blog.nixadmins.net

I got my new MacBook Pro Wednesday the 18 of June. Today I’ve been using it for a few days. Granted Midsummer holidays were here and in Finland we tend to do some serious partying during the midsummer holidays.

This year though the weather wasn’t really nice it was raining almost the whole Friday and that kind of sucked the fun out of the day. Anyway I had my new Mac with me to our cottage to get to know the new system a little better and to have somewhere to store images captured during the holiday.

After some initial searching and a lot of getting used I’m really starting to like OS X. It took some searching to find out how to install a program or how to delete a program. Since I’m used to Windows and Linux where it’s quite different. I couldn’t believe a computer could be this easy to use. Just drag and drop to install most software and drag them to the Trash can to uninstall. Could it be any simpler?

iPhoto is also a great program for some image editing. It also keeps all my photos in order. Simple editing like removing redeye and adjusting levels is also made easy in iPhoto. It also handles RAW photo format which is the format of choice for professionals and even hobbyists.

Still the one software on this machine I could praise is Time Machine. I’ve never seen a smarter backup for personal computers. Plug in a USB harddrive if you don’t have a Time Capsule, Time Machine will ask if you would like to use it for backup and run the first backup of your computer. That’s it. After that it will check for hourly changes and copy them to the external harddrive when connected.
Restoring is even easier and there are many ways to restore. To see an introduction on the new features of Leopard go to www.apple.com/macosx/guidedtour and take a look at the introduction video.

I have no idea why but somehow me getting a Mac made me want to play with graphics and dig out my camera again. Anyway I took a few photos during thursday and friday that I use as wallpapers. Maybe someone else will to so they can be found here. The listing of that folder is still very very ugly but it was fast enough to get it to list the few files found there.

Anyway I need to get back to playing with my MacBook so I can start working normally with it soon. Bye for now.

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I finally ordered my first Mac. My network card on my main PC died for some reason today and well instead of buying a new network card for 20€ I ordered a MacBook pro. Call me crazy if you want but I’ve been looking at them for years now and today felt right for ordering one. Hopefully I’ll be able to go and get it tomorrow so I can try it during the midsummer holiday.  I don’t know why but I feel like a little kid on Christmas waiting for this one. I’ve been a PC user all my life so this is a big change for me.
It’s also a little scary since they are really expensive and I’m not even sure I like OS X. The few times I’ve sat down in front of a Mac I’ve felt lost and unable to find what I’m looking for. Finally resulting in me using the oh so nice terminal. As a Linux user I feel at home in the terminal.

I’ve been using this evening researching programs to use and I must say there seems to be a great number of choice when it comes to programs. What I really need to get work done is a good IPSec VPN client a good terminal(which is included) and a good editor for scripts and some programing. Also any network security or network debug programs are welcome.

There are also some other things I’m worried about I have a Nokia E90 phone and I really need to connect to 3G sometimes. So I hope I can get it running in OS X .  Another thing I’m worried about is that this blog will take a turn to "praise the oh so holy Macintosh". I hope I won’t turn in to one of those people. I do have the multi OS use on my side so let’s hope I keep my feet firmly on the ground while testing this one.

What I will try to write about is my life with this computer, since I have been a PC user. My opinions might still be a little biased since my Linux usage might come to assist me in this first year test drive.

Well the time is now 00:48 local and Verkkokauppa.com opens at 09:00 so I guess I’d better go to sleep so I can get out of bed and drive 200 kilometers to get it in the morning. Meanwhile feel free to give me pointers, links to pages and what software’s are a must for a new Apple user.

I got myself ADSL back in 2002, since that day I haven’t been without The Net at home more than a few hours during power outages or minor problem with the ISP. Me and my fiance have been building a house for just about a year now and are soon to move in to the new house.

30.4 2008 my old ISP cut my 2M/2M SHDSL line to our apartment and we still live in it. 2 may the new ISP connected the 24/1 ADSL line to our new house.

I brought all the servers to the house first of may and the apartment is really quiet now. We are both used to watch TV series and listen to music located at one of the file servers. So how does it feel? I must say it’s weird. Being at home and not being able to look something up whenever you want. Read email, read the news… I could go on forever. I’m really surprised to see how "hooked" on the Internet I am. A lot of my daily activities are on the Internet, and suddenly the activities are cut of. Well almost at least, as I said I can still surf at the building site but then I loose precious time. *cough cough* like writing this blog post. Well I did it while taking a coffee break.

This makes me wonder are the modern people really this dependent on the Internet? And if we are, is it a good or a bad thing? How did we manage before the Internet, mobile phones, mp3 players? Sometimes I think back to the times when you could go out to the summerhouse and no one could get a hold of you. We had no phones there and for a week or two, sometimes for a longer time the only thing that you’d think about was fishing, catching some sun, swimming and other normal summer activities. No work related calls, no interruptions in the vacation.

Are people more stressed due to this? I’d say they are, you can’t get any real peace anymore. The companies and colleagues assume they can get a hold on you anytime. Setting auto replies to email might cut some of but some still don’t get the hint.

Comment and tell me about your experiences in this.

I need to get back to building my house so I can move in sometime soon and get my Internet back. 

I just found myself a nice application which should make it easier to write some blog posts. If you are running a blog and want a good editor head over to the Windows Live Writer homepage. The interface is clean and easy to use as you can see in the picture below

You can easily insert pictures and change styles. I wish I could use this tool while editing the main site www.nixadmins.net also, as it runs with Drupal.

If you know of a better editor or a good editor to use with Drupal please make a comment and I’ll check it out.

Signing out for now.

Finding time to do some blog / site work seems to be hard right now. All my time goes to the largest project I’ve ever done, building my house.
Hopefully I’ll be moving this month and maybe I’ll post some pictures before we move in. Sorry for this quiet time.