Recently my computer has been taking a LONG time to reboot.

I installed this networking program, DAVE 7.1, the other day and thought maybe it was the culprit. Nope.

So I started digging into the Console system log and son of a bitch I found out that my external modem was the last entry in the log, then 4 minutes of NADA then the next entry. Oh, let me say that from the time I hit the power button to the time I started booting into my personal account's GUI was taking 5 minutes! Well anyway, I had moved the modem a while back from the back of my iMac to my powered USB hub. I moved it directly to the iMac and voila, I now go from shutdown and hit the power button and in 30 seconds I'm booting into my account GUI.

Phew!

I was starting to think that I was going to have to do a Windows'esque reinstall of my system to fix things up.

Note to self, the next time I have issues remember to disconnect ALL peripherals and see if that resolves the issue.

Net Applications tracks the market share of computers in use by a proprietary method of monitoring web activity. So these numbers are only as good as their logic behind the data - however, it should give relatively decent numbers in so far as trends go. And the Mac has been and is continuing to trend upward.

I saw the other day that Apple has a 66% market share in computers over $1000, wow - that’s pretty impressive.

All around me I see Apple making inroads, both in notebooks and iMac’s. It’s great to see more and more people realizing how nice an the Mac ecosystem is for us users.

The new MacBook Air is a cool computer, sure I'd prefer it had a gigabit ethernet port and preferably FireWire but otherwise I think it rocks. My friends think that Apple blew it and that they should have closer replicated the old 12" PowerBook which was narrower.

But the Macbook Air is what it is, like it or not.

My question is, would you rather have a MacBook Air 1.8ghz, or a standard 2.0ghz MacBook, an AppleTV, an iPhone, and a 500GB Time Capsule? Because the MacBook Air 1.8ghz actually costs more than all of those other items combined.

Door #1
$2,099 - MacBook Air




Door #2
$2,026 - MacBook, AppleTV, iPhone, 500GB Time Capsule

I would certainly pick door #2.

Have you seen how the OSX86 'Hackintosh' crowd have been successfully running Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard on that new super cheap Asus Eee PC?

If I'm not mistaken Asus OEM's the current MacBook's for Apple, so what in the world is holding The Mighty Jobs from introducing something similar to the Asus Eee PC for the Mac Market. Engadget noted that Asus estimates it will sell nearly 4 million of these PC's next year. I don't know about you, but I'll bet Apple could move a boatload of these babies if they were Mac's.

The cheapest Mac available is the Mini, and it needs a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. The Mini itself starts at nearly $600, add in the other goodies and you're easily over $800. I'm not going to argue the merits of Mac vs PC, but it's arguably a tough to sell for somebody who has always had PC's and they can get a complete Dell system with Windows, keyboard, mouse, and monitor for under $500 on sale.

Throw the dog a bone, offer a sub $500 notebook Mac and watch the masses flock to it.

I'm working on a project in which I need to talk with people who work with US Patents. Preferably a patent examiner. But anybody with involvement with the patent process would be beneficial. I would like to correspond via email to get some information to help with my research.

Please email me directly or pass on my email if you know somebody who may be able to help.

I really appreciate it.

After a few more days with Leopard, I've got a few other thoughts.

1. I really like how the Finder now has a 'Green bar' effect with colored stripes. I tend to show files/folders in my Finder in the list view with is wide, the new colored lines makes it much easier to follow left to right.
2. Spotlight. Oh, I'm so sad about this one that I may have to go get another glass of this fabulous Malbec that I'm drinking. If you click on the Spotlight icon and enter some text to do a search, the resulting window looks the same as it did in Tiger, but if you click the 'Show All' button things are quite different. In Tiger, the Show All was a bigger version of what the initial search displayed, it grouped/categorized the results, but now in Leopard it's a scatter listing much in the same way how Windows search results have been displayed since I can remember. Well, I'm no fan of the non-categorized list. It's really sad that a feature I used many times a day is now gone!
3. Spotlight. Hey wait a second, see that Plus button to the far right on the Show All screen??? You can select document type, date criteria and more. Don't misunderstand, for how I used Spotlight in Tiger - Tiger's Show All page was superior to the new page. However, these new features are good, just not as good as it was to me.
4. Many of the programs I use daily have already been updated by the developers, I have to think that within a few weeks most common apps will have been updated.
5. Time Machine, it's going crazy doing backups all the time - but it's pretty behind the scenes not much to really notice. I haven't tried to restore yet. Also not sure if I'll still use SuperDuper! along with Time Machine or what. The Time Machine backup drive is not bootable, MacOSXhints.com had a good tip on how to make that drive bootable, read more here.
6. I'm liking the new Dock even more, can't believe people are getting rid of the new "3D" dock.
7. Windows Explorer is ugly, but is very good at what it does. Leopard's finder is a nice improvement over Tiger's finder, admitedly it's not as good as Windows Explorer from what, 2001? But it's not bad, I don't get in a huff about it - I've learned to work with it very well. I am a bit amazed though that so many people are in agreement with me that Windows Explorer is still better. Well, that's not what amazes me, but rather than Apple - the king of Human Interface Design hasn't been able to best Windows Explorer after all these years.
8. Doh! My brother bought a new 24" iMac a couple of days ago from Amazon, and it didn't include an upgrade to Leopard - only computers bought from Apple or a subset of Apple resellers qualify for the upgrade. LAME.
9. I'm still having trouble connecting to shares on my WinXP machine on the LAN, and digging to the discussions on Apple's forums have shown that I'm not the only one having this problem. Note to self: next time wait a month after release to install the new Apple OS.
10. On Tiger, using Camino - I was always able to just enter a domain name and hit enter and it would go to it. For example, I could type in the word "ford", hit enter, and it would go to http://www.ford.com however, now if I hit ford, and enter, it doesn't go there. WTF? I do use OpenDNS, I'll have to turn that off and see if anything changes - but I used OpenDNS with Tiger. This sort of backwards functionality rubs me the wrong way.

It does sound like I'm down on Leopard doesn't it. Well I do like the new bits, but also feel like some of the functions and features that I was very fond of have been reduced - this isn't going over well with me.

1. Stacks (on the Dock) sounded really cool until I went to use them. I'd much prefer that clicking on it opened the folder in Finder, I don't like the springboard or grid options.
2. I see that there are already hacks to axe the Shelf and 3D look to the Dock - I rather like it.
3. Make sure you uninstall UNO before upgrading to Leopard, whoops - live and learn.
4. I used to be able to connect to a Windows machine on my LAN by using it's network name, now I can't do that - am forced to connect to it via it's IP. And I'm having some issue connecting to certain shared folders with full read/write privileges. Not sure wtf is going on here.
5. The expanded use of CoverFlow is really nice.
6. Quick Look is awesome.
7. I'm using Time Machine, but don't have any experience with it to report just yet.
8. Dockless, a great util to keep some Apps from showing up in the Doc no longer works, this saddens me - hopefully it will be updated for Leopard soon.
9. Gizmo Project is not working in Leopard, I'm sure an update is not far off.
10. Spaces is nice, and there are some good things about it. But honestly, I miss some of the features from Desktop Manager, like being able to show the virtual desktops in the Menu Bar, complete with outlines of open Apps. It was a one click affair to change virtual desktops via mouse with Desktop Manager, with Spaces you have to click the icon on the menu bar and then click the desktop you want. This may sound trivial, but it's far more effort if you do it frequently.
11. Partitions can now be re-sized without destructively losing data in Leopard, wow, that's fantastic.
12. I used to use VineOSX VNC server because Apple Remote Desktop wouldn't allow me to connect with low bandwidth settings, and it doesn't work with Leopard. And unfortunately, the new ARD in Leopard also only works if I connect in high bandwidth mode.
13. Preview, I felt this was one of the unsung hero's of Tiger - and it's far improved for Leopard.
14. I'd swear that I read somewhere that Time Machine would give you the option of backing up USER data only, or everything including all system files. I see no such option available, however.
15. The Red, Yellow, and Green buttons on the top bar of windows are higher contrast now and much easier to distinguish.
16. Installs have more graphics when completed, easier to see.
17. iChat now has a tabbed interface, I just wish it were interoperable with other services.
18. Terminal is something I rarely use, but I can see that it's really beefed up. Not only is it tabbed - you can grab a tab and tear it off, move it back to being tabbed. Neat stuff for you command line junkies.
19. Mail.Appetizer no longer works with Mail, guess I'll move to a growl notification for mail.
20. The Menu Bar is better contrast now and easier to see items on it. Also, the Spotlight is no longer a garish blue, but a simple black icon.
21. The new Folder Icons are far better than Tiger.
22. Damn, have you seen Apple's stock price!

I'm not trying to be critical, I like Leopard - a lot. The itemized list above is just some of the observations I had. The connecting to local machine and mounting volumes is my really only issue I'm having right now. There's a lot of great stuff, and more stuff that I haven't had time to explore. But this is a worthy upgrade to Tiger.

My fingers are crossed that it's stable and runs as well as Tiger did.

I was putting together a Keynote presentation this evening, it included a quote that contained the word "whilst". Keynote put the red squiggly line underneath it, indicating that it was either misspelled or that it wasn't in the dictionary. In order to double check the spelling, I opened the Mac OS X Dictionary and it had the word and definition, whilst.

I wonder why it is that the Mac OS X dictionary contains words that are not in the spelling function of programs from Apple? Don't they utilize the same dictionary?

I ran across an article today on the International Herald Tribune about Quiet Computing. It quickly caught my eye because I used to be in the PC Quiet Computing Camp, and I heavily relied on SilentPCReview.com which contributed to the article. In fact, when I switched from PC back to the Mac in February '06, I wrote an article for SilentPCReview.com to talk about, of the many benefits, how incredibly quiet the iMac is.

What is interesting to me is how much money people pay for a nice quiet PC, often up to $5,000! Wouldn't it just be cheaper, easier, and more elegant to get an iMac and run Windows on it if that's the OS of their choice? They'd save a ton of money in the process. If the purpose is for a living room type installation, then the iMac with it's integrated screen may not be a good fit, and it's questionable if the Mac Mini has what would be required.

Anyway, the one sure thing is the iMac is not only a great computer, but it's really quiet too. I certainly appreciate this reality.

Universal Binaries where terrific when the Intel Mac's where fresh on the scene, you know it would be optimized for either platform your Mac was running, but now they're just freaking big, bloated, and unnecessary.

STOP THE MADNESS

Intel Mac's now have almost as large an installed base as PPC Mac's, and by Christmas the Intel Mac's will be the dominate 'guts' of all Mac's out there in existence.

Universal Binaries are huge in comparison to platform specific builds. Please developers, start offering a PPC build, and an Intel build. Save yourself some bandwidth by delivering more svelte applications, and save millions of users the disk space of bloated Universal Binaries.

First two major Torrent Tracking sites, IsoHunt's TorrentBox and Podtropolis sites were banned from traffic in the USA. And now it seems that Demonoid, the second largest torrent tracker site, is at least temporarily shut down.

Here's more information from TorrentFreak.

I read a very interesting article over at the International Herald Tribune which talked about how Apple may have squandered a huge opportunity for the Mac.

snippet:

The Mac was seemingly well positioned for the moment in many ways. The transition to Intel microprocessors was complete. The OS X Tiger was a sleek, feature-rich, polished operating system. Leopard, the next iteration, is scheduled to be released in October.

Read the full article here.

Could Adobe be making the important first move into the world of online video and image applications, much the same way Google Doc's has for office type applications?

Adobe has confirmed that they are working on Photoshop Express, a free online edition of Photoshop. No this isn't full blown Photoshop, but is most likely going to be powerful enough for many users. Adobe has already got Premiere Express, but Photoshop Express is likely to be a much bigger hit.

I'll remain a little skeptical of this until I can try it, on my iMac I'm more than happy using SeaShore, an Aqua implementation of Gimp. I far prefer standard applications to online applications. However, I must say there can be great benefits to online applications, such as your data being retrievable from any place with internet access, and the ability to share and collaborate with others online, this can be very powerful.

Photoshop Express:

Premiere Express:

While I understand that people who were entrenched with iMovie HD 06 feel short-changed with timelines and audio capabilities in iMovie 08 being less robust or missing. However, I think most people will prefer to do their home movies and short movie projects with iMovie 08 over iMovie HD 06. And come on, if you really like iMovie HD 06 that much, it's still there for you to use it.

Here's a note from MacSeven reader Mark in Toronto regarding his personal experience with iMovie 08.

I finally took iMovie 8 out for a serious ride. This weekend I did 2 of the 3 HD video tapes from last months trip to Los Angeles, I made these into movies using iMovie HD 06 a few weeks ago, and now I'm redoing the videos in iMovie 08 for a direct comparison.

I have to say, I really love it.

iMovie 08 doesn’t have all the bells and whistles (where is the audio fade out that the end of a clip?), but it also doesn’t have the idiosyncrasy’s that iMovie HD 06 has. For example, have you ever reviewed your movie, and decided to drop a piece in, or trim a piece of footage in the start or middle only to have all the audio un-sync on the 20 clips that follow? (yes, I know about the “lock audio at playhead” setting, but this still happens). This morning before work I needed to tightened up a little spot on the PCHwy Scenery video. There were at least 30 clips after this edit point, as well as 2 and sometimes 3 audio tracks (with sound effects, music, track audio, etc) of sync’d video. I wanted to set it up to render while I’m at work, but I had to do this tweak, so I figure this would be a good test as I had 5 minute MAX to do everything. I sparked it up, found the 3 or 4 clips I wanted to modify and applied my deletes/changes. To my amazement, the entire rest of the video popped right into place instantly. We’re talking all the transitions, titling, audio… everything! I did a couple quick tests to verify, the hit “Share” and loaded my H.264 presets and began the render. The important thing is the working time on the project: Start time 7:25am, end time 7:30am.

Well done Cupertino

It's no secret what my opinion of Quicken for Mac is [pathetic]. Good news, I was able to get onto the beta for a Mac personal finance competitor - they have an all new version in the works, and I'm pleased to be on the team for it. I won't be able to discuss it as a part of the deal, but I'll tell what I can, when I can, cool?

Wow, two referrals to Engadget in a row... Unusual.

Ross Rubin writes a very good column on Engadget, Switched On. He recently wrote an interesting article talking about Flash and how and why Apple may deploy (and not deploy) it. I've no idea if he's close to the target on this one, but it certainly made sense to me.

Snippet:

One could argue that, particularly with Apple's newcomer status to the world of the carrier-dependent, it wants to err on the side of safety in the case of the iPhone, but Apple TV doesn't have a similar defense. Because Apple TV and iTunes lack Flash, YouTube is transcoding its entire video library to H.264, Apple's preferred codec for QuickTime. A lack of support for Flash weakens Apple's argument that the iPhone does not provide, as its ads claim, "a watered-down version of the Internet."

Full article here.

If you frequent MacSeven you may know that my favorite web browser is Camino. No matter what I try, I never find anything that just feel right the way Camino does.

I recently used Safari for a week or so at work on my Windows machine, one thing that I learned I really liked about Safari is how it does inline autocomplete in the address bar.

Safari has inline autocomplete enabled by default, and Camino, like most browsers, has it disabled by default.

Here is an image showing how Camino defaults, inline autocomplete not enabled:

You can see that as you start typing in a URL, it shows you items from your history under the address bar, you can select from the list. But I much prefer how Safari is by default, with inline autocomplete enabled.

Here is an image showing how Safari defaults, with inline autocomplete enabled:

In the image above I enabled inline autocomplete with Camino and now by typing the same three letters as before "mac" it now autocompletes the URL. As you type more the inline autocomplete will continue to narrow your results. I find this to be a much faster and easier way to get to where I want to go.

To enable inline autocomplete in Camino:

1) open a termainal session, and paste in the following line
2) defaults write org.mozilla.camino "Autocomplete While Typing" -bool YES
3) hit Enter, and restart Camino.

Wow, this downright makes the Airport Extreme look pretty plain Jane. More details on this sweet router with a display over at Gizmodo.

I've been using Camino as my primary browser for a long time on my Mac. Love it!

On Windows at work I used to use CrazyBrowser for a long time which is a custom multi-tabbed interface that uses IE as the core rendering engine. I started using this way back when, because it offered a clean interface with tabbed browsing long before IE did.

I've been running Safari 3 for Windows quite a bit since it was released. It's kind of growing on me. There are certainly things that I wish it had. I have some thoughts on Safari, and a wishlist for Safari for Windows (and Mac):

PRO's:
- Fast rendering, very fast.
- Renders very well, extremely few issues.
- Text looks great

CON's:
- Often times when trying to load a page I get an error "Safari Can't Open Page"
- Clicking on a link from external opens in a new window not new tab


The text looking great is very interesting. When I switched back to the Mac, the way the text looked with the anti aliasing look bugged the crap out of me, now I find that a year and a half later, I prefer it! Holy crap, how did that happen? (I never ran ClearType on Windows)

MISSING:
- Clicking on empty tab space should open a new tab
- Close a tab, and you should go to last viewed tab
- Ability to save USR/PWD for all sites
- Ctrl+click bookmark bar favorites should open in a new tab
- Ctrl_click search box should open in a new tab
- Should restore all tabs open in previous session upon re-opening
- Site Favicons should show up on the BookMark bar and tabs


Text samples. I mentioned how I've grown fond of how Safari renders text. Some pages that I've compared in both Camino and Safari - they look exactly the same. But on other sites the two browsers have a completely different look. I've put some sample pages of a page on Yahoo that looks different, and I find that I far prefer the look of the Safari rendering over Camino and the other browser examples I've shown.

As you can see from the screenshots it is clear that OmniWeb uses the same rendering engine as Safari, it looks nearly identical to Safari.

Hmm...

SAFARI


CAMINO


FIREFOX


OPERA


INTERNET EXPLORER



OMNIWEB




Alright, why do you suppose it is then, that the following page look nearly identical in Camino & Safari? Both have the anti aliased text rendering that I suddenly realize I'm so fond of, but in the previous examples, only the Safari based browsers have the same look.

SAFARI



CAMINO

1) I installed the VMware Fusion 4.1 beta today. I've never used Parallels or VMware previously. I did try Q which is a freeware alternative, but they don't have virtualization working on it yet so it's much slower, probably more like VirtualPC was.

VMWare installed very easily, and installing Windows 2000 Pro on it went smooth as silk. I installed a Virus program and a few utilities, all seemed to go well. Although after I adjusted it to use more of my system memory, it seems to really slow down my entire system - yeah I know that may happen, but here's the odd thing. After I closed out of VMware my system was still really sluggish. I didn't have time to go back and retest, it could have been NeoOffice or something else that was the culprit. As I get more time to play with it, I'll post my experiences.

2) It has been a very long time since the last update, so the new Plaxo for Mac which came out today was a much welcomed update. Plaxo is fantastic. Consider it one more reason why you don't need to pay the .Mac tax.

3) I may have to shoot somebody if the iPhone fever doesn't end. The iPhone is either going to be the most successful new [electronic] product ever released, or the biggest letdown in history. I certainly hope it is a huge success, however it goes, we'll know soon enough.

I talked about RAID NAS options the other day, and I couldn't help myself, not leaving well enough alone I kept researching and thinking about my home data needs and different options and solutions. What was niggling me about the RAID NAS solution was this - if your RAID box has a failure then you are f*cked! Seriously, even though a RAID box has some level of protection against one of the drives failing, if the NAS box itself suffers a dire fate, you're hosed. And believe me when I say that I truly feel so sorry for those who have suffered a RAID failure and permanently lost important data.

I read an article talking about why RAID's aren't a good option for SOHO environments, and it confirmed the doubt that I was having about that solution. So instead of going with a RAID solution, I'm going a different route because if I lost my digital pictures, digital music, personal documents, and other digital treasures - I would be up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

With a RAID, I was planning to use it sort of like our work network storage - it would have been my main repository for stuff. Now I'm thinking a different strategy. Use my computers main internal harddrive as their main places for data, and then automate backups from these computers to a Network Drive. The main differences being 1) The primary copy of data resides on the computers hard drive not the RAID box, and 2) you have a complete and full duplicate copy of your data. With a RAID solution as a Network drive you only have 1 copy of your data.

Fortunately I found a great deal on a 1TB Gigabit Ethernet drive solution from LaCie for a very respectable $285 delivered from Buy.com Seriously, you can't buy two 500GB drives and a case with USB2 and Gigabit Ethernet for the price of this Big Ethernet drive from LaCie. By the way, because this drive has both a USB2 and a gigabit ethernet interface you have some options. You can connect this drive to your router and have an instant network drive. You can also connect it to your Apple Airport Extreme USB2 port and have an instant network drive that way. Or of course you can connect it directly to your computer via a USB2 connection. I'll be connecting mine directly to my gigabit ethernet switch on my LAN so that I get fast speeds to my wired computers.

If I decide that I really would rather use a network storage device as my primary repository for data on my LAN, then I can always buy a second LaCie Big Ethernet 1TB drive and clone my primary drive on the secondary drive.

I feel very good about this new solution, it offers me a high amount of data safety at a very reasonable cost.

I was over on Yahoo Apple/Macintosh News today. I couldn't help but notice that there were a LOT of iPhone articles, so I took count. 18 of the 30 stories on the main page were in fact about the iPhone. Wow. It stuns me at how much hype the iPhone is getting.

I certainly hope that the iPhone is worthy of all the attention that it is receiving (before average users even get to lay a finger on one...)

But there will be no iPhone for me for quite some time. The Cell Phone Soup Nazi has told me, No iPhone for you! when I recently got two new Motorola Razr's for my wife and I. I committed to a 2 year commitment to get the phones really cheap. I'm not so concerned about this. The iPhone is bigger than I'd like in a cell phone, but more importantly it's far more expensive than I'm willing to pay for a cell phone - even an iPhone.

Maybe in two years when my commitment is up the iPhone or its newer variants will be in the sub $300 range. That might interest me more.

I went to look at my Dashboard this afternoon and noticed that I haven't rebooted my iMac in over 16 days. Sweet! I wasn't even trying for a long uptime - just turned out that way.

I can't count on all my fingers and toes at how many error messages Windows would give me back when I tried not rebooting for several days.

Ah, stability is a blessing. Thanks Apple, OS X Tiger rocks!

John Dvorak is saying that the time has come to short Apple's stock (bet that it's going to drop) because the iPhone's keyboard is bad. So bad that 20% of people who buy an iPhone will return it because they hate the virtual keyboard.

Time will tell, but it's an interesting read nonetheless.

"The keyboard is a disaster, and people are going to return the phone in droves. I'm guessing 20% will go back."

Read the full blog post here.

Sun's ZFS file system has been rumored to be included in Leopard for quite some time now. Today Sun gave indication that ZFS will be a part of OS X 10.5. Ok, so what? That news in itself isn't very informative. Several months ago the Machine Check Exception Blog had a great post on why ZFS will matter to: Laptop / Desktop users, to Workstation Users, to Server Admins, and even why it won't matter. If you're curious about ZFS give this a read. I've put Why ZFS Will Matter to Laptop / Desktop Users below since that covers most of us.

Why ZFS Matters to Laptop/Desktop Users

People with iBooks, MacBooks, Powerbooks, Mac Minis, and iMacs all have generally the same storage setup: a single hard disk with capacity ranging from 40-500 GB. A lot of the magic of ZFS does not become manifest until you have several disks, but even with one, you can benefit in several ways:

Filesystems can be compressed. Unlike a compressed disk image, a compressed ZFS filesystem is read/write. Moreover, the compression flag can be turned on and off on the fly. New data will be compressed (or not) as per the flag, and old data will be left as is. Compressed filesystems are great for data that you don’t access very often, or data that compresses very well.

Filesystems are nested and making them is as easy as making a directory. This in itself is not very interesting for laptop/desktop users, but combined with compression, this means that you can effectively turn on compression for just a subfolder on your drive.

Every block of data on the disk is checksummed so errors can be detected during read operations. Many common hard drive failures are catastrophic, and painfully obvious when they happen. But it is possible for your data to be corrupted on disk in ways that you, and the hard disk, will never notice. While checksumming will not allow you to recover your data, it will let you know when you should go retrieve a file from your backup. (You are backing up, right? Go buy an external Firewire disk and SuperDuper!, and start doing it right now. It is easy, fast, and you’ll thank me later.)

Space-efficient and fast snapshots. A snapshot allows you to see your filesystem as it was some time in the past. ZFS is designed to snapshot a filesystem in constant time, no matter how much data you have, or how frequently you snapshot it. Moreover, the snapshot is very space efficient. Identical blocks are shared between snapshots and the live filesystem until they are written to. The space required for snapshots is therefore mostly a function of how quickly your files change, and not so much how often you make a snapshot. It’s like version control for your entire computer!

Apple’s much discussed Time Machine feature in OS X 10.5 is a great example of the interface possibilies when you have snapshots available. However, Time Machine does not appear to require ZFS, which means that Apple had to bolt snapshots onto HFS+, a complex and awkward task. Snapshots in ZFS are cheap and easy.

I am a big fan of RapidWeaver, I use it for both MacSeven and my personal website. RapidWeaver (RW) allows to very quickly and easily build an entire website yet it is not a GUI design like iWeb. With RW you enter all of your information more in a form like environment, choose your theme, hit publish and presto it's done. There are GUI pages, and a great add-on called Blocks, but for blogging and photo type pages the stock RW style of entry is great and very efficient.

Ok, that was a 2 second reason why I like RW. Now for what bothered me this past week.

I have paid for RW, I think it was 3.2 when I bought it. A couple of days ago RW 3.6 came out and it has some really nice upgrades that I'm happy to see. It turns out that RW 3.6 is a $25 upgrade unless you have purchased 3.51 in which case it is a free upgrade. In general I don't like when there is a cost to upgrade unless it's a full version up grade, e.g.: 3.6 in my opinion should be a free upgrade from any 3.x version, and 4.0 should be a paid upgrade. You may or may not agree with my feeling on this, and that's fine - it's just my opinion. I actually paid the $25 to upgrade, I'm not thrilled about it, but I want to take advantage of the upgrades to I'm paying the price - after all in the scheme of things, $25 isn't too big of an amount to get me all worked up.

Here's what really bothers me about the $25 upgrade for RW 3.6. In recent months and weeks RealMacSoftware (makers of RW) have had RW on sale at places like MacUpdate Promo and MacZot, they have also given away a lot of free versions of 3.5. Then lo and behold it turns out to move up from 3.5 to 3.6 there is a $25 upgrade fee. Certainly somebody who got a free version of 3.5 can continue to use it, they are not forced to upgrade. But it smells sleazy to me to tempt people with discounted versions of 3.5 and even free versions to then tell them that they have to pay to upgrade to the next dot release.

I still like RW, I support the company, but I really question recent events / promotions of RW. I feel like they lured people in and then slapped them with an upgrade fee, and it doesn't sit well with me.




........................................................................

The Linksys Tomato Firmware released an updated firmware to version 1.05.

Enjoy the goodness that is known as Tomato Open Firmware.

........................................................................

SlimDevices was kind enough to send us a brand new all Black SqueezeBox so that we can review it. The review will be several weeks out, it will be a non-traditional review in that it will be two people doing the write up on the unit. And we may not see eye to eye.

audioengine USA was kind enough to send us a pair of their AudioEngine5 powered speakers. A review will be coming on these as well.

I just got the new NeoOffice 2.1 which supports Macros from Microsoft Word and Excel. I'll report on this after I have time to test it out better. I can say that NeoOffice got a sprucing up and it looks much more modern than it's stodgy by comparison version 2.0 variant.

Also I just received a copy of the yet un-released Aqua OpenOffice (no X11), this isn't prime time yet and there is some terminal work involved in getting it to run. After I figure that out I'll give a quick report on it's progress. I'm very curious to see how Aqua OpenOffice and NeoOffice compare with each other.

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Linksys WRT54GL Wireless Router:

I would really like to get an Airport Extreme, but I don't need 802.11N so I'm very hesitant to pay an additional $100 for it compared to a regular 802.11B/G router.

My 4 or 5 year old SMC wireless router has been a real champ. Nice GUI, it has served me well for a long time. Recently it has needed to be rebooted about once a week though, and I reached my breaking point with the necessary reboots. I probably would have bought the new Airport Extreme even with the premium price for it's 802.11N support if it had a 4 port giga-switch built into it instead of a 100Mbps. But I just can't see paying $180 for it when I don't need the 802.11N and it can't speed up my wired LAN to giga-ethernet speeds.

The timing was right this morning when I ran across this deal on a Linksys WRT54GL for only $38 delivered after a Linksys and a Paypal rebate. and jumped on it. You may be wondering what makes this Linksys so cool. Clearly it doesn't look very cool and is obviously not designed by Apple. The Airport Extreme is the nicest looking wireless router I've ever seen, the Linksys looks like a Radio Shack experiment gone bad. It's not the looks, but the ability to update the firmware with great OpenSource firmware that adds numerous feature to the router. One such feature is the ability to turn up the power for better connections. Great stuff.

It would take a long article in itself to go over all the neat things that the two non Linksys firmware offers for this router. You can find out more about them at their websites, and on Wiki. DD-WRT web page, and the Wiki page. Tomato web page, and the Wiki page.

I'll be flashing my router with the Tomato firmware, it looks simply awesome.

Maybe I'll post screenshots in a few days when it is up and running


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I ran across this video on TechCrunch, it's pretty funny.




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Uninspiring Vista is a short article from from a long time Window user who in testing Vista switched to the Mac.

Inspiration comes from the strangest places, in this case from "Technology Published by MIT Review"

The article is titled: How Microsoft's long-awaited operating system disappointed a stubborn fan.

By Erika Jonietz

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The Apple TV is a great add-on device for any computer user who uses iTunes to manage audio and or video content, and they want to bring that content to their home AV system. Lack of support for DivX and XviD is not good, and the frame rates listed in the specs are less than ideal for TV content - but I'll reserve judgement until I see one in operation first hand.

FrontPage on steroids is how the Apple TV interface looks to me. I would like it if Apple updated FrontPage to have the same interface.

I will not be buying an Apple TV though. Why you ask? Simple, I am looking at solutions that replace my home AV system, not for a device which is yet another component to add to my system. Apple TV doesn't even have a DVD player built into it. You may be shocked to hear this as somebody who is a Mac and Apple fan, but my home AV system is powered by Microsoft Media Center 2005, and it's a great setup. Vista MCE a huge step forward making it even better.

As nice as Apple TV looks, it doesn't target the same features and functions as MCE. Our family uses an 'MCE Server' running in the office and we access all the content through an extender. It is our single source for Live TV, Recorded TV (MCE has fantastic DVR functions), photos, music, and more. Single Source, those are key words for me.

I only hope that Apple TV is the first entry into the home entertainment market for Apple and that they decide to take on MCE. Similarly to how Apple only operates music as a pay per song model instead of also offering a subscription service - I see Apple staying the course with their current mo