It Just Works

Last week I had my daughter in with me at work after an unexpected meeting came up for my wife. I decided to grab one of my 3 (!) older iMac's for her to use while at my work. I needed to move it off a table for a treat day and I put it on my desk . . . and out of curiosity I decided to see if I could load Synergy up on it. Currently I use a Dell laptop with Fedora Core 9 (Linux) on it for my portable PC, and then a Dell Dimension 3100 with Windows XP on it for my main system. Synergy allows me to use one keyboard/mouse between all the systems -- it's very slick. I was looking at a web page on the old iMac (on Tiger - OSX 10.4) and wanted to print. In literally 30 seconds or so I had the printer found, installed, and printing. I was floored . . . I spent 15 minutes when I redid my Windows box, and almost 1 hour on the Linux laptop. UGH!

There's a reason why I use Macintosh (unfortunately at home only) and it just works. It gave my son fits when I told him that's why I quit dealing with Windows/PC stuff, but it rang true the very next day when my work PC had went down. Comparing the number of problems I've had over the past 7 months of Mac ownership to my same timeframe of Windows/Linux woes . . . .ooof. I'm so happy with my Mac systems. I know that probably labels me as a "fanboy" but to me a computer is simply a tool, not a destination. I use it to do my work . . . I would be unhappy if my ratchet fell apart and needed fixing when I went to work on my truck or car. Likewise, I shouldn't need to jump through hoops just to use a computer. The tool should be transparent to what you are doing.

Extending The Experience

Ok . . . so I'm really becoming a Mac fanatic.  Last weekend an early iMac slot loader (CRT based G3 - 500Mhz/20 gig drive/512Mb memory) followed me home . . . I couldn't help it.  :-)   Right now it's on a cart for portability . . helps keep the kids at bay from wanting to camp on mine during weekends/nights here.  :-)  My daughter is already planning to save her money to buy one, and son really wants one, but decided to go for another Windows box for right now.   

This weekend we went to the Apple store and I picked up the mini-DV to composite/s-video cable.  $20 well spent -- because now my Mac can do exactly same roll my Linux box was performing before with displaying things on my TV.  That's basically the only signal it uses . . . other than DVD and VCR hooked to it.  I ditched satellite last year in cost and sanity savings mode.

I'm really quite amazed by my little old iMac (uh . .  the old-old one . . . LOL).  It is quite snappy and works great for checking mail, surfing, and running iTunes and that.  I want to move it around and I just need to get a wireless card for it next.  My want list keeps growing.  :-)   I'd also love a Airport base station . . . that way I could just stream my music to the pool or garage . . wherever I chose to.  Isn't technology great?  :-)  

Speaking of technology . . . I saw a very cool phone setup tonight.  It allows your cordless home phone setup to also use your cell phone via Blue Tooth.  That would be a killer app IMHO . . . especially if you were in a fringe area with marginal signal.  You could put the cell phone and base unit in a place where cell phone worked the best and then roam with the wireless handset.   

Of course the next great technology that will help with that also is the portable mini-cell network.   Basically Sprint has a device that allows you to become your own cell system and send your cell traffic from your own "tower" to go over your high speed internet.  If it saves money/minutes against plan I think there could be a huge convergent of technologies coming soon.  If Sprint would ever kick out high speed wireless at a price point that would make keeping your laptops/etc... all on one network and have it work ANY where . . that would be a killer app.   Can you tell I'm a geek?  :-)

Frustrations on PC's

My son's laptop needs a little loving, so I blew away windows and installed Fedora Core 8 (Linux) on it. The only problem is the wireless card . . . out of three wireless cards, the only one that ran in his was an Orinico one that I was using in my other Linux laptop. Grrr. Figures. I will hopefully have that sorted out soon, but I was just amazed at how many hoops I was jumping through for installation on things . . . it was really sickening. The latest FC8 though looks very nice and should be a good performance boost for his meager 800Mhz system. If I could find some memory for it and a new harddrive, it would really scream along pretty good . . . but my suggestion to him was to mainly concentrate on using it as a front end to a regular desktop over the wireless connection. He could then use his desktop PC and not worry about any speed issues. We'll see. He's wanting to do some hard core gaming on a desktop, so I've source a AMD 2.2Ghz barebones system that should satisfy his need for speed . . . at least in his price bracket. He would really like a Mac like mine though. :D A chip off the old block huh?

iCal Integration Amazement

Ok . . . one more little post for today. The new iCal integration with Mail is fantastic. I have most of my stuff setup on electronic bill pay with notices. In pops a new bill notice and I can simply click on the date in Mail and have it added to iCal 'automagically'.

I then set my number of days notice and viola . . . I'm good to go! It's so quick and easy to do that I will probably be much better about noting such things and getting them in my calendar (and then transfered to my phone). Efficiency!

Powerpoint to DVD - no problem!

Yesterday I was too excited creating the blog to mention one very cool time saving thing that happened with my new Mac. I had a Powerpoint presentation that was created from slides for an organization I belong to. We got a new DVD/LCD Projector so the CD they created wasn't going to work with it unless we got a computer or something to display that file. I first opened the file in the 30 day trial edition of Microsoft Powerpoint. It had an export to movie, but it had just generic timing. I didn't want to have my presenter to have to press pause/play during their speech to get that to work. There had to be a better way.

I purchased the iWorks package with my Mac because I wanted the Pages software for the organization newsletter, but it also comes with Numbers (spreadsheet) and Keynote (presenation) software. I opened the Powerpoint document with Keynote and was amazed to see an "Export to iDVD" option. I thought surely this isn't going to be THAT easy. Well . . . it was. I was able to add in a little title and that to the marquee screen on the DVD and then burn a copy. I popped it in my DVD player and pressed play. Sure enough, the DVD would display one picture (originally a slide) and it would pause. Then I could hit the play button and go to the next one. How cool is that? I would have been beating my head against a wall for a weekend or more with a PC trying to do that . . . and then it wouldn't have looked half as cool and professional as what I ended up with.


I'm SOOOOO happy with little things like that. In time savings, it was at least a 8-16 hour project or more if on a PC but for the Mac I spent about 15 minutes on it and then let the Mac render and burn the DVD which took about an hour or so. (My last DVD project was a lot faster, but this one had so many menus that it rendered between every 6 slides if you wanted to jump to another scene.)