To all those people who claim that Apple is already in the netbook market because of the iPhone/Touch:

Bwahahahahhahahaha.

Seriously now.

Bwahahhahahahahahhahahahahahhahhahahahahahaha.

Bye now.

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I bought an XBox 360 today, hooked it up to my 32″ HDTV via HDMI, and I’ve been playing Fallout 3 ever since. There is no way to explain in words just how beautiful this game is in high definition on such a TV. You really have to see it to believe it.

I sold my PowerBook to get the money, seeing after I bought my Aspire One, added a normal hard disk to it, and installed Vista on it, I never really looked back to the PowerBook - it was collecting dust. I have a PowerMac G4 for my Mac OS X needs now, so the PowerBook was just a useless piece of 15″ metal to me.

I’m really happy with the 360. Just to be safe, I bought 3 years of full insurance for the device, for just EUR 44.95. I can pee on it and they still have to replace it. HA HA.

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May I introduce the latest addition to my computer family? After waiting for months and months for a decent offer, I’ve bought a PowerMac with Dual G4 450Mhz processors, 1MB L2 cache each, 1GB of memory, 80GB HDD, and a dual layer DVD burner (oh, and a ZIP drive - automatically I dug up my old [...]
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My parents bought their first mp3 player today. They bought the new iPod Nano. I was - obviously - tasked with buying it for them, setting it up, and uploading the first few CDs. This is my first hands-on experience with an iPod that lasted longer than 3 seconds (I’m the world’s worst geek). Two [...]
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The hard drive in my PowerBook G4 just died.

I have hard drives happily at work that pre-date the first coming of Christ, but of course, Apple had to put in a cheap, crappy drive and now I’m fcuked.

The funny thing? System Profiler sees the drive, but Disk Utility doesn’t. I’m - naturally - out of warranty, so, uhm, yeah.

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PowerBook:~ thomholwerda$ sudo lsof | grep ExplainingBBLeadership.pdf
Password:
Finder 94 thomholwerda txt REG 14,2 82162 2482912 /Users/thomholwerda/.Trash/ExplainingBBLeadership.pdf

What I dont understand is why the goddamn “File in use” error dialog doesn’t tell me WHAT process is using it.

“The world’s most advanced operating system” MY ASS.

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I want an iPhone.

There, I said it. The recent SDK, no matter how limited it might be, will allow the full force of Mac developers to descend upon the iPhone. And let’s face it, application developers for the Mac know how to make great, functional applications. I prefer them over any other platforms’.

Sadly, my two-year contract was renewed only a few months ago, and of course, the iPhone will be way too expensive over here. In addition, Apple will obviously partner with any carrier except my own (T-Mobile). In other words, I won’t be having one any time soon.

Curse the control freaks in Cupertino.

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“With 300+ new features, Leopard is the most impressive Mac OS X version yet.”

We can go back in time, edit photos while making a cure for cancer, and of course, we look cool and hip while doing it.

AND YET STILL NO ARROW KEY NAVIGATION IN DIALOGS.

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For Christmas, my wife gave me the new Airport Extreme. As a result, as of yesterday, we are now officially 802.11n in our house. Unfortunately, the iPhone degrades it back to 802.11g. However, I must say, the speed before I connected it was immediately noticeably faster. This was not "it feels snappier." Right away, the effect was staggering. Web pages loaded in a tiny fraction of the time they used to. Made me wonder if there wasn't something wrong with the old D-Link g router.

Anyway, I highly recommend 802.11n to anyone thinking about taking the plunge. Incredible difference.

Tags: Apple, 802.11, Wireless, Networking
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It’s sold. The Cube is no longer in my possession. I really didn’t like parting with it, but as a parting gift (besides the 300 EUR, that is), consider the following conversation with the buyer.

“I have to say though, the Cube is an American Cube, so it has an American power plug. I’m giving you an adapter with it, though, and of course, you can replace the American power cord with a Dutch one.”

“No problem. It’s replacing an American Cube as well. My NeXTcube browser was starting to annoy me, old and all.”

The guy was using a NeXTcube as his main computer. I can assure you, my Cube is in good hands.

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You want good Mac for good price? You come to Thom, I sell good Cube for good price!

In goede staat verkerende PowerMac G4 Cube te koop wegens overstap naar Intel Mac. Met alle originele toebehoren, inclusief de originele doos. Uiteraard werkend te zien, en draait Tiger heerlijk.

Specs:
- PowerMac G4 Cube 450Mhz
- 768MB RAM
- 128GB HDD
- GeForce 2MX 32MB videokaart uitbreiding (dus Quartz Extreme)
- Originele bolletje speakers, keyboard, muis, en doos
- Externe USB geluidskaart bijgeleverd zodat je externe speakers kunt aansluiten

EUR 350. Take it or leave it.

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I just bought the new aluminium Apple keyboard - wired, of course. Nice piece of machinery. I always preferred laptop keyboards over traditional ones, as they feel more natural. Let’s hope it doesn’t get restricted to 867Mhz+ machines when Leopard comes out.

And it has that new-Apple-gear-smell. I love that smell.

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Played with the new iMac for a while today at the Apple store (well, premium reseller, same thing).

Damn, that’s one sexy piece of engineering. I need to find a method to get rich fast.

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After the problems of a few days ago, I decided to simply reinstall my Cube altogether - the only way ‘the world’s most advanced operatng system’ can make way for a 2nd operating system on its hard drive.

After backing all important stuff up to my Server 2003 server, I booted from my Tiger DVD, used Disk Utility to create two partitions, and then installed OS X, followed by Mac OS 9 (which you need to update in order to 9.2.2). All went mighty fine, and a few hours later I had two fully working installations of the Mac OS on my beloved Cube. Anyway, if you are pondering (re)entering the wonderful world of OS 9 too, here are a few things you should know.

First of all, the browser situation on OS 9 is rather daft. There is no Firefox for OS 9, and the latest Mozilla build is 1.3.1 - old. Your best bet is to use iCab 3, an up-to-date browser for both OS 9 and OS X. It supports all fancy schmancy stuff, including Flash (Flash 7 is available for OS 9 from Adobe’s website, and runs YouTube just fine).

For emailing, look no further than the best email client ever: Outlook Express:Mac, 5.02 (bundled and default). This is a very elegant and extremely resource-friendly (7.1MB of RAM!) email client, with some really, really clever stuff built into it. Especally if you have a lot of mailing lists to manage, Outlook:Mac 5.02 is a dream come true. One of the best things to come out of Redmond.

There are a lot of different instant messaging clients available for OS 9, so just pick whatever protocol’s official client you use. Sadly, I have been unable to find a decent multi-protocol IM client. For IRC, ircle is a good client, even though it’s shareware.

Another must-have for OS 9 is SmoothType, a preference panel which greatly enhances OS 9’s font antialiasing capabilities (quite similar to that of Mac OS X). It’s only $10. You’ll also need something like USB Overdrive or Kensington’s MouseWorks to enable multi-button mouse and scrollwheel support (both do not seem to work with Apple’s Mighty Mouse, though).

For all other stuff, there’s still a boatload of OS 9 applications available on the net.

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The world’s most advanced operating system.

That’s how Apple introduces its Mac OS X. And it’s the biggest piece of bullshit marketing I’ve ever seen.

I want to install Mac OS 9 on my Cube. I want to do that because I want Classic support, but also because I want to boot into OS 9 from time to time (I actually like OS 9). Anyway, the reasoning is irrelevant. I want to do it. Anyway, in order to do this, I need to take a few steps: non-destructively shrink Tiger’s HFS+ partition, create a new partition in the resulting free space, initialise it as HFS+ with OS 9 drivers, boot from my OS 9 disk, and install it.

The world’s most advanced operating system can only do the last two - and let’s face it, that’s not even due to OS X.

You cannot non-destructively shrink the boot HFS+ partition on a PowerPC Mac using Apple’s diskutil resizeVolume command (booting in single user mode, obviously). This is the command used by Boot Camp, but it only works on Intel Macs. The command is present in OS X/PPC, but it simply doesn’t work - without even giving a useful error message. Even partitioning tools for OS X, such as iPartition, cannot help you on this one - it says this is a limitation in OS X.

I needed to resort to GNU parted on a Ubuntu PPC disk in order to, quite easily, shrink the HFS+ partition. Without a hitch, in 10 seconds.

Mac OS X also cannot create a new partition in the resulting free space. Actually - OS X cannot edit any area of the disk it is booting from - whether you are messing with the boot partition itself, the free space around it, or any other partition. The crap thing, now, is that GNU parted cannot create HFS+ partitions, so you’re basically fcuked on this one.

In Vista, I can right-click on “Computer”, select “Manage”, go to “Disk Management”, shrink any partition, including the boot partition (!), on the fly (!), in 30 seconds (!), without even needing to reboot (!), after which you can easily create a new partition in the resulting free space, and install whatever you want on it.

OS X the world’s most advanced operating system? Utter bogus. OS X is an extremely good piece of engineering (and I thoroughly enjoy using it every day) but only if you stick to the use cases His Steveness set out for you. Do anything even remotely exotic, and OS X will curl up in fetal position and scream “help! help!” at the top of its voice.

If you want to go all geek, stick to Linux, BSD, or Windows. Each of them covers a whole lot more use cases than OS X.

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