I was starting to think that the tide might be turning away from ATI + AMD: my favoured platform for the last four years or so. Both Intel and NVidia have been ahead of ATI/AMD now for about a year in terms of top-end video card and CPU performance.
I have a deep, dark secret to admit: I often send email using HTML/rich text features. I know, it is shocking: but I fear the seductive features of things like fonts, bold facing, and colour have turned me from the true path of pure text.
I came across this comic on xkcd today…and it seemed so true to what happens during my upgrades that I felt compelled to share it
I stumbled across this video which gives a stop-action view of someone using the least impressive of computer tools to perform some rather impressive illustrating magic…
In computers, bugs are a fact of life. No matter how much someone might claim that an application or operating system is “perfect”, the truth is always quite different.
Take the Macintosh, for example. I’ve been using my MacBook Pro for a while, and am pretty impressed with its behavior. But “bug free? Heck no. Here are a few recent examples of “unexplained” behavior:
When I cracked the case, however, it actually wasn't too bad: yes, it definitely needed cleaning, but the dust/hair build up had mostly been stopped from entering the chassis by the air filter on the case.
...When I listened closely to the fans, I noticed that it seemed like the power was going off and on at about a half second cycle during that minute, before finally "catching" and staying on.
I’ve been hearing about how the various instant messaging platforms are going to interoperate“any day now” for several years. But it always seems that the various players involved never quite get it together. Windows Messenger connects with Yahoo! Messenger, but not AIM. iChat connects with AIM, but not Messenger. Jabber connects with everything, but not enough people use it.
I can never leave well enough alone. If 2 GB of RAM in my MacBook Pro is good, 4 GB of RAM would be better, right? Well, as a matter of fact, yes. So I set out to expand the memory of my new Macintosh, and have a few tidbits to share.
Can your MacBook Pro be expanded?
As I understand it, there have been a total of two “releases” of Intel-based MacBook Pro. The first came out late in 2006 and was in distribution until approximately June of 2007. That version used a version of the Intel chipset that, for reasons that remain unclear to me, could only address 3 GB of RAM. Note that you could *install* 4 GB, but that the machine itself wouldn’t actually use the memory above the 3 GB boundary due to mapping conflicts. I believe this first version of the MacBook Pro came with 1 GB of RAM standard.
Apple quietly updated the MacBook Pro during the June time frame of 2007. The new models use the Intel “Santa Rosa” chipset, and can now support up to 4 GB of RAM. These newer MacBook Pros come standard with 2 GB of RAM, with of the two slots in the machine filled (I.E.: two 1 GB SODIMM chips).
I’ve had my MacBook Pro for a week now, thought it would be a good time to share some pictures. Here she is:
This picture was taken the very first time I powered the machine on, after it had completed its initial setup. The machine came pre-installed with OSX 10.4.10: the last version of OSX before Leopard. I got a "free" upgrade to Leopard (just had to pay shipping and handling), and it arrived here yesterday. Here’s how the Mac looks now with Leopard installed…
I mentioned earlier that I had installed VMWare Fusion on my MacBook. One of my objectives with this was to be able to run Windows Live Writer on my Macintosh for editing this blog.
You might rightly point out that there are plenty of blog editors for the Macintosh, some of them reasonably good. However…I’ve tried several of them, and they don’t work quite as well for my purposes as Live Writer does. So…how did things go?