Chris Betcher

With the impending release of Mountain Lion , Apple's new version of the OS X operating system, I've been giving some thought to whether I'll bother upgrading or not. I am, or at least I used to be, what many would refer to as a Mac Fanboy. I still think Apple builds the best consumer computer hardware on the planet, and, so far anyway, OS X is probably still the best desktop/laptop operating system currently available. A few years ago I would not have included the "probably" qualifier in that last sentence, but lately I'm feeling more and more disenfranchised with Apple and their litigious nature and walled garden approach to creating customer lock-in. It's not that I don't like their products. I do. I have several Macs, iPads, iPhones, and Apple TVs. Walled garden or not, they build beautiful products that -  for the most part - do exactly what they claim... they just work. While I don't always approve of their proprietary attitude to the way the...

By default, your computer's drives usually have creative names like "My Computer" or "Macintosh HD". Home wireless networks usually have equally uninteresting default names, like "linksys" or "netgear", or that ultimate of all default SSID names, "default". USB Memory sticks and portable USB drives often have even less interesting names, usually based on their brand, or a series of random characters. Some people give their computing equipment names that make them a little more interesting, or at least a little more unique and personal. I've seen people use names of planets, Greek gods, fictional characters, and many other esoteric collections as the source of inspiration for the names of their networks and computing gear. I once worked as the network manager in a Catholic school where all the servers were named after saints. IT geeks often have an unusual sense of humour, and it commonly shows up in things like this. As I was ...

I remember back in the mid 90s I started to hear more and more about this upstart operating system for computers called Linux. It was an alternative to Windows and Mac, and was based on an open source project started in 1991 by a student in Helsinki named Linus Torvalds .  I thought it sounded like a fascinating project and I liked the sound of it, since any alternative to Windows had to be a good thing.  In about 1997 there was lots of talk about this new OS and its potential so I wanted to give it a shot. I originally tried to install it on my trusty old Thinkpad using a copy of Redhat Linux that came free on the cover of a computer magazine, but I didn't have much luck so abandoned it at the time. Not long after that I heard the infamous John "Mad dog" Hall speak at a computer show in Sydney, where he passionately and logically espoused the virtues of open source software as a legitimate alternative to commercial software such as Windows and Office.  I recall he made ...

This is so cool... Found this image on Flickr via Digg of a guy who accidentally did a cmd+A in his Applications folder on his MacBook Pro, and then pressed Enter. In case that doesn't mean much to you, it basically opened every application on his computer at the same time! If you take a look at his Dock, that's a lot of applications! The amazing thing is that the machine didn't crash, which is an amazing testament to the power of OSX. I don't think I'd even consider trying that on a Windows machine... Tags: mac , apple , macbookpro

I've been having a bit of a play with YouTube lately... not just as a consumer of content, but in true spirit of Web 2.0, as a contributor of content. It's a pretty cool site and it's easy to while away the minutes, er, hours, browsing through their stuff. I was really interested to find that Apple's totally rewritten new version of iMovie has built in support for adding videos to YouTube. It is nicely integrated too... as you finish working on your movie (using the new interface, which could be the topic of a whole other blog post), you just select YouTube from the Share menu and iMovie does all the digital origami required to package up your masterpiece into the appropriate formats and compression ratios to send it up to the 'Tube. It's very neat. It prompts you to add the relevant metadata and tags, and does a fairly efficient job of rendering and converting the file, then uploading it. As a test, I edited together this little production last night using...

You know, there's a good reason that Apple is like it is, and it's largely because of Steve Jobs' leadership. Take this quote from His Steveness in the wake of today's Apple press event... "Is Apple’s goal to overtake the PC in market share?" Jobs said, “Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world and make products we are proud to sell and recommend to our family and friends. We want to do that at the lowest prices we can. “But there’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to ship. And we just can’t do it. We can’t ship junk,” said Jobs. “There are thresholds we can’t cross because of who we are. And we think that there’s a very significant slice of the [market] that wants that too. You’ll find that our products are not premium priced. You price out our competitors’ products, and add features that actually make them useful, and they’re the same or actually more expensive. We don’t offer stripped-down, lousy products." You...

In a world where all of us suffer from information overload to some extent, the ability to pick and choose the articles that we find interesting and have them delivered directly to us surely has to be a useful service. That's what RSS does. RSS is a wonderful thing, but I know many people who still don't use it. RSS , or Really Simple Syndication, is a means of subscribing to a webpage, or a blog, or blog comments, or a podcast, or a series of news articles - pretty much anything really - and then every time something on that site changes, a piece of software called a feedreader collects and collates all those changes into one place. You subscribe to whatever you like. It's a little like designing your very own personal newspaper that contains only the articles that interest you. If you think about it a bit like an old style message board or web forum where you have new messages delivered to you via email, RSS is a similar idea. Under these old style systems, you beco...

Spam is an absolute scourge. I don't understand why people do it, but then I've never really understood why people spray graffiti on walls, or write viruses either. I guess some people just get a kick out of being a bloody nuisance. Of course, spam is a little different in that there is money involved. Big money apparently. If you send enough emails out about methods to enlarge your p3nis or buy p0rn and viag4r4 or whatever else spam tends to focus on, there are apparently enough stupid and gullible people in the world that someone, somewhere can make a comfortable living off their stupidity. It still amazes me that people respond to these messages in any way whatsoever, but apparently they do. The best way to deal with spam is to completely ignore it - don't read it, don't respond to it, don't acknowledge it... just totally ignore it. For the first time ever I feel like I'm winning the battle against spam, so I thought I'd share how I've managed to...

I admit it. I'm terrible at staying focused. Especially when you put me in front of a computer, I find it easy to get distracted by the million and one things that can distract a computer user... emails coming in constantly, IM messages bleeping at me every few minutes, RSS feeds constantly updating and all the other services that tend to bombard one with "stuff". Sometimes, especially when I need to write, it would be good to just shut it all out for a while and resist the temptation to answer that email, respond to that IM or browse that RSS feed. I suppose I COULD try to use a bit of self discipline and just ignore these things, but where's the fun in that? I COULD turn off all that stuff and just shut it out, but it's too tempting to need a distraction from what I should be doing... and that's the problem in the first place. So I thought this piece of software looked interesting... it's called WriteRoom , and basically turns your fandangled, geewhi...

I bit the bullet and bought an extra Gb of RAM for my Macbook Pro yesterday, bringing it up to its maximum memory capacity of 2Gb. It's a pretty fast laptop anyway, but I was finding that when I had a lot of big programs open, and particularly when I was running Windows using Parallels, it would occasionally have a bit of lag when switching between running apps. Not any more... The extra gig makes a big difference to the way that non-Universal apps run. Apparently there is a fair bit of memory overhead required for Rosetta (Apple's built-in emulation layer that enables applications written for the PowerPC chip to run on the new Intel-based Macs), and even with the Macbook Pro's standard gigabyte of RAM it works the machine hard to run Rosetta apps such as Office and Photoshop. For anyone using a new Macbook or Macbook Pro, I'd suggest seriously thinking about adding that extra gig. I'd say it's definitely worth it, although you ought to shop around as the af...

As a power user on the Windows platform and a quick learner on the Mac platform, there is something about the difference between the two that has always intriuged me. I've noticed it in many forms over the years, but I was reminded of it when I read this rather silly report on the TUAW site... I'm sure the fellow who wrote it had his tongue firmly in his cheek, but if you browse through the comments under the main article you'll find a very interesting thread of discussion has emerged relating to the Mac's little green zoom button. Seems the zoom button is not without its fair share of controversy and a rather passionate, yet civil, debate is raging there about the differences between the way windows (with a small 'w') behave on Windows (with a big 'W') versus the way they behave on the Mac. The basic gist of the discussion is about the subtle difference between the user interfaces of both platforms and the author tries to draw an assertion that the U...

As I write this, I'm downloading updates for Windows in the background. Yes, you read that right. Windows. But wait, aren't I a Mac guy? Yes. Absolutely. But I also teach computing in a mainly Windows environment, and it still makes sense to be able to use those few apps that I need in a classroom situation in their native platform environment, and that means Windows. Although I personally prefer to use Mac versions of most applications, it gets too hard to teach a class about the Windows version of Word when they look up and see my Mac version on the data projector. (Despite the fact that everything is there in both versions, the Mac version has a slightly different IU and a few added features, so it doesn't look identical.) Anyway, I figured the simplest solution would be to just use the Windows apps for those few times when I need them. There is also a proprietary Markbook app that the school uses that is Windows only, and I would like to run that occasionally to...

I've just been playing with a very cool piece of software for the Mac. Or is it a piece of software for Windows? Actually, it's kind of both. Crossover is based on the work of the WINE project - a curiously-named self-iterative anagram that stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. WINE has long been used in the Linux community as a means of getting Windows programs to run under Linux. When I first looked at it several years ago it was still very raw and new and difficult to use. However, in the last few years, WINE (and in fact Linux too) has come a very long way. Linux development moves forward at an amazing pace and the last few distributions I looked at were very impressive indeed. Back to Crossover. Although it's still only in Public Beta, Crossover runs as an application on either the Mac or Linux platforms and it allows genuine Windows applications to be run natively on either of those OSes. Not emulated. Natively. That means you can take a Windows program and ...

I started using a personal computer in 1982. It's now 2006, and for the majority of the past 24 years I've used computers running some version of Microsoft Windows. My first experience with Windows started with version 3.0, then 3.1, WfW, 95, 98, 98SE, ME, 2000 and XP. On the server side I've used Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Server 2003. I have also been a Microsoft Office trainer, hold a Microsft Office Specialist certification and have even been a technical writer for Microsoft. Professionally, I'm currently responsible for managing a Windows network that encompasses 6 Windows servers and around 300 Windows XP workstations. You could say that I have invested a good deal of time and energy into Microsoft products over the years. So when the time came recently to buy myself a new computer, it may seem surprising that I bought myself a Mac. Yes, a Mac. It's not my first Apple. I started my love affair with personal computers on an old Apple IIe, back in the ...