Blackwater- Contract murderers?
I read an article today regarding how a Blackwater sniper in Iraq apparently killed three Iraq government security guards.
The Macintosh is cheaper…??
As anyone reading this blog knows, I bought a Macintosh recently. Heck, all I’ve written about during the last couple of weeks has been my MacBook Pro. I am pretty happy with my new computer, but I’m the first to admit that a Macintosh isn’t exactly an economical alternative to a PC.
Adding memory to a MacBook Pro
I can never leave well enough alone. If 2 GB of RAM in my MacBook Pro is good, 4 GB of RAM would be better, right? Well, as a matter of fact, yes. So I set out to expand the memory of my new Macintosh, and have a few tidbits to share.
Can your MacBook Pro be expanded?
As I understand it, there have been a total of two “releases” of Intel-based MacBook Pro. The first came out late in 2006 and was in distribution until approximately June of 2007. That version used a version of the Intel chipset that, for reasons that remain unclear to me, could only address 3 GB of RAM. Note that you could *install* 4 GB, but that the machine itself wouldn’t actually use the memory above the 3 GB boundary due to mapping conflicts. I believe this first version of the MacBook Pro came with 1 GB of RAM standard.
Apple quietly updated the MacBook Pro during the June time frame of 2007. The new models use the Intel “Santa Rosa” chipset, and can now support up to 4 GB of RAM. These newer MacBook Pros come standard with 2 GB of RAM, with of the two slots in the machine filled (I.E.: two 1 GB SODIMM chips).
Pictures of the new Baby…
I’ve had my MacBook Pro for a week now, thought it would be a good time to share some pictures. Here she is:
This picture was taken the very first time I powered the machine on, after it had completed its initial setup. The machine came pre-installed with OSX 10.4.10: the last version of OSX before Leopard. I got a "free" upgrade to Leopard (just had to pay shipping and handling), and it arrived here yesterday. Here’s how the Mac looks now with Leopard installed…
Don’t hand your kids to me…
Gettin’ jiggy with VMWare on the Mac
I mentioned earlier that I had installed VMWare Fusion on my MacBook. One of my objectives with this was to be able to run Windows Live Writer on my Macintosh for editing this blog.
You might rightly point out that there are plenty of blog editors for the Macintosh, some of them reasonably good. However…I’ve tried several of them, and they don’t work quite as well for my purposes as Live Writer does. So…how did things go?
Windows on Mac is Spooky
Everyone knows, of course, that you can run Windows applications on a Macintosh. When Macs started shipping with Intel processors this became almost a no brainer. Boot Camp is the most obvious way to achieve the “Windows on a Mac” experience, but is a bit of a brute force approach: when you boot your machine, it is either a Macintosh or a Windows based system, not both at the same time.
What the heck is a winmail.dat attachment?
Being new to the Macintosh, I’m “discovering” things for the first time that are ancient history for most Mac users. That is entirely to be expected. But I must admit I totally mis-diagnosed a mysterious email attachment I received today.
.Mac Sync: down for 10 days and counting
I mentioned in my previous post that I have subscribed to .Mac, Apple’s online service for file sharing, email, and so forth.
One of the neat things .Mac can do is automatically synchronize your Mac’s address book, email, and calendar so that you can access it using a web browser on any computer. I was trying to figure out why my MacBook’s address book entries weren’t showing up in the .Mac web interface, and finally read the little notice on the site saying that synchronization was temporarily down.