Comments for Chronicles of a Mac-PC Slider

Comment on Bookpedia by Nora

Nora — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 09:31:13 +0000

Glad to hear you’re enjoying Bookpedia! A little tip for the Amazon wishlist import – if your wish list is public then you can search for it with Bookpedia: just enter your name or email address into the search window and choose ‘Wish List’ from the Search Type drop down menu. When you view the result with Bookpedia, it’ll give you your Amazon wish list in the Add window so you can just hit Add for all the entries to add them to your Bookpedia database. (Make sure you uncheck the preference to “Return to search window automatically after add” to keep the Add window open.) You can also drag covers straight from an Amazon page in Safari into Bookpedia’s table view to add entries that way.

Comment on Introductory post by Jonathan Aquino

Jonathan Aquino — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 04:52:57 +0000

Jeff – As a Catholic and a software engineer, would you be interested in joining the Association of Catholic Computer Programmers? We started a few weeks ago. http://accp.ning.com

Comment on Memory by Domenico Bettinelli

Domenico Bettinelli — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 15:54:22 +0000

Jeff, I never buy RAM from Apple. A co-worker just purchased an expensive video editing rig but got the minimum RAM pre-installed so we could get it cheap aftermarket. (Saving is on the order of hundreds of dollars!) The best place to get a good deal on RAM is dealram.com, which surveys all the different vendors.

I’m interested in how you like Fusion. I have Parallels, which works fine in my limited use, but have heard good things about Fusion.

Comment on Photoshop by Domenico Bettinelli

Domenico Bettinelli — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 19:41:51 +0000

I think sometimes people refer to Photoshop Elements as just Photoshop. PE is much more reasonable at about $90 and has about 90 percent of what I would want Photoshop to do anyway.

Comment on OSX by Jeff Geerling

Jeff Geerling — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 04:03:38 +0000

In Leopard’s implementation of Spotlight, files can store metadata (such as comments) within the actual file, instead of in the .DS_Store file – a very welcome improvement for me!

Comment on OSX by Jeff Tan

Jeff Tan — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 02:40:37 +0000

I am also a Mac-PC slider.

I had first been exposed to the Apple II+ which a cousin kindly gave me in college, but apart from playing with the Z80, playing Ultima, a few arcade games, and using Wordstar on it, we mostly needed to work with the IBM PC/XT. So I would sneak away from my Apple II+ in the morning and secretly dally with the XT at the lab. I even wrote a diagnostic utility for the XT that fits inside a 32KB chip and ran from an ISA card (I think) with an 8080 processor on it.

And then my mom bought me an AT. My aunt tried to get me into the Commodore 64, but everything we used at college was either PC-based or it wasn’t a microcomputer. Eventually I upgraded to the 386, a 486, the Pentium, etc. Soon I was surrounded by Intel-based PCs at work, and I had the AT at home. My Apple was stashed away someplace, never to be used again.

Years later, I got my first laptop, which was a Toshiba with Pentium III, and then I switched to the Thinkpad, which I absolutely adored. My PCs at work were all running Linux, though, and I eventually ran Linux on the Thinkpad as well. I reinstalled XP on it and my wife now uses it at home. So it was time to get another Thinkpad for myself.

But Lenovo bought the Thinkpad line.

So a friend suggested the Macbook Pro instead. And I’ve been loving it since then — even if I do run the Windows XP and the FC6 Linux virtual machines on top of Mac OS X, from time to time.

And it only hit me right now that, in moving on to the Macbook, all I did was come full circle. Wow!

Comment on Waiting for Leopard by Domenico Bettinelli

Domenico Bettinelli — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:28:19 +0000

Actually many pre-orders were sent out early. I received mine Friday morning before noon.

Comment on OSX by Aaron

Aaron — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 19:13:52 +0000

If the command key is really driving you buggy, you can remap it. In System Preferences, there is a “Keyboard and Mouse” preference pane. Under the “Keyboard” tab at the top, there is a button that says “Modifier Keys.” You can change which keys correspond to which functions there.

Comment on The more monitors the merrier by Dominik

Dominik — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 19:44:13 +0000

A quick comment. Have you considered using RDC (or it’s open source alternative – http://www.rdesktop.org/)? Instead of having to switch between the PC and Mac, you could just start a remote terminal session to your PC in a window that takes the entire screen. Remote Desktop in Windows is pretty amazing in terms of performance and with computers sitting next to each other you should not really see much difference.

Comment on iMac form and function by Br Anthony OPL

Br Anthony OPL — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 18:04:32 +0000

I too dislike the Mighty Mouse. I’ve been spoiled on Logitech laser mice for years now, so going from a mouse with more buttons than your average aeroplane cockpit to a “bar of soap” is unthinkable.

Nevertheless, I think I should at least point out that the two-button functionality of the Mighty Mouse has nothing to do with the squeezy things. In the setup for the Mighty Mouse you just have to choose two-button mode and it’ll work like any other normal mouse, left click and right click.You still won’t be able to see the two buttons, but they’re there and they work.