Appley – Rollingskull

SWOL…. swol battery.

I’ve been with out my 2016 MBP for about 48 hours now, I had to take it in for repair on Saturday for a swollen main battery in the chassis. The repair is a mail out repair, and since I have perfectly good computer sitting next to my Mac, I thought no big deal I’ll just use the Win10 machine for a while. I’m fluent in Windows and use Windows primarily for my day job but going back to Windows at home after 12 years of Mac at home has me noticing lots of little things.

First you don’t realize how attached to iMessage you are until you don’t have it on your main computer, having to look at your phone for a conversation rather then it being just another chat app is remarkable when you no longer have it after having it for so many years. Yes WhatsApp, GChat (until it’s sun setted next year), and Skype all provide a desktop client…. But none work quite as seamlessly between devices or the OS as iMessage does.

On my Mac I have a little automation script set up to monitor my “~\Downloads” folder and it moves files based upon file type… PDF to a folder on my OneDrive, JPG to a dedicated folder away from the desktop for memes from social media, and larger media files (over 2MB) to a network share attached to a 12TB DAS. The file automation has been built into MacOS for as long as I’ve used it (since 2007) and it’s been one of those things that has always just made life a little bit easier. Windows does not have a built-in equivalent; you can download the equivalent service but there is no native equivalent baked into the OS. Which really gets to the larger issue of there is no Windows equivalent of Automator for taking care of bunches of little tasks that we all do during our day and never thing twice about. Also, for the record yes, I still download media… I’m internet ancient, and sometimes I like to miserly with my bandwidth. I still act like I have a 56k connection when I’m paying for gigabit on one line and unlimited data on my cell phone.

Finally, I don’t think I would have noticed this if I hadn’t been working on a presentation for a conference. There is no recent documents in the “Start Menu” like there was in Windows 7/8/8.1 I literally just noticed this yesterday. In MacOS it’s still up in the apple menu where it’s been for almost 20 years. It’s not a big deal, 99% of the time I open recent files via the app I’m using them in anyway. Sometimes it’s things like the recent documents that are force of habit that you don’t notice until it’s in your face.

It’s not all weird on Windows, the Office365 experience is markedly better then on MacOS IMO (and vastly superior to iOS). Which should surprise no one as Office has always been a flagship for Windows capabilities. I didn’t appreciate how good it was until working on my conference slide deck and writing this post (which I’m writing a draft of in Word, because I like my software to work against me actively). Little things like word definitions and thesaurus suggestions when I click on words is nice, and the kind of thing I would expect from a modern fully featured office suite on a modern platform.

Most of the mechanical differences I’ve observed between Windows and MacOS are more directly related to the hardware I’m running each OS on…. The Mac is using new NVME SSD and USB 3.1 across the board, while the Windows machine is using a mix of older NAND SSD and spinning disk. The Windows machine still runs fine from a CPU perspective for web browsing and office work so no real difference in the experience. The biggest differentiator has to be the monitors! The LG 5k is a great monitor that I don’t appreciate enough… I’m really missing it using 2 Samsung 1080p monitors right now… they are getting the job done, but damn I need to do something about this monitor situation on my Windows machine.

So those are my differences I found it a bit odd and thought I would document them here since you know I’m writing on here so much…. Why doesn’t a sarcasm font exist yet?

That awkward moment…

It’s a bit awkward when your a I.T. professional and you realize that you no longer need a PC at home.

It started out innocently enough… I bought a Mac in 2007 and a new one in 2011 and my bank account quietly wept both times.

I upgraded to Windows 8 in the fall of last year. Why? Well why not I’m a I.T. professional I need to be versed on all forms of the dominant operating systems in the land in their native forms (GUI for Windows, CLI or LINUX, and a unholy combination of the two for Mac OS). I then did the requiste app upgrades that come with any upgrade to windows… I lost the ability to get into work… The Citrix client for Windows 8 is to advanced for the Citrix presentation server that my work uses, and I can’t downgrade versions because Citrix is dumb.

That’s not a issue I can Citrix into work on my Mac.

I find that I have less time to play games and few games that come out really intrest me, I stop buying $60 games. I start buying games that are on sale which means they are a few months old and increasingly have a Mac version by that point… This matters little since the only game I’m really interested in playing is Batman Arkham City on my Xbox

I install a hybrid drive on my Mac… and things (well some things) launch so so so fast (sub 1 second for Chrome I shit you not) (from cold boot to password screen for disk encryption is 7 seconds)

I get pissed off when I go to look for the calculator on my Windows 8 box… years of muscle memory and a certain f*’d up logic out the proverbial window.

The temperature hits 90 about 3 weeks ago, it hits 95 in my office (I haven’t turned on my AC yet (personal thing global warming be damned I don’t turn on the AC before April 15)) I turn off my main PC to keep from so much heat being kicked out. That was 3 weeks ago I haven’t turned my pc on since then. It took me a week to even notice that I hadn’t turned it on.

The change was so subtle I didn’t even notice it till I had been fully consumed. Not to say there isn’t a place for the PC in my world (“Skyrim” is still PC only) the environment for the level of work that I do has reached parity to a point that the platform matters not.

The bigger point here is I have finally shed the ingrained need for a “Full Desktop” PC and have finally come to a point where I laptop is everything I need a main computer. This notion is already on a dead man walking path though… The tablet in the living room will see to that in short order.

This leaves the following thought the future of a the high powered all powerful time and space bending machine as a thing of the past. In the next couple of years the home computer will be nothing more then a server for the mobile devices that need local content caching, the rest of it lives on the internet through a always on society.

Even the top end of the market where I used to live will no longer need high powered machines for gaming the processing power for the high definition polygons will live on a server in a datacenter that scales massively for the latest AAA title where the gamers of tomorrow pay for a license fee and then time of use for processing power (think amazon cloud only games instead of big data) the only limitation being the available bandwidth on the local internet connection.

“Anubis” is the last of the big gaming rigs… I quietly weep at this thought.

Techonology Hates Me…

So for last couple of posts I’ve talked about moving from one mac to another… and well it appears the my windows PC reads my blog because when I was surfing the internet on Monday after work my screens decided to do it’s impression of a 3d effect trying to impress me it failed miserably….

So the good news is I’ve sourced a new video card… the bad news is I’m pretty sure I’m going to keep running the Boinc CUDA apps that look for aliens and fold proteins on that new video card.

More migration notes… bootcamping

Ok so this one is going to be quick… I got a new mac… yea!

I posted previously on the migration process after a about 24 hours things started to magically get faster, which tends to make me thing there is some sort of background system process running that updates things to the new mac from the old mac. I don’t knot it’s just conjecture or maybe I just need to reboot the damn thing.

I’m thinking I probably needed to reboot the damn thing after dumping some serious knowledge on it.

Ok so if any of you have heard me gripe about my apple store experience in 2007 when I bought my first mac…. you know the story where the dude selling me a very expensive looked down his nose at me and said “windows isn’t going to be the first thing you install is it?” I find that I’m back to a kind of circle of life moment with my mac and windows.

It seems that my upgrade Windows7 that I bought for my old mac is tied to that hardware so I couldn’t use it on the new mac, ok not a huge deal I will use winclone and clone the dmg into the bootcamp partition… yeah that worked not at all. Which left me with… well maybe I can suck up my bootcamp windows into vmware… nope no dice. Honestly after about three hours of dicking around with I decided it wasn’t worth my time.

So now the real question comes out, do I really need to bootcamp my mac? Part of me says yes I do! Then the rational side of me kicks in, 95% of the time when I booted into windows was only to download updates and that was a bit of a pain. I can’t say that I have any real intentions of using this mac as a gaming rig… ok I do have steam on it and compared to my old mac Left4Dead is pretty sweet. When it comes to gaming though at least the kind of gaming I do the PC is the platform of choice. Yes mac are starting to do games, here is the other side of that coin I have no real desire to build a new PC other then my CPU is getting to be a bit long in the tooth. The GPU isn’t far behind.

From a overall perspective what I would like to do is move off of the PC entirely and run all of my media on a apple platform… that however seems kind of expensive but man that shit would work. I can say from a IT guy perspective it’s in my best interest to be familiar with all platforms out there so I guess I will be keeping my PC around even if it is just for gaming and looking for aliens.

Mr. Data

What ten years of hard drives look like on computer recycling day….

Keep until the end…

Long time readers of the blog… and I think there is a grand total of 4 of you now. Probably remember the last round of upgrade fever that hit the batcave which resulted in a TiVo, a MacBook Pro, and a sooner then I would have liked upgrade to my current desktop rig. That last bout of upgrade fever was 2007. Honestly it was pretty much kicked off by coming into a couple of bucks because of a house I sold. I think I may have gotten into beer brewing at about that time too, and I have yet to hear anybody complain about that (when enjoyed in moderation).

So flash forward to 2010 it’s 3 years since the last major bout of upgrade fever… and honestly I don’t think it’s returned. Do I look at the new Core i5 MacBook Pro’s and go “damn that is one sexy machine”? Oh hell yes I do. Am I going to stick with Mac as my laptop platform of choice…. at this time I’m going to say that the answer is yes. I don’t feel this over riding urge to go and purchase a new laptop simply because it’s new. Other then a different body style and upgraded guts what does this new mac do that my existing mac doesn’t do?

In a word not a damn thing. Actually I’m starting to think that I may pull windows off my mac with the exception of a vmware environment. Why install windows on a mac? well in a word “games” and I have to think about the last time I played a game on my mac (spring of 2009) after that I’ve booted into windows just to update it and the AV software, I’m normally back to the mac os within a hour or so. At this juncture it seems kind of dumb to keep a windows partition on my mac. Vmware has matured as a product that it’s pretty usable for those one off devices that won’t work with mac (which in my world are far and few between).

What I find interesting is what I choose to do on my mac vs my pc….

Photos… mac
Videos… editing the one time… mac… watching pc
surfing… pc unless I actually unpug the mac and take it to another room… and honestly I would just assume leave the technology in the office when I get home / get done working.
games… pc
blogging… what ever is most convenient… which again depends on what I’m doing quick dumps seem to go better on the pc… longer sessions (pretty much anything with the category of “musing of a back porch”) tends to be written on the mac. Not that the mac is any better it’s just more portable which lets me get creative in other spots.

When I think about how I use mobile technology I know that a iPad while cool would probably not be used as anything more then a media tablet and digital photo frame. And if I had pictures that I wanted to show off in HD on a 10 inch screen I would so buy one. But I don’t and I tend to be more old school in my technology usage (I still prefer a command line for Christ sake) and combination of mac-book air with a mac mini seems like it would do well for me. At the very least the mac-book air wouldn’t burn my legs like my mac book pro.

Why a Mini and a Air? The Air would be for the day to day stuff, surfing and writing… The mini would be for more cpu intensive apps (vmware, iphoto editing, something with more then a 12 inch screen) of course the cost of those two items is just about to the point of a mac book pro and why buy two when you can have one at the same price.

The part in all of this that drives me up the wall the most? Other then a slightly undersized hard drive (which is fixed very easily by a afternoon and $75) I have zero problems with my mac and it does everything I need/want it to do! I don’t know if I’ve finally hit the point of not needing the latest and greatest or if maybe just maybe I have found technology that can fulfill my needs for a extended period of time.

God it’s hell to have my problems. 🙂

Alt MAC

So STEAM finally comes to MAC next week while I don’t plan on loading it right away on my Mac, I thought I would share a tidbit of the improvements coming with the Mac version of STEAM. Please note that this is aimed at the Mac gamer set… so if you aren’t a gamer you probably won’t get these. If you’ve ever used Mac you will get them all.

Team Fortress 2

When engineers build turrets in the Mac version of Team Fortress 2, the turrets will cost twice as much (in metal) as the Windows equivalent. However, the turrets will be curvy and shiny, and emit a pleasant noise as they shoot the enemy down.

The Heavy’s chain gun will be lighter and smaller, and of course curvier and shinier. It will weigh merely 1.8 pounds and fold up nicely to ultra-thin dimensions, allowing the Heavy to move quickly at all times. It will keep track of the Heavy’s appointments and phone numbers with a stylish, yet elegantly functional, interface. However, it will only shoot rubber bullets.

And my current favorite…

Left 4 Dead

All custom maps in the Mac version of Left 4 Dead will have to be approved by Apple, which will reject any maps that feature nudity, suggestive content, political satire or zombies.

Two more main characters will be added: a balding, schlubby-looking guy in a suit, and a young dude with tousled hair and a semi-beard whom you will immediately want to shoot. However, you should not shoot the tousled guy, because teamwork is important to winning the game — and because it’s a lot more satisfying to see him dragged to his death by a tongue zombie.

Read More http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/05/alt-text-valve-apple/#ixzz0nHqReIup

Windows 7… Mac… And you… Part 2

So the Bootcamp Windows 7 install on the Macbook Pro (MBP) has been not nearly as nice as the original XP install in 2007. Research has turned up that the machine I have (at just under 3 years old) is right at the cut off for 64bit Win7 compatibility and if I were one rev newer I wouldn’t be having nearly these problems. So with that in mind, my experiences are far from typical. However in the hope to save some other poor soul who has the same model MBP as I (and this is my way of documentation in case I have to do all of this crap again) i present to you now part 2 of the MBP/Win7 saga.

After getting the ISO built the next trick is to install the OS which isn’t so hard you just kick bootcamp in MAC OS to start the windows installer and a reboot later your off and running. Where I had issues was after the first reboot I kept getting a hung install on the “completing installation” screen. The trick here is to have nothing but the power cord plugged into the computer and don’t touch the damn thing… If you see the three little dots (…) stop moving for more then 5 minutes… Start over with the install and do it again. I had to do it three times, I can’t tell you why it does it just that it does.

The good news is once the install completes and you start filling out all of the stuff to finally setup windows most all of the networking stuff is going right out of the gate. So now you have to install the bootcamp drivers for Windows 7 (bootcamp 3.1)… and here is where more fun starts.. you have to start with the Bootcamp 3.0 drivers on the MAC OS 10.6 DVD, but if your using the Santa Rosa Mac and a 64 bit install of Windows they 3.0 bootcamp drivers won’t work…. easiest way to get around that is to follow the instructions here…. http://blog.andersonshatch.com/2009/01/11/windows-7-x64-on-a-macbook-pro-guide/ And in case you can’t follow directions like me, you need to right click and run as administrator on the cmd.exe not the setup.exe on the DVD.

So after that… you now can load all of the updates to Windows

And hopefully be on your happy trails…

Windows 7… Mac… and You!

So if you haven’t been keeping up on the Apple Blogs, bootcamp finally supports Winders 7!

I decided to jump in head first into this fun little adventure this evening…. and things…. well things didn’t go as well as I thought they could have gone… and there are more then a few landmines.

So here is the setup…. I’m running Mac OS X 10.6.2 on a Mid 2007 Mac Book Pro (2.4 GHZ Santa Rosa) bootcamped with Windows XP 32 Bit (20GB Partition)

If you read all of the docs from Apple they tell you to boot into Windows and do the upgrade from there… and just like a real Windows XP to 7 upgrade you have to do a “Custom/Advanced” upgrade to make the jump.

So I reboot the Mac and when I reboot I boot off of the DVD drive and select the Windows 7 x64 DVD and hit enter… I’m then presented with a option

“1.

2.

Select CD-Rom Boot Type:_”

OH and just to make it real interesting my keyboard doesn’t work… nor does my USB keyboard.

I do what any logical IT person would do… I reboot 4 or 5 more times… all with the same result.

So when your a IT guy and you have these issues there is really only one thing left to do… GOOGLE THAT SHIT!’

A couple of other folks have run into this same problem…

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/servervirtualization/thread/a8ae28ed-daf8-4e47-a356-84fb57cf9016/

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=467704

The basic cruxt is that there is a format mis-match between this MBP and a file in the EFI boot folder on the disk… A bit more googling and following links the best method to fix the file problem in the EFI folder is to extract the DVD to a ISO file and then reburn it to a new disk.

And the easiest way to do that is here…

http://sergiomcfly.blogspot.com/2008/04/select-cd-rom-boot-type-when-installing.html

At this point you have a burnable disk and should be able to proceed with the upgrade.

Stupid Mac…