Wednesday, October 31, 2007

My Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) experiences : Luckily Amazon was wrong about its predicted Nov 3 - 7 arrival. As it shipped from Dallas, it took just 2 days for USPS to get it to Houston. I was fortunate the DVD wasn't damaged as it fell out of the flimsy cardboard box Apple used for it. Trivially simple and painless to install. Put the DVD in, click install, reboot, select English as language, accept the License agreement, and off it went, with nary a problem. When it finished, only a few minor issues. I had to "install" the drivers for my LaserJet 3800n which the Macintosh no longer knew was there, and bootup is slower, likely because of the beta McAfee VirusScan I'm running. Time Machine defaulted to wanting to backup every Macintosh volume it could see, rather than just the boot volume, so after I realized that and adjusted preferences it worked fine, but it is slower than slow. I'll have to try disconnecting from Internet and turning off VirusScan and see if that helps, or I can go back to doing a backup by restoring the Boot disk to another Hard Disk. Disappointing Apple still doesn't provide a HD optimization utility. As for BootCamp, the setup file is dated April 2007, so nothing new there. Selecting "Startup disk" no longer sees my Vista volume, but it can be selected at Bootup. New drivers are provided on the Leopard DVD for XP and Vista, and there I have 2 major issues. The drivers for my NVidia 7300 didn't install and crapped out in both XP and Vista, so it required a side trip to nvidia.com to get their Sept. 2007 drivers which worked fine. Apple a year later still hasn't provided a PC driver for its own external iSight webcam. One review said the Macintosh could now write to PC hard disks, and I did not find that to be the case for NTFS formatted volumes. Ethernet must be working better because any browser now seems to run faster under Leopard than before.

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Apple has released OS X 10.5 : I've made a clone of my Macintosh Hard Drive, and checked both drives for "permissions" preparatory to installing Leopard. Amazon says my Leopard shipped, and is due Nov. 3.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Epson biodegradeable inkjet printers: I have a color inkjet printer as it's an excellent poor man's Xerox.

My Epson Stylus CX6400 had a terminally clogged printer head (soaking overnight in either
alcohol or Windex didn't help) so I bought a nice new HP Photosmart C5280 at Office Depot,
as they swapped my still NIB leftover Epson ink cartridges for HP ones. Now I fear it'll be
months till HP has a working OS X 10.5 driver.

Monday, October 08, 2007

No iPhone for me (at the moment) :
I can't put my own ringtones on it.
After the iPhone 1.1.1 update, the phone only works with ringtones bought through the Apple iTunes store or the original Built in Ones.
What if you have a public domain sound file thats not available through iTunes and you'd like to use as a ringtone? You're out of luck at the moment.
Example sounds:
Flint phone (works great on my Sony-Ericsson Walkman phone), now with a 4 Gig Memory Card
Star-Trek Warning sound (Red Alert)

Sunday, October 07, 2007

Macintosh AntiVirus ? Apple is about to introduce a new version of OS X, version 10.5,
rumored for later in October 2007. Last update broke the then available major antivirus products. Fearing a repeat, I wasn't anxious to pay to renew my Norton AntiVirus 10.0, given Symantecs' failure to promise me a technology upgrade if needed with 10.5

Luckily McAfee has just released a free beta of its VirusScan, version 8.6; which it promises to be compatible with OS X 10.5. So that is what I now run with my OS X 10.4.10