While people would rarely choose to share their boots, its perfectly acceptable to share ones boot disk. Amongst your computers that is. After a series of unfortunate events surrounding my Mac OS X Leopard disc, I found that there are many ways you can get a fresh copy of OS X running on your Mac.
It started a few months ago when I got my new iMac. Long story short; it was a disaster, I got a new one, its a little off as well.. Anyways, it scratched my Leopard DVD. No problem though, I acquired a new image and tried to burn it to a double-layer DVD. Toast quit halfway through and seems to have toasted the DVD drive. The half-baked disc was stuck in my iMac and the drive isn’t recognized anymore. This pushed me to find a different way to install OS X, and I learned a lot in the process.
Continue reading ‘One Boot Fits All’
Want to sync to your address book, calendar, and bookmarks? Don’t want to pay $100 a year? Doh. That’s the answer of yesterday, because I’ve got some news for you. Now you can sync your stuff seamlessly and for FREE. That’s right, after waiting on a little or no cost solution for years; someone has finally stepped up to the plate. Fruux is an amazing service available to us Mac OS X users at literally no cost (in dollars, mental anguish or otherwise).
fruux is a lightweight and convenient system preference pane, that syncs your Address Book, Calendars, Tasks and Bookmarks between different Macs.
Continue reading ‘MobileMe Without the MassiveFee’
A couple months ago I ordered the Elgato EyeTV 250 Plus from the online Apple Store (free shipping FTW). Technically speaking its a TV tuner, but I bought it for its cassette digitizing abilities - more on that later. I thought that was the only use I’d get out of it too, since Elgato doesn’t offer a Electronic Program Guide (EPG/listings) for Canada. Until now. The past few weeks they’ve been rolling out a beta version of the EyeTV 3 software that includes support for a Canadian EPG.
Continue reading ‘EyeTV in Canada’
I’ve long dreamed of setting up a Mac based media center. So during the past few days I’ve been testing out some solutions to this little problem. There are the obvious ones, like the AppleTV, and then some more complicated mixtures of hardware and applications.
My goal is to sync or stream all of my digital media (music, TV shows, movies, pictures etc) to a large SDTV (standard definition television) in the family room.
1) AppleTV
The AppleTV is an amazing little box. It’ll sync or stream nearly all of your media from any computer that can run iTunes. There’s also some nifty plugins to extend its functionality. On paper it looks perfect, but in practice it caries a number of limitations.
- Initial cost
- File type limitations (think DIVX etc)
- Limited configurability/tweaking
- No support for SDTVs
These limitations are somewhat superficial, I could solve most of them by hacking and having a bigger wallet. At this time, however, the AppleTV just isn’t a viable option.
Continue reading ‘Big Ideas for a Mac mini’
As some of you are painfully aware (due to my lack of progress on a few projects) I’m in the process of getting a new computer. I had been using a MacBook as a desktop replacement, but I was starting to feel the lousy integrated graphics, the slow 2.5″ HD and the overall irritation of running a notebook in clamshell mode.
So last Sunday I followed the advice of many veteran Mac users and pulled up the Apple refurbished section. Its stocked with nearly everything in the regular store at a great discount. For the savings you give up the gorgeous retail boxes (refurbs ship in a plain brown box). That’s it, really. The product may have been taken home by another customer, but has since been returned to Apple and reconditioned. This process involves replacement of any internal parts, if necessary, and a thorough cleaning or case replacement. Refurbs arrive in perfect cosmetic condition with no scratches, scuffs or imperfections with brand new keyboards, mice and accessories. They have same warranty as new Macs and are generally better inspected than new machines. Mine apparently fell through the cracks.
Continue reading ‘Refurbished 24″ iMac’
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