You are such a geek... » apple

Apple Thunderbolt Display Review

Nick — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:04:39 +0000

With the increase in travel as of late I am finding myself tied more and more to the laptop. Despite an extensive home lab with KVM switches and dual monitors, there I would sit with my 11″ MacBook Air. Simplicity was the main reason I found. Transfer files, syncing something to a new machine, etc. just was much more hassle than I needed. I had what I will call the semi-dock with my Air in which I’d sit it on a stand and then run the myriad of wires to tie it into the home desk system. GONE!

Display

I am going to focus on the docking capabilities and desk integration more than the monitor itself. It is an LG Display that is beautiful. There is nothing I can say that other reviews have not already. Its beautiful and soaks up the entire desk with its size. In standard Apple fashion it is beautifully engineered and designed. Matches the sexy look of the MacBook Air for sure.

Cables

The monitor has a single cable attached permanently to the back with the power cable being removable. Soon as I lifted it from the box I knew this would be a long-term issue as it caught to my belt loops. The cable attached is the MagSafe connector and Thunderbolt link for the laptop. My concern stems from this being the single cable with the most movement and use as the laptop is attached and removed. How many times have you found an old CRT with the VGA cable frayed and attached to the monitor? Other than this small concern the cables are sufficiently long to put your laptop around a desk in multiple places without too much taunt. I wish the thunderbolt/magsafe was a little more loose, but I can deal with it for now with some cable management. Just be aware that it isn’t as straight and laying flat as Apple’s pics would have you believe out of the box.

Ports

FINALLY! I get home from work/travel, take the laptop out, plug in to easily accessible cables and get to work. Before the purchase I would hunt down the cables that fell below the desk and pull out multiple USB hubs to connect everything. The most transfer speeds I could get via my USB ethernet adapter were not enough to justify the cable many times. Now though, Jumbo Frames on Gigabit Ethernet! Firewire 800! Das Keyboard! I finally feel like the Air is my primary machine and it doesn’t require me to strew cables across everything.

Speakers

They suck. Good enough, but don’t expect to rock out to them. Passable for VOIP conference calls.

iSight HD

The camera on the MacBook Air is the lower resolution camera vs. the HD version found on the rest of the lineup. The camera is MUCH MUCH better. Also having the camera on your primary monitor does away with the side-of-face view many of my business associates experienced. The microphone also seems much more capable of picking up my voice for calls which is nice for someone who spends a lot of time on VOIP calls.

Gaming

The laptop is incapable of driving both its internal monitor and external display at native resolution. When gaming with Civ IV or DoD:Source I have to step the resolution down to 1366×768 (native of the Air) to get any decent performance. I don’t do a lot of gaming, but it is nice to get online and frag my little brother from time to time. I am sure the display would be fine with an upgraded GPU.

Going Green

Before this purchase I literally had 4 computers and 3 monitors on standby at anytime. Now the power is just my monitor and laptop. Also the monitor is more integrated into the ecosystem of Apple so when I put things to sleep they all go to sleep rather than bits and pieces. I don’t measure the power per device (out of fear more than anything) but I can wager that I am saving some money on my power bill for sure.

Before and After

An iron fist in an iron glove – Mac/Linux Keymapping

Nick — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 13:28:20 +0000

This post will serve to upset both sides of the coin.

Apple users wondering why I would load an inferior OS
Linux users wondering why I spent all that extra money on Apple Hardware

I am going to skip the religious battles over OS and platform and say that if you happen to have loaded Linux on a piece of Apple hardware this post is for you. One of the first problems you will find is that your Alt+Tab doesn’t work as expected. If you follow the instructions your Command and Alt keys will work as you had hoped with the Apple Keyboard:

1. Starting from your blank desktop, go to System –> Preferences –> Keyboard

2. When the window opens for Keyboard Preferences, navigate to Layouts and Select Options

3. Expand the Alt/Win Behavior and check the radio box: Control is mapped to Alt Keys, Alt is mapped to Win Keys That is all you need to fix the keyboard map

Civ V for Mac = Borked with Black Screen

Nick — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 15:52:07 +0000

I purchased Civ V for Mac the day it was released. LOVE…LOVE…LOVE Civilization. I had this issue after the 4GiB Download on 3 different machines and configurations that the music would play, but no graphics. Black nothingness taunted me for days. Aspyr was silent and worthless as usual and the forums sang with similar rage. Here is the fix for me on my Mac Mini and Air:

Edit “Documents/Aspyr/Sid Meier’s Civilization 5/UserSettings.ini”

Change SkipIntroVideo = 0

to

SkipIntroVideo = 1

DONE!

PGP for Mac Whole Disk Encryption Review

Nick — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 22:51:48 +0000

Wanted to share a quick “how does it work” about PGP WDE for Mac.

http://www.pgp.com/mac/

This is the only solution that does pre-boot and true WDE for the Mac. The software is 189 for a yearly license or 239 for perpetual. The software itself is very “apple-ish” with great wizards and walk through for those not familiar with key based authentication and encryption. Some of the features are:

WDE for Intel based Mac running 10.4/10.5, no SL due to the 64bit kernel from the debug trace on my Mac Pro :)

Encryption integrates with Apple Mail or Entourage through scripts for PGP authentication on messages

Integrates into iChat for encrypted chat – HORRIBLE compared to OTR and Adium IMO

Encrypted ZIP – not winzip compatible

Encrypted virtual volumes – think truecrypt

Secure Wipe – Secure Empty Trash on a Mac doesn’t comply with NISPOM standards last time I checked. They include a Finder integrated tool that works against those standards. Much quicker too than secure erase on standard macs.

Now for QA:

Why did you buy it?
2 main reasons are work and security. FileVault is a great tool, but due to the sparse volume approach it shares some technical limitations and issues that I am not willing to accept. Let alone the bugs that refuse to allow default settings within the OS saved for 10.5. In addition with WDE I can perform time machine backups to my WDE firewire drive for total protection

What is the performance hit?
Once the drive is encrypted it is little to no impact. If you have done cryptfs in Linux, the impact is about the same. Compared to the windows Boeing image the performance is phenomenal. Notice though I said once it was encrypted. My MacBook Pro with a 500GiB drive is still going. Screenshot attached to share my sadness at the speed.

How well does it integrate?
Very nicely! There is a little icon bar that sits up top near the airport indicator informing you of messages encryption and other status. It is not GROWL integrate (NIH) so that is a little annoying, but the interface overall feels like a full mac product

Would you buy again?
Since WinMagic STILL has not put SecureDoc out for Mac or Linux this is your only choice right now. I am a little peeved that the product is not FIPS 140-2lvl2 in this day and age, but the encryption suffices. I will say that having used both PGP and SecureDoc, PGP is what I would give to Mom for use.

What about Bootcamp?
Nope – bootcamp does not work with this product. I know that on the MacPro it wiped out my dual boot gentoo build in one swoop. That was using the EFI based boot (rEFIt), so I am not sure what PBA system they are using. Use Vmware or VirtualBox :)

bin2iso for Leopard 10.5

Nick — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:00:41 +0000

I compiled bin2iso from source for all the mac users out there. For some reason bin2iso is not in macports. Link below:

bin2iso

Unzip into a directory and chmod +x bin2iso

Recommend moving to /usr/local/bin

*** Update 11/22/10 ***

I get a ton of Google hits for this post. If you have macports or fink installed you can now use the bchunk program. The syntax to convert a bin to iso is as follows:

bchunk IMAGE.bin IMAGE.cue IMAGE.iso

SheepShaver on Ubuntu

Nick — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 16:34:56 +0000

I wanted to run MacOS 9 in my Ubuntu Intrepid dev box so I went ahead and grabbed CVS. Problem was the autogen script never dumped a config.sub. Instead I took the easy route and downloaded an RPM version and used alien to convert. The one extra step to get it running is to as root ln -s /var/lib/libreadline.so.5 /var/lib/libreadline.so.4

Have fun!

sheepshaver_23-13_i386.deb

Centrally locate iTunes and iPhoto Libraries

Nick — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 01:28:32 +0000

You took the bite, you bought two Macs. It is a dirty feeling that you can’t wash off as you had the fact you now I contemplating purchasing a Steve Jobs black turtleneck sweater. One thing ol’ Steve hasn’t given us Mac Geeks yet is a central server. We are disposed to store things in one mac and hope for the best. You, the reader, are in luck as this geek isn’t the garden bred Mac type, but rather a UNIX type. With a little command line voodoo we will centrally locate those libraries.

If you plan on using a NAS (Network Attached Storage like TimeCapsule) then ensure AFP sharing is enabled. If you are using a SAN (Storage Area Storage like a Drobo hooked to a Mac via Firewire) ensure the machine is sharing the external drive.
On the mac where the libraries are currently stored map to the share drive by going into Finder (home folder for example) and hitting Apple+K
A dialog box will appear with a Connect to Server in the header. Type: afp://$ip/$share with IP and Share being your defined settings
Once you are mapped open up the Terminal which can be found under Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal
We are now ready to prepare for consolidation. Follow this article for consolidating your iTunes library before transferring: TMO Quick Tip
Now lets head back to that terminal and sync the data to the share: sudo rsync -avEz ~/Music /Volumes/ShareDrive
Go run a few miles, depending on the size of your library this will take awhile. After it is completed we are going to do the scary step of removing your current library. Yep, I said it. Drag that bad boy to the Trash and empty. Don’t delete the Music folder but rather all the contents. Be sure your data copied because if not you are going to hate me and start crying. Stop it, no one wants to see you cry.
Now lets link that bad boy back so you can rock some tunes: sudo ln -s /Volumes/ShareDrive/Music/* ~/Music/
Open iTunes and cross your fingers and toes it worked. At this point I expect you are river dancing or firing me an angry email.
Now time for iPhoto! Same type of process: sudo rsync -avEz ~/Pictures /Volumes/ShareDrive
Same as before, be careful and delete everything in the Pictures folder
Let us now link again: sudo ln -s /Volumes/ShareDrive/Pictures/* ~/Pictures
Open iPhoto — Nick FTW!

Why do it this way rather than the Apple Approved Method? This allows your machines to think that the data is there as long as the network is up. If you have a laptop when you are home iPhoto and iTunes work like a champ. Soon as you hit the road your computer acts like there never was a library. This gives you the ability to operate a few machines at once without either of them knowing the truth about your adultress libraries. The downside to this is being VERY VERY careful not to have 2 machines editing the iTunes or iPhoto libraries at once. It will suck, heads up.

Change your device alias in Open Firmware

Nick — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:33:41 +0000

If you happen to have a G4 Cube or another system with a MCE upgraded superdrive, you have the issue of dealing with the Master/Slave mappings. You loose the capability to hold the “C” and boot cdrom. Why? Well Open Firmware detects cd as your hard drive. Here is how you can change that function:

Hold Command+Option+O+F
devalias
See what is listed as hd and cd and write those down
devalias cd device-path
Replace device-path to what is listed after hd from the devalias command
boot cd with a bootable CD to verify

This is great! Look at it go! How do we make it permanent:

Hold Command+Option+O+F
devalias
See what is listed as hd and cd and write those down
nvalias cd device-path
mac-boot

PPC Linux

Nick — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:09:50 +0000

Why Linux and which one? Let me take a second to review:

Debian Stable 4.0 – Too old! You can’t expect me to be spoiled on my x86 architecture with the latest GNOME and Firefox and then jump back to Debian stable

Debian Testing “Lenny” – Too new! The kernel is a step ahead of the Mac-On-Linux folks and therefore negates my ability to still run MacOS in Linux. Also had a heck of a time with my 6200 Nvidia Card in framebuffer.

Fedora 9 – Will not boot the yaboot directory under \ppc\mac\yaboot from OpenFirmware. I am not usually a Fedora fan but was willing to give it a whirl. Didn’t work

openSUSE 11 – Great looking distro that took FOREVER to install. Also it is very heavy for older G4. The NetInst is a worthless adventure if you plan to go this route; download the DVD. It pains me to not continually be unhappy with SuSE. I still have a 4.8 box in my office here. Boy times have changed…To their credit, the only reason MOL is running on 2.6.24+ is one of their developers. Thanks to them for that!

Ubuntu 8.04 – Not an official architecture supported by Ubuntu. As much as I love Ubuntu, I refuse to run an unsupported arch as I would just end up compiling all the updates which brings me to my next choice

Gentoo 2007.0 – I have been a Gentoo guy for years. I still have a burn of 1.4 2003 release somewhere. The compiling by source is a real bear, but that was until GRP was created. Think of GRP as a shortcut. These are common packages already compiled and ready to go. They can get you running quick. This will not save you time when you want to compile something off the wall but it does get you a system up quick.

OpenBSD 4.3 – By trade I am an Information Assurance guy. If Mac-On-Linux ran on OpenBSD this tutorial would be dramatically different :)

My main drivers were:

Ability to run Mac-On-Linux

Current main support architecture

As light or heavy as I wanted

Secure

So in the end I decided on Debian Testing. What?! The reason being is that the only thing it didn’t do well was MOL and I can bypass that by running the kernel from Debian Stable. At the end of the day a good few distro’s can’t deal with the CD being Master in an MCE setup. Debian also has far reaching community support and is an official architecture. Off we go!

1. Download the first ISO. Debian will let you download all 9 of them if you are going off the net to install. I am going to guess that someone reading this has broadband.

Debian PPC Lenny Install

2. Burn the ISO. You will then place the Install CD in first and reboot the machine.

3. On reboot if you have the original OEM drive hold the “c” key and off you go. If you have upgraded to a SuperDrive (MCE or others) hold Apple+Option+O+F and you will be dropped into the OpenFirmware. Play carefully :) Enter:

boot hd:,\install\yaboot

4. Off to the races! At this point just follow the debian install screens. I wipped the whole drive as with MOL I can just run Mac in linux rather than rebooting.

5. After installing the X configuration will most likely not work. Login as root and type:

X -configure

mv /root/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf

6. Next we need to add stable to the sources so we can grab a MOL compatiable kernel:

vi /etc/apt/sources.list

Add:

deb http://mirrors.xmission.com/debian/ etch main

7. Next lets update everything:

apt-get update

8. Now we need to install MOL:

apt-get install mol-modules-2.6-powerpc build-essential

9. Reboot!

10. After the reboot Hit CTRL+ALT+F1 and drop to a console. At this point login as root and stop gdm:

/etc/init.d/gdm stop

11. We will run the commands to get MOL working now:

apt-get install mol

12. After the install go ahead and configure MOL

molvconfig

Accept all the defaults for video modes unless you have some crazy CRT on your desk

13. MOL will now work! Go read their HOWTO for getting Mac Running! Congrats!

So Nick, what works and what doesn’t on a G4 Cube? So far, everything works. Including the Airport, sleeping, and iSight. It is a great load and Linux is MUCH MUCH quicker on the original 450 than OSX ever was.

My newest Mac, The Macintosh IIci

Nick — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 23:57:30 +0000

Hello from my IIci. The machine is fresh from the original boxes with the original manuals. WHAT A STEAL!? My mom’s one comment when it arrived was that it

Looked heavy with all those boxes
Makes a funny noise when that floppy is writing

The machine is currently sporting the original 7.0.1 with a future upgrade of A/UX 3.1 soon as the external SCSI CD-Rom arrives. News to follow on my adventures with A/UX…