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Mar 31
Mar 31
Everyone is in for a special treat just in time for the last day of the workweek, an early podcast! (cheers in background, I hear, I hear).
Show # 16 — Customizing Your Mac
—Rumors and News—
30th Anniversary Tomorrow
New Microphone for Recording Today
Good Deal on Rapidweaver
Custom URL Dock Icons
Avie Tevanian Leaves Apple
Virtue — Possible Later Review
Forums Up for Site
Local Apple Store Coming This Fall
—Customizing Your Mac—
Changing Your Backgrounds
Dock Preferences
More Screensavers
Changing Out Icons
ShapeShifter
—Music—
“Savin’ Me” by Nickelback
Mar 30
Well, I never did get any useful feedback on microphones and such for the podcast, but I went ahead and bought one anyway. I chose a USB microphone from Samson, the C01U and it seems pretty nice actually. I haven’t got a chance to play around with more of the detailed settings (which will hopefully unlock some better quality), but I’ll talk about all of that in the next podcast. For right now, you can check out the product’s page below:
Mar 30
This post might not have very much to do with Macs at all, but it’s a video that I found online somewhere and thought it was pretty interesting. It’s a commercial for a Honda car, but the movie itself is a very large and complex machine, reminding me of the cartoons where everything worked together, like irons, windshield wipers, clocks, and they all mesh to make something move at the end.
Anyway, it’s a pretty cool clip to just watch, hope everyone enjoys!
Mar 28
Okay, if you haven’t heard me talk about Rapidweaver before, I’ll make a short description of this great piece of software. Basically, it allows you to easily create a very cool looking site. Then, it’s really easy to integrate your podcast. And add photos…movies…downloads…blogs…and all the while, it’s the most Mac-like app I’ve used in quite a while (and that’s important to me, remember, I’m an interface/design admirer).
So, this great piece of software is on sale. And a good sale. So, if you haven’t tried it yet, try it, you’ll be hooked. If you have tried it and never got around to dropping the dough, then you’re in luck. For about 22 bucks (instead of 35 I think) RW can be yours.
Mar 28
I really keep meaning to work on our articles section of the site, but linking to stuff on the main page is just so much easier. To get on with it, below is a useful article if you keep URL icons in your dock. Personally, as soon as I booted up my Mac, I got rid of the “Apple Mac OS X” URL or whatever ships with the OS. I didn’t see any use for it. But, I suppose the functionality is nice for some people.
The article details how you can make the icons that appear distinctive, and therefore more useful. It also hints at how to change any application or folder icon (with a few exceptions) and I’ll be getting to that here before long.
Mar 28
The man behind the core of OS X will have his last day at Apple this Friday.
Avie Tevanian is leaving Apple this week. He started out his career designing the Mach kernel, moved on to Next with Jobs and worked on NextStep, and then ended up at Apple bringing his earlier technologies together to form the basis of OS X.
Knowing all of this now, it makes me wonder if I shouldn’t have sent him a birthday card as well as Jobs
Mar 28
I just tried a new application that I found off of VersionTracker and right now it looks pretty promising. I’ll have to get back to everyone before I say something for sure, but right now it seems okay, saving screenspace.
Virtue is a desktop manager. This is standard equipment in almost all Linux distributions that I’m aware of. It was a feature that I didn’t use that heavily because it was implemented poorly in my opinion, but a nice idea. However, Virtue is a true Mac application and shines in usability. It integrates up top with your Menubar and lets you customize quite a lot of features, including creating more desktops as you need them, adding names, labels, different backgrounds and more.
As I play around with this app more, I’ll let everyone know what my verdict is. However, it’s a free application, so be sure to check it out on VersionTracker.
Mar 28
I was at work today, and got a work order where a Windows 2000 computer wasn’t booting because of an invalid boot device. So, I did what I normally do and hooked the hard drive up to a spare IDE cable in one of our computers in the back. I couldn’t get the computer to boot this way because the disk was so bad I guess (I changed the jumpers and everything).
We have a handy thing that lets you plug an IDE device up via USB with a power adapter and everything, so I tried this. Well, Windows got mad and wouldn’t mount the volume and locked up. Then, out of sheer frustration, I hooked the dying hard drive up to my Mac. Voila! It popped up on my desktop with no problem, and I was even able to search the volume for what I needed to recover. The drive was making horrible sounds, and is definitely dead, but it was my Mac that saved her data.
I was very proud of my iBook and made sure that everyone knew the powers of Mac 
I just have to wonder if there is a big difference in the way Mac OS X mounts or checks volumes, etc. The drive was FAT32, but I don’t understand why it did work after all. Thank goodness for small miracles.
Mar 27
I got around to placing a link to the site’s message boards finally. So you can reach that area under the “Support” area of the site, or by selecting the link from our “Just Added” area in the sidebar to the left.
We had some RSS issues late this week, due to me making some site structure changes, skipping out on a podcast, and family stuff, and therefore it took me awhile to see that I even had a problem. However, we’re all up and set now, so sync your feeds, because we’re back in business.
