Mokka mit Schlag » Mac

Last night at the beginning of class, my TiBook couldn’t wake the screen up from sleep, though strangely the cursor was visible, and responded to the trackpad. However nothing else would. I had to force reboot with the power button.

When the computer came back up, all my preferences had reverted to their defaults. There was also a mysterious “Safe Preferences” folder in my ~/Library folder. However it only held a couple of Apple preferences. Deleting it did not restore my original prefs, and near as I can tell they weren’t saved anywhere when the TiBook reverted to defaults. Naturally this happened immediately before I’m leaving for a three-day trip when I still haven’t packed.
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I was reading Digital Photography: The Missing Manual this morning, and it kept talking about all these cool photo retouching features I’d never noticed. I opened up Phtooshop Elements to try them out, and they weren’t there! Then it occurred to me that perhaps it was time to upgrade my ten year old copy of Photoshop Elements 2 for Mac OS 9.
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Since JavaOne, I’ve been thinking its time to upgrade my roughly 5-year old TiBook. The wireless is having trouble connecting, and it’s really a little slow for some of the things I’m doing now. It can’t even play my Doctor Who AVIs without skipping a lot of frames. Apple had just released some new MacBooks, and I’ll need a laptop at Architecture and Design at the end of the month, so I was thinking this was a good time to buy.

Then I read this:

Back on June 20, I reported that there’d be new, slimmer MacBooks coming in October that along with being made from new materials would also feature some “speeds and feeds” updates to the internal components. Today, another “trusted source” told us this was correct and added that the iPhone’s multi-touch technology is theoretically supposed to roll out with all the new laptops, including those coming out in October. The feature will be built into the touchpads, allowing you to navigate through your notebook’s files, applications, etc. the same way you can on the iPhone. (Yes, I know you can already scroll with them, that’s nothing new. I’m talking about all the other finger gestures that can be done on the iPhone’s screen.)

Since size is really everything to me in a notebook, I think it makes sense to wait until October before upgrading. I’d hate to buy a MacBook now, and miss out on a smaller, sexier model just a few months later.
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Run , don’t walk, to http://perian.org/ and install Perian, a simple, Mac-friendly collection of open source video codecs that finally lets QuickTime play and encode many popular video formats that Apple has ignored including Divx, XviD, FLV, AVI, MS-MPEG4 v1, MS-MPEG4 v2, MS-MPEG4 v3, DivX 3.11 alpha, 3ivX, Sorenson H.263, Flash Screen Video, MKV, Truemotion VP6, and AVI.

Yes, I know there are other products out there like VLC that can play some of this stuff some of the time. This is the first one that actually works.

Definitely worth a donation.

The Apple Store is down and it’s a Tuesday. New Macs must be coming out momentarily. Probably MacBook Pros or maybe new iMacs.

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Apple Insider is reporting that Apple plans to discontinue the Mac Mini. I can only hope they’re wrong. The last two Macs I’ve bought, including the one that powers this site, are both Minis; and I’ve assumed I’ll be able to buy more in the future.

The Mini is a wonderful apartment computer: fits in a small space, draws little power, makes almost no noise. I’m tempted to replace my dual G5 tower with a Mini next go round. The expandability of the tower is nice, but to be honest all I ever do is plugin one USB or Firewire device after another. I’ve never actually bothered to pop the hood and install a new drive or ATA card or anything.

If I were buying a new desktop today, a tricked out Mac Mini with 2 gigabytes of RAM and 160 GB hard drive would cost $1249. By contrast the minimum Mac Pro (1GB, 250GB) starts at $2200, and goes up to $2499 when I add enough RAM to run Parallels. I could use the bigger hard drive in the Mac Pro and might want a more powerful graphics card (though I’m not sure about that) but otherwise the Mini is adequate for my needs.

Small is beautiful. More importantly, small is convenient and cheap. Add an HDMI port, a cable card, and DVR software; and the Mac Mini could become the digital hub that AppleTV so much isn’t. We need more Minis, not less. Please Apple: don’t kill the Mini.