My new Macbook Pro.

Apr 09

Ok , I might have been nagging and wining about it over the last couple of weeks. And I swear that after this post I’ll  probably shut up about it but .. I got my new Macbook Pro yesterday. My darling wife took the time to drive up all the way to Germany for me yesterday and pick up the new Macbook Pro that we ordered. She had suppressed her own geeky curiosity and left the laptop in its original packaging untill I got home yesterday night so we could have a little ‘official un-boxing ceremony’. Now I’m not one of those Apple fanboys that yells ‘ OOOOOOH and AAAAAH "when touching the box and who thinks that "handing over a big pile of cash" is a "buying experience’ for which we should thank Steve Jobs into eternity. No, I just bought a decent machine for a heavier price (but i think the quality of the hardware is worth it) and that "decent machine" has the requirements it needs to have to serve as my trusty workhorse for the coming two or three years. I’m not screaming that it’s SEXY ! I mean .. calling a piece of hardware "sexy" implements that you either have a big ass fetish (and that I’m NEVER EVER touching the mouse of the desktop computer in your bedroom) or that you are in serious need of a girlfriend/boyfriend/inflatable companion or should seek therapy.


Since we are on the kinky side of the conversation again I must confess I did go for the "Unboxin Porn"
where I shot a couple of pix of the un-boxing of the laptop. To be honest, Apple DOES package their products very well and you at least get an idea you just bought the IT equivalent of a Swarovsky necklace or a set of Marlies Deckers underwear for the better half .. So thats ok. The new Macbook Pro does feel less bulky then its immediate predecessor. The unibody casing reminds me of the old "powderbox-clamshell" Ibooks as it feels very natural to carry it in your hands. The new keyboard (the one thing that ticked me off when they presented the new models) is surprisingly NICE to work with. I hated it initialy because it made the Macbook Pro look "cheap" but in the end its very very nice to work with. The backlight ont he keys is nice but since the keys are black you get a lot of ‘stray light’ escaping around the edges of the keys, but that just lights up the keyboard better. The new screen is indeed brighter then the previous model but is not a "Sensational departure" from the other models.  The big changes are for me the new "trackpad without a button’ where you need to press down on the entire trackpad to click. Now , I’ll probably get used to it soon, but the "absence" of a click-button does make that " detailed touchpadding " where you hold down your button to select with one hand and carefully move the index finger of your other hand over the touch pad to move the cursor, a lot more difficult. The touchpad feels nice to work with and is certainly geared toward "one hand operations" (again that sounds kinky) but i"l either get used to it , or pack a mouse.

The one thing I’m NOT pleased about is the absence of a standard fire-wire connector and the absence of ANY connector on the right side of the laptop. I mean : I’m right handed (so is  90 percent of the planet), the mighty-(annoying)- mouse comes with a SHORT cable. Yet there is not one single connector on the right side ? What the crap ?  So i’m forced to EITHER use another mouse (no problem there) OR use an extension cable ? Is this the "simple Apple way ?  I’m not saying we should turn the Macbook Pro into a usb plugfest , but hey .. ONE PORT on the right side shouls have been a good idea at least.

As for speed and overall performance I have not tested it . I’ve shoved oover the programs and accounts of the OLD Macbook pro using an Ethernet cable and that worked out nicely, and in a way perhaps the fire-wire thing is something we should let go off. Apple does give us the "special speedy" firewire connector (the 800) but my drives just don"t have that kind of connector and I’m not buying ANOTHER cable (I had to buy a new mini-video to DVI adapter) and i’m also not realy pleased with that (the older Macbook pro had a standard DVI port) But all in all I’m pleased with the device. Cutting ports and connectors does give the device a more "slick" look and feel and i’ll probably have more to say about how much I like it .. in a few days. 

 

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

 

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A weekend doing .. nothing.

Apr 06

Life on the edge of real and Cyberspace might be super exciting, but
once in a while we log of our systems and go "do something else". It
may seem incredible to you guyz to think of Knight and Nyana
wandering around in the land of "infinite desktop wallpaper resolution"
(the ‘real world’) but with weather like this, it should be considered
a crime to spend too much time indoors. So we geared up on Saturday
morning with a combined videoresolution of 10+8+2 megapixel (2 camera’s and a videocamera) , a combined storage capacity of 120 gig (acer aspire one) + 8 gig (Sd cards in camera’s en videocamera) and +4 gig Usb stick + 16 gig musical storage (ipod) and 1 gig storage capacity on the Iriver. Totalling at a grand ammount of .. well .. a little too much geek goodness all-together. ( i’m
not counting the resolution of our cellphone camera’s) A minimal
connection line to the Internet (constant) comprised of my Blackberry
over Gprs , with the ability to access 3G via our USB modem on the Aspire one and a maximal connection speed of 56 mbit (over open wifi) or 100 Mbit should we encounter a stray wifi
port.  The funny part is that we hardly used any of it this weekend.
Aside from snapping some pictures with our "small camera" we enjoyed
the sunshine and the great weather at the beach. On sunday we geared-down and left the netbook at home to go cruising in "the valley of the Jeker"
just south of where we live. Cruising through rolling hills, watching
the river glide through the green landscape like a silver snake and
peddling our behinds off, just to get uphill (did I tell you we don’t
have a lot of ‘physique’ ? ) We should realy start doing some more sports. And the time we DID spend holding some form of high-tech equiptment in our hands was wasted on our brand new Nintendo DSI. Playing Brain Academy, Singing along to the silly songs of Rayman Rayving Rabbits II or pounding Klingon hide on Star Trek Tactical Assault. All of that of course while sitting outside. So instead of reading a very high – tech blogpost.. just come back later and go outside to enjoy the sunshine. Or check out or weekend on the Flickr Stream .

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Kc223 "Switching your family to Linux."

Apr 05

Are you sick and tired of having to repair and remaster the Windows systems of friends and family ? Have you had pretty much enough of constantly having to clean viruses and mallware from aunty Jo’s computer ? Wouldn’t it be great if they all just used Linux ? Well, why don’t you switch them ? Tune in to this weeks Knightcast and find valuable tricks in converting your family .. to linux.

Shownotes.

  • Intro
  • Switching your family to linux : Software assesment.
  • Switching your family to linux : Hardware assesment.
  • Setting up a dual boot system with correct partitioning.
  • Using ext2 ifs
  • Post install : Goodbey mr Stallman
  • Signoff
  • Music : Behaviour : anywhere but here.

 

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2 operating systems, One place to store your data.

Apr 01

Yep, its April fools day. According to the headlines the Google homepage just crashed (see to believe), Ubuntu is going to become an RPM distro and several other stupid newsstories that only prove that you are a complete idiot if you believe them. So I’m not even going to bother with telling you that I just got an official MCSE-certification and am going to accept a position in Belgiums top Microsoft board of executives in a project to kill open source once and for all… nothing of the sorts !

I am however going to point you to a nice tool a friend of mine pointed me towards : EXT2 IFS for windows !

So here is the situation. you are running a dual boot scenario with both Windows and Linux on the same system. You would like to have your “documents” available in ‘both’ operating systems. Not just your “my documents” in Windows and your “home folder” in Linux. Well , its not very hard to do. The first alternative that you have is to have Ubuntu read the NTFS partition of your Windows XP machine (don’t work with Vista)  To do so go HERE. The downside is that this is not a very “fast” way to work. File-access is not very speedy and thats because they need to ‘reverse engineer’ the closed source standard of NTFS in order to get it working. Sure you can mount your NTFS partition in Linux , but why would you ?

The other alternative is to store all your data on your “linux system” and enable WINDOWS to read the Linux file format . you’ll need to install the tool called EXT2 IFS for windwows and this will let you read and write to your Ubuntu partition (download it HERE ) Once installed the program will ask you to assign a drive letter to the EXT2 partition of your Linux system and TADAAA , you’ll be able to access the files.

The next step is easy, Go to your mounted linux partion and look for the folder called /home/your-user-name ,  Next create a folder in there called “my documents” and remap your my documents folder to this very folder. This will transfer your data from your Windows system to your Linux system. That way you’ll be able to access your data using your ‘my documents’ shortcut on the desktop in Windows AND by going to the “my documents” folder in your homefolder when you are working in Linux.

Its THAT simple and it ain’t no April fools joke.

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