Category: Computing

It was with some degree of controversy that Apple released OS X 10.6 and a download only.  Many people wanted the physical media, something I well understand.

With Snow Leopard and then Mountain Lion, I never got round to creating a bootable install disk, but I am thinking of upgrading my hard disk and putting in a solid state disk to replace my current traditional hard disk.

Creating a disk is not hard but does require a degree of patience.

The first job is to get hold of the install files. Not as hard as you might think.  If your have not bought it yet then just purchase it from the App Store.  If like me you purchased it sometime ago, you will find the install will have deleted itself after use.  Just Option-Click in the Store to re-download it.  It will download into your Applications folder.  I suggest you save this file into a safe location.

To make the re-install faster, I am creating an bootable external hard drive.  Launch Disk Utility and create a 10 GB partition.

Make sure you make it a GUID Partition, via the Options button, on my disk above, I have a small 10 GB partition for the Mountain Lion Install, a small Window partition and then a native OS X partition.

Right click on the downloaded Mountain Lion Install file and select show package contents.

Browse to ./Contents/SharedSupport/ and Open InstallESD.dmg, this will mount the image.

Now go back to Disk Utility and select Restore;

Now drag the newly mounted image into the Source box and then drag your destination Disk Partition into Destination, then just click restore, depending on the speed of your disk you will have a bootable disk within a few minutes in which to use for rebuilding your Mac.

Finally to test your disk, go into System Preferences, and select Startup Disk, then select your new Disk Partition to boot from.

Easy, when you know how.

This morning while everyone was waiting for the expected announcement of Apple’s iPad mini. I sat down and wrote the first half of this blog post, with what I though would be announced and my thoughts.

I have a full sized iPad so the mini does not interest me, I was more interested to see if the new iTunes would be announced, it is more then due a rewrite. Originally just a program to manage your music, its grown into a media manager to look after your songs, music videos, movies, books and even games. An extensive shop and lets not forget podcasts,radio, and iTunes U.

The other thing I was hoping for was an announcement of the 13″ Retina MacBook, while also a product I am not interested in, the smaller retina screen and whatever graphics hardware is needed to drive it, is something I would like to see in the smaller 11″ Air.

So tonight I fired up the iPad and watched the live stream of the event.

First up was the new iBooks, this was not a surprise as the new ePub standard was announced earlier in the week.

Then the new 13″ MacBook; tempting for travel but for now I am going to hold out for a MacBook Air. No updates to the Air though, hope there going to get the retina screen soon.  Even if I don’t buy that it will mean I might get the current version cheaper.

A bit of a surprise was the new iMac, lots of improvements but the lack of a DVD drive may put some off.

Then the big surprise of the night an updated iPad, basically the hardware from the iPhone5 but with even more Graphics performance.

Then the main event the iPad Mini. Not as cheap as people were expecting but then Apple do not do cheap they try and do quality!

No announcement yet of the new iTunes but it is expected this month.

So did Apple deliver what you expected?

For personal use my Desktop / Laptop of choice is an Apple Mac, while at the Day Job I mainly use Windows with a bit of Solaris, Red Hat and CentOS thrown in for good measure.

Most OS’s are pretty good now a days and the old complaints about Windows and the Blue Screen of Death are mainly in the past; but by personal choice, when I can, I use Mac OS X as my day to day OS and Ubuntu as my home server.

The Mac OS while not perfect does an excellent job of not getting in the way while you work. One of the few iritations is with the Mac UK Keyboard. While they manage to fit the £, $, €, the # seems to be missing.

When editing code which needs the # or when tweeting, beginner Mac users find themselves searching the net, to try and find out where the lost # key has gone. A situation I myself have to confess to.

Odd as it seems its not missing, a quick press of Option-3 (or Alt-3) brings up the hash (#) symbol. They just seemed to have not printed it on the keyboard. Odd and strange, but then many Windows users would say that about Apple Mac’s!

PS, I was watching an American video tutorial recently on bash shell scripting and he refered to the hash (#) as the pound symbol, is this another area where English UK and English USA differs?

Colour and Color, two nations separated by a common language.

Well for those waiting for the first maintenance release of Mountain Lion the latest OS for the Mac, it was released at the end of last week.

http://support.apple.com/downloads/

For those who need to download it to update multiple computers and not use software update you can find it on the link above.

I needed to check something this morning on the Royal Mail Tracking Website, and found according to them the Mac OS and Browser is not supported.

Come on Companies, in this day and age I would expect at least support for common internet standards allowing any standards based OS and Browser to work over the internet.

That means supporting Windows, OS X, and Linux.