or maybe just plain old Queer Uncle. I hope i’m not an uncle they hate to visit. That would suck. Oh yeah, if it’s a boy they’re calling it Benjamin! How cute is that! Same name as my favourite teddy bear They haven’t thought of any for a girl yet. OMG I can’t wait! Early days though so…

So I neively ride on into Christmas town casting aside all doubts that it will be my usual sucky accident laiden yule-tide hell. It started off so well, we went to my brothers who put on a great spread, his first time preparing a christmas dinner and it’s always entertaining watching my brother stressing in the kitchen whilst I generally get in the way. We spent most of the day drinking far too much, being merry whilst making fun of Eddie, who was SO well behaved! He surprised us all, such a good doggy Well mostly, first mistake of the day was leaving the turkey on the table when we left the dining room. Some time later Eddie sneaked off, we looked everywhere and found him under the dinning table with a huge chunk of the turkey, with bone, growling at us to keep away. He must have reached onto the table and bit it straight off so my brother was pissed swearing that in no way is he going to save the rest of the turkey now. Haha. Eddie takes the funniest photo’s, how mad does he look there! I don’t know how on earth the camera made his hair all stick up like that, and since when did Eddie have a big brown beard??? Sure, its getting a bit dirty looking from his saliva stains, but seriously, it looks no way near that brown in real life. Stupid camera.
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I love me iBook, its cute and cuddly, unlike those big powerbooks stomping around as if they own the place. Mean powerbooks. The design does have its faults though, the vertical viewable angle of the screen is a little pants, its actually impossible to get into a position where the contrast is the same top to bottom. I can excuse it for this however as its an affliction of most notebooks, they all vary and I’d say the ibooks screen is about average.

My big gripe, and its the thing that over time is annoying me more and more, is the trackpad button. It’s so bleeding clunky, so much so that I’m considering taking it into the apple store to ask if its normally this bad? I did try and click a couple of the ibooks in the store but it was a little too noisy with customers to tell if they were as bad. It’s not just the click that’s annoying though, its that when you let go, the sheer force of the buttons chunkiness makes the screen’s release catch vibrate. So not only is the button loud but it also sounds cheap and nasty because of the catch issue. I could probably live with the buttons loudness if it wasn’t for the catch joining in, if you rest your finger on the screen release button whilst pressing the trackpad button it isn’t nearly as annoying a sound. So maybe if I could stick something under the button? I piece of felt maybe. I’m not sure how though.

I made a nice diagram to demonstrate it. Nice huh?

Horrendous, i didn’t write anything yesterday. I’m hoping to get a run of 28 days, can’t see that ever happening. I’m such a forgetful person, seriously. Talk about absent minded.

It’s terrible but when I have 50 or more articles to read on a bloglines page I tend to get about half way through the page before I end up skipping past masses with my eyes only noticing those entries with pretty pictures, it’s not really a conscious thing. So, more pretty pictures people. Even if they aren’t relevant to anything.

I gave the kiss of life to my warcraft account earlier this month, well I paid for a month’s play but I’ve barely touched it, I’ve probably only got a few days left as well Bit annoying. TBO the only reason I did it was an overbearing urge to see how it played on my iBook. A really cool thing about it is that blizzard were thoughtful enough to include both the PC and Mac version on the same disks, so i didn’t need to buy the game again. And it runs pretty damn well on the iBook which is a testament to blizzards coding skills. And of the iBook’s design of course. This particular model has 32mb of GPU RAM for the game to play with, anything less and warcraft probably would have suffered from some visual glitches. In fact the Radeon Mobility 9550/32MB is quite powerful considering this is Apple’s lowest end notebook. The equivalent vaio’s have dodgy turbocached geforce go’s that share the main ram.

I have the feeling I might mentioned the above before. Ah well, oh yeah and a oddity, on OS-X, when you only have access to a single button mouse/trackpad you hold control to do a right-click. But, in warcraft you do Command-click instead. weird huh? I wonder if apple will start putting mighty-trackpads on their ‘books. By that I mean a 2-button affair, but with the appearance of 1 button.

I was freezing cold a few minutes ago and now i’m boiling hot, freaky. I think i might have avian flu, I’d love a bit of avian flu, be lovely with blob of chutney. This is my first post typed out in ecto, wonder if it will work? I tried the windows version of ecto with LJ some months back and hated it, this mac version seems to be completely different, i don’t know why they even share the same name.

Eddie is lying next to me flat out, aww he looks so peaceful. Uh oh, well he did, now he’s having a scratch.

I fancy talking about my early iBook experiences. Actually i’m going to go through some negatives, moaning is always much more fun than praising.

VGA Ghastliness

Hmm, how do you do a heading in ecto, i’ve tried adding <h2> to the custom tags but it replaces it with strong when i switch between modes. Weird. Anyway, using the iBook on my monitor has been nothing but painful. Firstly, Apple in all their wisdom decided we have no need to turn off the built-in LCD display, ever! It can’t be done! Which means even when you connect to an external monitor you still have to have the notebooks display on, and because of this you can’t increase the res beyond the capabilities of the display (which is 1024×768). My monitor is 21″, so a res of 1024×768 is hideous.

Well, the above would be the end of it, but after a huge amount of unnecessary research I discovered that you can increase the VGA out’s res beyond the limitation by using screen spanning. BUT Apple ship iBook’s with screen spanning disabled despite the fact that the iBook is perfect capable of doing it. Now this is funny, the PowerBooks ship with it enable, I wonder why that is, well OK i don’t, I know why, to artificially add value. I discovered a cunning script called Screen Spanning Doctor which enables screen-spanning in the open-firmware (there is a caveat, don’t run the script if you have an ATI-Rage based iBook because the Rage GPU can’t do it and you won’t be able to boot anymore). With screen-spanning the second display becomes an extension of the primary display, you can even drag windows between the 2 screens, what’s even stranger is that they can be different resolutions, so now i can have my 21″ set to 1600×1200 as it should be. This is a far from perfect solution because it means extra work for the iBook, in particular the GPU, 1024×768 is 768432 pixels and 1600×1200 is 1920000 pixels, add them together and you are using A LOT of GPU memory, and the iBook only has 32MB of graphic memory. This means that some of OSX graphical tricks suffer from some slowdown because the 32MB is maxing out and spilling into the main memory. (expose is noticably jerky), fortunately general speediness of the desktop and apps themselves don’t seem to suffer, i guess that’s because the CPU is freed from graphic duties on OSX. This extra load is totally unnecessary if only Apple would let us turn the display off completely, or if they really do need to the keep the display on, why not let us have over-scan on the built-in display, for instance just show the middle 1024×768 pixels of a 1600×1200 desktop. Please Apple will you??

My woes don’t stop there, it turns out to my amazement that the iBook’s VGA out is under-powered, just like the mac mini. I’m surprised no one has mentioned this before??? It’s made all the more apparently because i can switch between the mac and the PC. The mac looks weak, black is black, thats fine, but white looks dim, almost gray. Colors also don’t look as vivid as they do on the PC, I get used to the mac after a while, but when i switch to the PC its like WOW, colours look soooo good compared. Just as mac mini owners have found, you can improve matters slighty by going into universal access and increasing the contrast, white then looks half decent but it washes colours out at first, but if you carefully go through the display calibration wizards in expert mode with the contrast upped slightly you can get things looking whist not great, adequate. Apparently, you can fix all this by getting hold of a VGA voltage amplifier. But i can’t find one online anywhere
Eddie is wandering around as if he’s lost something.

iPhoto i do i do i swear i do

iPhoto is a tremendous disappointment on so many levels. Firstly, i had presumed that it catalogued photo’s similarly to Adobe Album and picasa, that is, that it searched folders for photo’s to add to its database. Turns out iPhoto does nothing of the sort, it manages its own photo’s and stores them in a fixed location, if you import photo’s from a folder it physically copies them all to its own folder. Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb. I’ve set my iBook up so other family members have their own login, but they can’t share each others photo’s because iPhoto can only deal with one datastore at a time, and the share your photo’s facility depends on each others instance of iPhoto running simultaneously!!!! I have got around this problem to some extent by a massive amount of fiddling. I’ve created a shared account, and for each person removed their own “iPhoto Library” and recreated it as a symbolic link to a shared directory. This means that everyone uses the same iPhoto library. I have an extra complication in that i want to store some photo’s remotely on my networked PC, it has a much large HD (250GB compated to just 60GB on the iBook) and as seen as photo’s are rather large files these days I don’t want all of them on the iBook. Not only can iPhoto not store files in 2 places, it isn’t exactly network aware either! My solution is to write 2 scripts, one to create a symbolic link to the shared directory on the iBook, and another to change the symbolic link to a network location. I simply close iPhoto and run a script to switch datastores. It’s a faff but i’m getting used to it.

I’m not too keen on iPhoto’s interface either, it takes up too much space, especially on a relatively small screen, too much of the time the photo you’re looking at is cramped into the middle of the screen, there’s no easy/quick way to switch to more of a full-screen view. Why is that the only app not to have a hide toolbar button is the one that would benefit from it the most? The only way to get a bigger canvas is to do a slideshow, which is way to many clicks to get a closer look.

Why is that “open in external editor” is only available on a context menu?

Ooops, i won’t do that again.

Why didn’t the mac community warn me about the macs folder copying behavior? I moved all my textural documents from the PC to the mac, occasionally it would come up against a file that it didn’t have permissions to copy or move. So i went on the PC and granted them, then moved the folder again, in the blissful belief that it would merge the contents. I left them for a few weeks under the impression that everyone went fine. I then had the strange feeling that some documents were missing. And then shock horror, my skin crawled and i panicked when i read on someones blog that the mac doesn’t merge folders when you copy/move them onto each other, when it warns that it’s going to replace the directory, it really does do just that, it removes the contents before it copies the new stuff, to put it another way, if there is a file in the destination folder that doesn’t exist in the source folder, it removes it anyway!!! Whaaaaaa????

Thankfully, i do a backup every month, and there wasn’t many files that were not in the previous months backup. phew.

Right then, i’m bored now, if there’s something i haven’t covered, i’ll do a part 2.

Technorati Tags: “Screen spanning doctor”, Apple, iBook, iPhoto, KVM, VGA

Ah the second new love of my life, this is really sad this one. Terribly terribly sad. Aaaaanyway, I never used to think of apple much, in fact no one did in the UK, especially in the 80’s and 90’s. I’m not even sure they bothered to release a lot of their early stuff here. I’ve never once in my life seen an Apple II. Even the mac was pretty much a non-event, whilst in america they’ve consistently enjoyed a small but perfectly formed user base, over here in the UK you would have to travel a long way to bump into one. I first used a mac during a stupidly basic and short lived DTP class in college in the mid 90’s. I’m not 100% certain but i think it was running System 7, and the machine was horribly underpowered, didn’t leave me with a good impression at all and since then I didn’t even go near to a mac for going on 8 years. The original iMac changed things slightly over here, well at least they caught your eye, sitting in the dark recesses of the local department store, but still, most people didn’t know anyone who actually owned one. Of course, the iPod has gradually changed all this and Apple have probably enjoyed a bigger surge in the UK than anywhere else considered how badly they were doing pre-ipod. Up until last month, the only Apple product I had was a shuffle. But look at all the Apple boxes i’ve got now!

So here it is, my cute little iBook, it’s so huggable. Just look how sweet it looks next to my big ol CRT.

I usually lounge around in the family room with the iBook, but on those occasions when i want to do something on a bigger screen, or when i need to do some PC centric dev work I take the iBook upstairs and plug it into this KVM switch, the iBook immediately switches to screen spanning/sharing and i can quickly switch between the PC and the mac. Unfortunately what you can’t do is switch say from the mac to the PC to check on something such as a progress bar and then immediately switch back, you have to wait about 10 seconds before it lets you do another switch. Maybe its to stop you from switching in quick succession and breaking something?