monline

Unfortunately I just had a unpleasant experience: my Mac crashed/froze while I was watching a movie in VLC player. In the middle of the screen the following message appeared (indicating a kernel panic): "You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button." (And the same message appeared in French, German and in a language that I suppose was Japanese. See attached image.)

"OSx86 Tools. The first of its kind in the OSx86 community, it puts an end to the endless, time taking, and inconvienent Terminal commands that every OSx86 user knows so well. Not only does OSx86 Tools provide a GUI for everything, it automates everything that would normally take much longer to do, and it does it safely with almost no chance of user error."

The first sign of malfunction was that the MBP started to be picky about what sort of blank CDs/DVDs it would accept for writing. This was not a big deal since it still accepted 9 out of 10 CDs without any problems.

Some time later I had a failed burning. The burn process started OK, but near the end (or maybe during writing the lead out?) it failed with some mysterious error message. This was quite strange, but I was still not very suspicious (this is my first Mac and having grown up using PCs with Windows I got used to failures).

However lately I started to have problems even reading my CDs and DVDs. This was the last drop of water in the glass. Every sign pointed to either a broken optical drive or malfunction due to dusty lens. I already had issue with dust on the lens of various CD/DVD drives in the household (eg. the Hi-Fi system and my old PC had problems reading CDs too and a manual cleaning of the lens helped - I tried a lens cleaning kit too, but it was worth nothing).

Sometime around Monday or Tuesday Apple introduced its refreshed line of MacBook and MacBook Pro products. I'm a bit suprised to see that the new models still lack any HDMI connector while all new models from other vendors have it. Hey, even our new barebone PCs at my office have HDMI ... why is Apple ignoring this tendency?

We're developing a video-conference app at my company and I wanted to test it at home with the MacBook Pro's built-in iSight. However it did not work. It turned out that the new iSights are in fact USB cams and you've to right click any flash movie and select "USB Video Class Video" as your active camera.

I've found some intructions over here. While I do not plan to switch from Mac OS X (at least not at the moment), it's good to know that it can be done without too many pitfalls.

Apple's site has quite some useful info, it's worth taking a look at it. Eg. here's a doc about the different modifiers (Fn, Alt, Ctrl, Cmd) that you can use to change the keys behaviours.
PS: the link above is for PowerBooks, but I think MacBooks have the same keyboard layout.

I just got the call: my new MacBook Pro arrived. Tonight I'll be Mac-ing ...

People kept asking me why in the hell am I going to buy a "brutal" MacBook Pro with 2GB RAM and an ATI X1600 graphics card with 256MB RAM? I just took a look at the minimum system requirements of Apple's Aperture, a photo-management software aimed at "pro photographers" (as the PR of Apple states ). Interestingly the "recommended" configuration is almost the same as the minimal. It seems as if Apple designed Aperture exactly for the MacBook Pro owners.