I did not know yesterday was World Backup Day. Earth Hour happened last night, that I know, even though this time around there wasn’t much fuss about it. After a few years of Earth Hours, the excitement has waned. World Backup Day, on the other hand, is quite new. Yesterday was its second year. What is World Backup Day about? Simple. It’s a reminder to backup your stuffs. As I write this, I plugged in my external hard disk so…
I don’t often write about “simple” applications (i.e. one with quite specific purpose), but this is an interesting one. I was trying to assemble a bunch of photos together. The only tool I had on my Mac was Photoshop. Photoshop can definitely get the job done, but it was overkill. It was just too much work for a simple task. There has got to be some simple application that was built just to do these sort of things. So, I…
Much as I enjoy working with Mac OS X, and think it is so much more fun than Windows XP, Vista, or 7, there are some issues with it that I’m having. The chief problem is that, from time to time, my MacBook Pro (MBP) does not properly wake up from sleep. When I try to wake up my MBP by opening the lid, I either get: 1) a blank black screen with just the mouse pointer, or 2) a…
Actually, there aren’t many pains. It wasn’t too difficult to learn “natural scrolling”. It gets a little confusing when you’ve got to go back to a Windows PC that does not have “natural scrolling” configured, but fortunately, I don’t use a Windows PC all that often. I usually can make do with Windows running in VMware Fusion on my MBP, and natural scrolling works there, naturally. The way Mail.app has rearranged my mail working space took more effort to get…
I wasn’t planning to be such an early adopter of Mac OS X Lion. After all, there wasn’t anything glaringly wrong with Snow Leopard. I’ve read about the nice things that would come with Lion, but I could wait. Maybe one or two weeks. I’ve gone from Tiger to Leopard to Snow Leopard, so I’ve some faith in the quality of Apple’s major version releases. But I thought I might even wait for the point-one version update, simply because I…
When Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was launched last year, one of the things that caught my attention was its support for Exchange 2007. It would have meant better integration for Mac users with a corporate Microsoft Exchange-based calendar and directory service. But alas, when I finally got Snow Leopard installed and tried to get my Mail.app setup, I realized the nitty gritty details. It’s Exchange 2007, not any Exchange, and it turns out that the Microsoft Exchange I…
One of the best things that Apple had introduced with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is Time Machine. It’s a no-brainer backup utility that “just works”, and furthermore, one that people will actually use. While Time Machine works great with a direct attached storage disk (internal or external firewire/USB) or Time Capsule, it wouldn’t readily work with other network attached storage. If you want to backup “over the network”, Apple wants you to buy their Time Capsule hardware. But there…
I opened the lid of my MacBook, it resumed from the previous suspend, and I clicked something on Safari. Then, Mac OS X told me: You need to restart your computer. It explained how I could do that, and it did it in 5 languages. Yes, it is the Mac OS X kernel panic. It’s the first kernel panic I experienced on Snow Leopard. The last time I saw a kernel panic was on Leopard. It’s the same MacBook, before…
For many Mac users, it is inevitable that Microsoft Windows will be needed at some point or other. There are a few solutions to running Windows on a Mac hardware. I much prefer the virtualization solution than running Bootcamp because I can still access the Mac OS X system at all times. The two main virtualization solutions are basically VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop. Then, the next inevitable question is, which is better? Which is faster? Which is more integrated?…
There’re plenty of software updates this week. First up was for Snow Leopard which is updated to Mac OS X 10.6.2, which contains quite a number of fixes (58, apparently) including an important one that involves data loss. Then, the Safari web browser itself, whose updates are distributed separately from Mac OS X, was updated to version 4.0.4. It fixes some security vulnerabilities, and improves performance and stability. Finally, there is also the update to Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac…
