Tag: mac Posts

This should be my last Apple post for a while, but I thought this was newsworthy. Photo from here A friend sent me an email this morning which basically talks about Vancouver being chosen for a new Apple store. After years of speculation and anticipation, there is finally confirmation that that an Apple store will occupy a space inside the Pacific Centre Mall in downtown Vancouver (BC). The three-block indoor mall has been undergoing a long-term and extensive renovation that included demolition, construction and the juggling and moving of several retailers, along with the addition of new stores. But Apple isn’t among those new tenants. Instead, additional construction will begin in 2009 for retail space where Apple will locate its first western Canada store. That work will be finished by the holiday season of 2009 and, most importantly, for the 2010 Olympic Games that begin in February. It’s still a […]

One of the pieces of technology I’ve always thought was pretty cool was the new Lightscribe CD burners out there on the market. Prior to Lightscribe technology, the best a home user could really do was to be an ink-jet printer, print out a CD label, and then mess with putting it on in the right place. Some companies tried to make blank CDs with actual, printable surfaces, but those didn’t really work. But somewhere, after a few beers, some genius came up with the great idea of simply etching the label on the CD using the laser built into the CD burner. And thus, Lightscribe was created. A sample CD burned using Lightscribe – photo from hp.com A while ago I was in Future Shop and saw a Lightscribe external CD burner for around $50. At that price, I thought, it would be cool to pick up so that […]

This is my mac. He’s pretty fun, kind of shinny, not too heavy, and he can nearly last a whole DVD without dying. But when he sleeps, he sometimes doesn’t wake up. When I iPhoto him too hard, sometimes he rebels and he goes to sleep instead. When I photoshop, sometimes he chugs away doing something else, almost like “don’t worry, I’ll get to that eventually.” I put more ram in Mac, hoping to make him happier, but he’s still sad. When he crashes, he does it slowly to rub it in, slowly fading the screen from top to bottom until he’s gone. He used to do this once a month, but lately he does it more. When Mac was new, he didn’t do any of these things. He was exciting, he was fast, he didn’t crash and he liked waking up in the morning. He iPhoto’ed for hours, played […]

So last week I decided that I was going to try and break my whole staying up late, getting up late routine and actually make an effort to go to bed early and get up early. For the most part (except for getting in a bit later today, which is excusable but unfortunately not bloggable), I’ve been keeping to a routine of hitting the sack around 11, reading on my laptop until 11:30 or so, and getting up at 7am. Now, I have a queen sized bed. I’ve had one for years now I guess, ever since university. But the funny thing is, I will never ever be able to sleep like I have a queen sized bed. For the most part, I curl up in a ball and stick to my one side, even on the nights where I toss and turn. When I clean my sheets, one side […]

I thought I’m chime in with my thoughts and feelings so far now that it’s been a few days without a PC. First, I’m definitely really happy with my purchase. For the most part everything has just worked, and I haven’t had to mess with very many things so far. Sometimes I lament not having more control over cetain elements (for example, trying to figure out which WiFi connection to use in a public space isn’t exactly obvious — in Windows at least you can see signal strength and public/private all at once. I haven’t figured out how to see all that on the Mac). The windowing manager on Mac OS X is so much better than Vista. It’s really snappy, and you can program the mouse to activate certain aspects of the Windowing system just by moving it into certain corners. For example, when I move my mouse to […]

Most of you that know me have undoubtedly seem me cursing at my computer furiously this past week or punching my laptop from time to time. The reason for this sudden change in behaviour stems from my recent installation of Windows Vista. Somehow, that whole process turned a pretty decent laptop into something completely unusable. So today, while trying to edit some photos at Northern Voice, I realized that I just couldn’t go on using my laptop the way it was. Everything was really slow and most applications crashed from time to time (especially Photoshop). Since I’m about to leave on vacation, and I really need a laptop to take with me, I debated spending the first day of my vacation reinstalling XP on my laptop. Which would obviously suck, but something really needed to be done. And then, looking around at my peers in the Forest Sciences Center at […]