appleNew PPC Mac
It couldn't last - I've just got rid of my last PowerPC computer (previously I've also owned a PPC Mac Mini and the mighty dual processor Quicksilver G4 PowerMac) about a month ago and I've gone and bought myself another one - this time an old G5 Xserve!
I've sorted out some very cheap colo storage for a 1U server so I needed something to put in there. It didn't have to be particularly fast as it will be mainly used for offsite rsync backups from my house and my brother's business but it did need to use SATA drives as these are way cheaper than SCSI when it comes to bulk storage. I was going to use an old HP DL360 G4 with twin SATA disks when I found the Xserve going cheap, so snatched that up.
It's a single processor 2.0GHz model with only 1GB RAM and my original plan was to put three 2TB SATA drives in it and install debian Linux across the top in a RAID 5. Turns out the server only has 2 drive caddies so I'm trying to find another one here in NZ which is proving problematic (there are a few on ebay but with shipping to NZ it gets quite expensive, nearly the same cost as a 2TB SATA disk). It also has no graphics card in it (a headless server, the graphics card was a build to order option on this model) which makes installing Linux on it a bit harder than it should be as I need to run the install over serial console.
While I scrounge around for another caddy I've installed OS X Server 10.5 on it (as OS X only supports software RAID levels 0 and 1 it doesn't really matter that I've only got two disks in it) which proved surprisingly easy as OS X is set up to start a VNC session with the machine's serial number as it's password if it detects there is no keyboard/mouse/display attached - if I can't find another caddy (or get Linux installed via serial console) I'd be tempted to leave OS X installed on there as I really only need SSH and a mirrored RAID both of which OS X provides.
And if nothing else, at the end of the day it looks pretty cool in the rack surrounded by the SuperMicros and HPs that sit above and below it :-) Now all I need to do is track down some more DDR PC3200 ECC RAM for it...
Retina MacBook Pro
Well I've finally been dragged kicking and screaming into the new Mac era - I've gone and bought myself a 15" Retina Macbook Pro! A whole world of Intel only software is now available for me, not to mention the fact that I'm now getting security updates again for the first time since 2011 :-)
The biggest first impression (coming from a 12" PowerBook here remember!) is the size of the thing - it is super thin, yet very wide and deep when closed. Luckily my courier bag just fits it (it is designed for a 13" MacBook but the retina one is so slim it just squeaks in). The next thing you notice is how well made it is - a single smooth chunk of aluminium milled out with a glass fronted screen, this thing screams quality (and well it should for the price I paid...). Once powered on the thing that really jumps out at you is the font quality - that retina screen is *so crisp* the fonts seem to float on the surface. Seriously, I've never seen typography look so stunning! I've been using it now for about 10 hours and it still amazes me how good fonts look. Going back to anything else after this is gonna be really hard.
Mountain Lion will take a bit of getting used to after using Leopard for so many years, but I already love the gestures built into it, it actually reminds me a lot of using a cell phone swiping apps from screen to screen. Not sure I'm totally sold on the new "Mission Control" way of doing desktops in a row (I liked the old cube set up from Leopard) but it is easy enough to use so I'm sure I'll get used to it pretty quickly. Plus, with such a massive screen resolution I don't need so many virtual desktops anyway!
Anyway, I'm off to play BioShock now (been waiting a few years for this as I've not had a computer capable of running it!) so I'll report back after a few days of using it. So far I love it!
UPDATE: After using this for a few days every other monitor is now ruined for me - all font looks blocky and and you can clearly see the antialiasing. I now need to buy a thunderbolt cinema display I guess...
Leopard WebKit
It's been out for a while but I've only just discovered Leopard WebKit, a modern build of the WebKit open source rendering engine for Leopard. Safari is built upon WebKit but Apple stopped updating Safari for OS X Leopard mid 2011 and with the web being what it is you'd be mad to browse using that now as many security vulnerabilities have been discovered meantime.
Well now with Leopard WebKit you can keep using Safari but with all the current security patches applied. What the devs have done is take the last PowerPC build of WebKit and selectively applied the patches written since to bring the browser up-to-date security (and feature) wise. It doesn't actually replace Safari, rather when you launch it it starts Safari but uses Leopard WebKit as the rendering engine.
I've been using it all day today at work (several windows open with several tabs in each) and it actually feels slightly quicker than TenFourFox, which is strange as on paper (and in benchmark testing) TenFourFox is significantly quicker at crunching Javascript. Anyway, download the latest stable build (as of this writing), install ClickToFlash (also available in the Safari Extensions Gallery) and try it for yourself - if you don't like it you can always switch back to TenFourFox and it's nice to actually have choice on the shrinking PowerPC platform.
OS X gone, Apple arrived
I've decided to change the OS X section to an Apple section, basically due to the fact that half the time I go on about wanting some Apple hardware and not really talking about OS X.
SSD Upgrade Complete!
Well that was a mission! I can honestly say that this little laptop has to be the most complex I've ever needed to work on. When I finally had all the screws out and the hard drive sitting in front of me I had to take a hacksaw to the end of the IDE cable to make room for master/slave jumper to fit on the new SSD (I've read that if you don't have the drive set to master it creates problems when waking from sleep, the old drive was a master with no jumper whereas the new SSD needs a jumper fitted). I've never in all my computer wrangling days needed to take a hacksaw to the insides of one!
Anyway, I got there in the end and I've just installed and updated a fresh copy of Leopard and copied all my old apps across (with my music on an external drive symlinked to my home directory to save space on the SSD). The change has been truly amazing - this little laptop now has a second wind. Firefox now launches with only two bounces in the dock (used to take ages), Word fires up in several seconds (used to take nearly half a minute!) and the dashboard widgets load almost instantly on the first run. Strangely though boot time hasn't shortened as much as I thought it would, but I'm not too worried as I normally don't shut the machine down, simply put it to sleep.
All in all I highly recommend this upgrade, it really has bought this machine a second life (though it won't speed up things like flash on websites...) but only if you're happy doing the fiddly work of getting the hard disk out.
SSD Upgrade
I've been trying to eke out a bit more life from my now seven-year-old PowerBook, figuring I'll shout myself a new laptop next year after the expense of my looming wedding is out of the way. I was super impressed by simply upgrading to an SSD here at work in my workstation - it boots like lightning now and apps open instantly, so wanted to see if I could do the same upgrade to my PowerBook.
The biggest problem is that the PowerBook uses an IDE interface for its hard drive and finding an SSD version in 2.5" size is not exactly cheap. I came across this review of an SSD IDE drive made by a company called KingSpec which looks to be a really good upgrade, especially in seek times, and as luck would have it they are available on ebay rather cheaply with free shipping (I paid around NZ $88 for a 64GB drive). From reading of other people buying these drives off ebay it takes around two~three weeks for them to turn up, so I've got a bit of a wait until I can install it (which looks like a mission in its own right) so until then I'll run some "real world" benchmarks, such as boot and shutdown time, how quickly I can open Firefox, how quickly a level in Call of Duty loads, if battery life is improved etc. Then once the new drive turns up I can compare to see if its worth the $88 (considering the laptop is probably only worth $200 now).
Who knows, maybe I'll run it for another year or two :-)
13" Retina? Yes Please!
The web is awash with articles talking about a rumoured 13" MacBook Pro with Retina Display. According to "those in the know" (I love those guys!) the laptop is already in production and is due to be announced this month. This is one rumour I'd love to come true - if Apple ship a 13" Retina I think that will be the thing that pushes me to buy a new laptop - I don't want a 15" model as I find it a tad too large (not to mention pricey here in NZ), and though the Air is a great small package I want something with a better graphics card (a faster proc wouldn't hurt either).
Or the whole thing could be untrue (all those reporting the rumour probably got their info from the same dodgy source), but I hope not :-)
<3 autofs
Seeing as OS X Snow Leopard went EOL a few months ago I finally upgraded my Mac Mini entertainment machine (in other words, the box plugged into my TV) to Lion (which incidentally is the end of the line for that box as it can't run Mountain Lion). One of the big changes in Lion was the dropping of Samba for the in house CIFs client/server SMBX, an Apple developed version of the CIFS2 protocol. This is fine on modern CIFS servers, but has some issues on older Samba/Windows servers such as the NAS I'm using for my media content for streaming to my TV.
The Internet is filled with tales of people getting "permission denied" on network shares, usually on NAS appliances that use the Samba stack. When using the command line you can browse the shares, open files etc but when using the Finder you cannot access the content of folders sitting in the root share. The fix seems to be to update the firmware on the NAS in question, but my one is now EOL (the story of my life) and so won't see any more updates.
The solution? Autofs, which has been built into OS X for many years now. I first encountered autofs when I sat my RHCE course/exam a few years ago, and it turns out that OS X uses it too. So instead of using the new CIFS protocol which doesn't work for me in the Finder I use autofs to auto mount the NAS over NFS as needed.
If you haven't used autofs before then this is a good guide on how to configure it for OS X - just make sure that your NFS server (be it a NAS or a Linux host) has the "insecure" option in the exports file (e.g. "/mnt/ide1/public 192.168.3.0/225.255.255.0(rw,no_root_squash,insecure,async)" in /etc/exports).
To be honest I'm not sure why I didn't do this earlier, now all I have to do is turn on the Mac Mini connected to the TV and I can start watching any media stored on the NAS, whereas before I had to always mount the NAS over CIFS first, then pick up the apple remote and start watching.
I <3 autofs!
No New Laptop :-)
Just a follow up on the previous post - turns out it was just the power button on my girlfriend's MacBook which had died, and seeing as the wrist rests on the keyboard had started cracking Ubertec replaced it for free (even though it was well out of warranty), so now the laptop is working again happily and the keyboard is brand new.
So no new MacBook Air for her :-)
New Laptop?
My girlfriend's MacBook is in at Ubertec for repairs currently - she has been using it happily nearly every day for several years but the other morning it wouldn't power up - no start chime, no beeps, nothing. It's totally dead. I'm hoping it's something easy or cheap (yeah, dreams are free...) because the last thing we need right now is to have to buy her a new laptop (she uses it almost daily so really can't live without it) but if we do I'll grab her one of the new MacBook Airs. She's using my PowerBook in the meantime to get work done, she loves the compact size of it but isn't so thrilled working on a 1024x768 resolution display in this day and age.
Funny how my now nearly 7 year old PowerBook is still trucking on without incident while her much newer Intel equipped MacBook is in for repairs - they don't make them like they used to...