Category: Computing

General computing with a bias towards Unix, OS X, Apple products, for use in Music and Photography

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# on a Mac

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.

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Support for Apple Mac’s

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.

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Gym, Wii, Beer, oh and Sorting out Lightroom

In an attempt to tick as many boxes in my categories list as possible, todays blog posting is a bit of a summary of the day.

Its been a busy day at work, and it has been a tempting time because of all the cakes that seem to be around at the moment.  Until the afternoon I had managed to resist, but then after a lunchtime trip to Nandos (yes so much for the diet, but I did have only a 1/4 chicken, rice and corn), I found on my desk a Chocolate muffin.

Thanks Bill!

After a busy afternoon doing 3PAR Admin, (doesn’t Exchange 2010 eat disk space), we went straight to the gym.  Nothing in particular, just a bit of general weight work, and 30 minutes cardio, spent between the Cross-Trainer and the Rowing Machine.

This evening has been far more fun.  A rather nice real ale, and a bit of time split between playing bowls with my lovely wife Caroline on the Wii, and sorting out her data on her external hard drives.

Her old PowerBook just had a 60GB drive so most of her data was on a mix of old hand-me-down firewire 800 drives that I no longer required.

Well with her shiny new MacBook Pro Retina, I also bought her a new 1 TB usb3 drive to hold her iTunes and Lightroom Libraries.

So between beer, the Wii and moving data around, tonight has been rather a fun night.  It was great to finally get my hands on her new MacBook Retina.  I was amazed at the speed it could backup and optimise a Lightroom V4 library.  Very impressive.

While sorting out her data I also took a few moments to look through some of the photos she has took of me, I thought you might enjoy this one, its me and Chris Bennett shooting Herons. With cameras of course not guns!

Chris with his Trusty Nikon D3s and me with a Nikon D200.

Anyway, its getting late and its time for bed.  Now that I have Adobe Lightroom on her Laptop, i’ll be finishing sorting out her data then getting Photoshop installed and trying that.

I wonder what else I can volunteer to do, anything will do as long as it involves using this joy of a machine.  The new MacBook Pro Retina with SSD and 16 Gb of RAM, fast hardly describes it!

 

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another quick look at the Retina MacBook Pro

Well after reading lots of reviews, trying one for myself in the local store, I have decided not to update my four year old MacBook Pro to the new model, but that does not mean we do not have one.

Caroline’s laptop, a late model 12″ PowerBook is now seven years old, so a few weeks ago I placed an order to get a replacement for her.

We were torn between the MacBook Airs and the bigger screen of the 15″ Retina models, in the end with us also having an iPad for light computer use (I am typing this on it right now), we decided on getting the 15″ Retina.

It arrived yesterday and we quickly migrated the PowerBook’s data, settings and apps over to it. This is one area that makes Macs a joy to use. Updating, backing up, restoring is all effortless and easy. Rumour has it that Windows 8 is going to be more like this, let’s hope so.

I have not had a chance to do much on it yet, as Caroline is yet to let it out of her hands but I’ll be getting Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop installed and really giving it a good test.

I have to say the screen is everything they say and everything looks fantastic on it, and everything is so quick, but then with 16 Gb of RAM and an SSD for storage it should be.

The only thing so far to catch us out is GateKeeper. This is a new feature in Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8), which prevents unsigned apps from running. For some reason it did not trust the BBC’s Desktop iPlayer.

Also some picture transitions using flash on a website were less smooth then I would expect, whether this is a coding issue on that site, Adobe Flash, or the graphics card struggling to keep up with things on the Retina display I do not know. It maybe that as we were just looking at a website the OS chose to,use the lower powered Intel Graphics instead of the high end discreet graphics card built in.

I have to admit I am dead jealous and I think I’ll be purchasing a SSD to put in my MacBook Pro to give it a new lease of life.

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OS X 10.8 – Mountain Lion – the upgrade

Technology keeps moving on and after assuring myself that my key apps would work, I bit the bullet and upgraded.  As always with an Apple Mac and OS X, the upgrade was easy and trouble free.

When I upgraded to Lion, I installed that on a second hard drive and tested all my apps first, I also waited for the first update from 10.7.0 to 10.7.1 before risking it.

But as Snow Leopard was to Leopard; more of a under the hood polish, then so is Mountain Lion.

Nothing too much to say about it yet, it all works and the computer is definitely a little quicker.  The major thing I have noticed is Safari, it really is much faster.

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Mountain Lion

Well the latest and greatest OS X release is now here.

Not had a chance yet to try it. Will need to ensure all my key apps work with it and if my laptop will take it.

We will be getting it soon either way as its time to replace our old PowerBook.

My MacBookPro still has plenty of life left in, so the new laptop will go to Caroline while I turn the PowerBook into a server.

Update: 27th July

Adobe and Apple have worked closely together to test Adobe® Creative Suite® 5, 5.5 and CS6 editions and individual products for reliability, performance and user experience when installed on Intel® based systems running Mac OS X Mountain Lion (v10.8). Earlier versions of Adobe Photoshop® (CS3 and CS4) software were also tested with Mountain Lion and there are currently no known issues.

Adobe requests that users discovering problems report them to Adobe.

http://www.macrumors.com/2012/07/25/adobe-and-avid-report-only-minor-issues-with-mountain-lion/

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Hands on with the Retina MacBook Pro

Well I finally managed to get my hands on one of the new 15″ MacBook Pro Retina Laptops.

While the screen is an improvement, the thing that made the biggest impression on me was:

  • it’s speed
  • the weight


It really is a speed machine, the RAM and of course the SSD instead of a conventional Hard Disk removes all the usual bottlenecks.

Not sure yet if I am going to get one, I would like to find out more about the screen and it’s colour gamut before committing.