Slash Dot Dash

Thanks to the increasing prevalence of Apple laptops – including the MacBook, MacBook Pro and new Air – having a Mac no longer makes you l33t! To combat this, a couple weeks ago I decided to pimp my MacBook Pro by changing the illuminated Apple logo on the case. A Canadian site sells a multitude of inserts that can be used to alter the logo.

Customize your laptop for only $4.99! These high-quality inserts will make your laptop one of a kind! Free Worldwide Shipping! Compatible with: iBooks, Powerbooks, MacBooks and MacBook Pros

The installation guide steps you through the process, the MacBook Pro is rated as “Medium” difficulty. Apart from the tight angle to unscrew the 2 retaining screws at the bottom of the screen, the tricky part to the process is removing the back of the screen using a credit card. You need a steady hand and a slightly cavalier attitude to prise the cover apart!

I went for the ‘Rainbow’ design – one of the original Apple logos – the end result is rather pleasant update to the plain white logo and it still glows in the dark.

Want to watch a movie on your iPhone (or iPod)? The simplest method of converting to the correct format and size is to use iSquint an “iPod video conversion app for Mac OS X”.

• Install, then fire up the iSquint application.
• Drag & drop your .avi file onto the window.
• Select Optimize for iPod, Add to iTunes and H.264 Encoding.
• Set the Quality slider (I’d recommend High) and click Start.

Leave iSquint to do its stuff and you’ll have the converted film available in iTunes. For a single CD avi file, expect a final file size of around 300-350MB for High Quality or 150-200MB for Standard Quality settings (at 127kbps bit rate).

Note: You’ll need to manually select the movie for synching when your iPhone or iPod is connected to iTunes.

Friday, 9th November has been added to my diary. After months of speculation the UK release of the iPhone was announced today at a press meeting in the London Apple store (which I visited just last week). The iPhone is available from 02 here in the UK at a cost of £269 for the handset and a minimum £35 / month contract (for 18 months).

The good news is that you get an unlimited data plan, the bad news is no 3G, which is a major draw-back. To counteract the 3G slip, Apple announced free WiFi for O2 iPhone users at the 7,500 hotspots serviced by Cloud in the UK.

Apple iPhone

O2 iPhone

... just in case you were wondering, YES I will be buying one.

So I thought I had a reasonably nice Rails coding environment.

Looks like this one is slightly nicer. 3 x Apple 30” Cinema displays; how greedy!

Photo courtesy of Flickr.

One minor annoyance with my MacBook Pro – hearing the startup sound every time it gets turned on. Not too bad when I’m at home but it’s a major embarrassment out in public. The answer is to install StartupSound.prefPane 1.1b1 which allows you to set the startup volume or to disable is completely.

StartupSound.prefPane is the software which controls the volume of the startup sound of your Macintosh computer. StartupSound.prefPane mute the startup sound without changing the output volume setting. And StartupSound.prefPane limits the startup volume so that it may not become loud even if you make the output volume louder. To set up the startup volume, you select the “Startup Sound” pane added to the “System Preferences.”

A guick reference to how I setup my new MacBook Pro for Ruby on Rails development.

Install Software

- Apple Software update

- Firefox 2.0

- TextMate

- Parallels

- Burn Free X

- CyberDuck

- MPlayer OS X (+ Binary Codec Packages)

Development (Ruby on Rails)

- X Code (with X11)

- MacPorts (DarwinPorts)

- MySQL 5.x

$ sudo port install mysql5 +server
$ sudo mysql_install_db5 --user=mysql
$ sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.mysql5.plist

- Subversion

$ sudo port install subversion +tools

- Ruby

$ sudo port install ruby
$ sudo port install rb-rubygems
$ sudo port install rb-termios
$ sudo port install rb-mysql
$ sudo port install imagemagick

- Rails

$ sudo gem install -y rake
$ sudo gem install -y rails
$ sudo gem install -y capistrano
$ sudo gem install -y mongrel
$ sudo gem install -y mongrel_cluster
$ sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-lib=/opt/local/lib/mysql5/mysql/ --with-mysql-include=/opt/local/include/mysql5/mysql/

http://blog.nanorails.com/articles/2006/07/11/installing-rails-on-mac-os-x-tiger

- RDesktop

- YourSQL

Utilities

- Menu Meters (CPU, RAM, HDD, Network)

- Virtue Desktops

- Blank ScreenSaver

User settings

- Enable FileVault on home directory /Users/

- Prevent .DS_Store directories on network shares

$ defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
$ cp Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktopservices.plist /Library/Preferences/
$ sudo chmod 777 /Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktopservices.plist 

Other

- Monolingual – remove 2.1G language files (keep British English, English and US English only)

- Bootcamp to dual-boot OS X and Windows XP (possibly Vista?)

Other Stuff

- Transfer files and iTunes / iPod library

- Restore Firefox bookmarks ( to ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/bookmarks.htm)

- Symbolic link /Sites to ~/Sites (due to FileVault security with Apache)

$ mkdir /Sites
$ mv ~/Sites/* /Sites
$ rm -rf ~/Sites
$ ln -s /Sites .

- Symbolic link /Music/iTunes Music to ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music (so that files in iTunes aren’t encrypted)

$ mkdir /Music
$ mkdir /Music/iTunes\ Music
$ ln -s /Music/iTunes\ Music ~/Music/iTunes

With the price of MacBook Pros (Core Duo) dropping after the release of the updated Core 2 Duo I could resist no more. After a week of ownership I am super happy… there is a very noticeable hike in performance over my previous PowerBook G4. It certainly runs hotter than the PowerBook – I’d hesitate to use it on my lap, but apart from that it’s all good. Coding Rails was never so fast!

MacBook Pro 15.4” 2.16Ghz Intel Core Duo 1GB RAM, 100GB HDD

Poor old Powerbook, after 5 years of loyal, hard work it finally died….

Those of a nervous disposition should look away now (is this the converse to Mac Porn??)

(Thankfully my own PowerBook G4 is still looking shiny)

Apple have announced their newest and fastest Mac; the Mac Pro with dual 64-bit Dual-Core Intel Xeon “Woodcrest” processors.

Looks pretty tasty and is the same price from the Apple store as the new 15” MacBook Pro laptop. I think I’ll stick with my PowerBook for now – love the portability and even though it’s an old G4 it’s still plenty fast enough for most tasks.

Apple have announced their new MacBook intel core-duo based laptops, available in the ‘ipod’ colours; white and black.

There is a useful comparison chart available to compare these new laptops with the MacBook Pros.

There are some pictures available from an enthusiastic new MacBook owner.

In terms of performance these new MacBooks are in the same league as the MacBook Pros sharing the intel core-duo CPUs. Ultimately it’s just their smaller size (13.3 inch screen) and budget graphics adapter that are the difference. I can definitely see these laptops selling well to the iPod generation – those who are looking for a it just works machine and looking for a hip replacement to their Windows PC.

Of note is that these new MacBooks come with “glossy” screens (also now available as an option on the MacBook Pros). This is causing a bit of a stir on the ‘net with some proponents suggesting that the general public is stupid and drawn to buy shiny things even if they perform worse (screen flare as shown by the flickr pictures linked above). I’ve recently seen a new Dell laptop with a similar shiny screen and although it looked impressively bright the flare was significant.