award tour

I realize this is like 2 years after the fact but I bought an AirPort Express today. I contemplated spending $100 for a 802.11g router for the last 2 weeks (slash 2 years) since I’ve had no need for a new router and I could get a perfectly good linksys G router for $40 off amazon. Anyways, I decided that the speakers on my macbook were just too lo-fi and buying this thing actually adds value to my underused stereo. I totally would have held out if I could upgrade to a 802.11n router but I, unfortunately, have a Core Duo and not a Core 2 Duo. Doh! I’ll post any feedback once I actually get the thing shipped to me.

So my macbook came with the standard 512MB of RAM. I decided I would try it out and see if I needed to upgrade expecting that I probably would. I’ve had the machine for 3 months and decided that the upgrade was a good idea. So, on the recommendation of a co-worker I got me a pair of G.SKILL 1GB 200-Pin DDR2 SO-DIMM Notebook Memory from the good people at newegg. Total was $198 with 4-day delivery.

As you can imagine, as soon as I got the RAM I was pretty eager to get it into my machine. I flipped over the macbook popped out the battery and attempted to unscrew 3 tiny screws which held a thin metal plate over the RAM and hard drive. My first problem was that the screws are really tiny. My tiny screwdriver was too big. The next day I stopped at Radio Shack and picked up a set of 5 tiny screwdrivers (for $5) only to discover that one of the screws was completely stuck. I checked online and it seems that stuck screws is a bit of a problem. Luckily, I borrowed a pair of pliers from Cheryl to get a better grip on the screwdriver. With enough pressure I managed to loosen the screw. After that, zero problems.

The RAM was recognized immediately and the performance has been better than I expected. Things like dashboard and expose are much more responsive as is swapping between large apps. So I totally recommend the hardware especially considering it was less than $200.

My initial thoughts, in no particular order:

• i quickly got used to the 2-finger scrolling and the 2-finger right button click
• i guess i still have to get used to figuring out whether I need to click alt, ctrl, or the apple-key
• the shade of green on awardtour looks pretty different compared to what I see on Windows
• frontrow is really slick
• I tired out iMovieHD using the built-in iSight. I was suprised how confusing it was to do some things, but for the most part it was dead simple. I was also impressed how quickly it rendered things considering the macbook uses an integrated video card
• skype wasn’t working very well for me. My audio echo’d and when I turned the volume up it created some odd feedback. I had none of these problems with ichat
• why is the chat window in ichat so ugly?
• Installed Quicksilver. I don’t get what the big deal is? Is it more useful with custom scripts? It also uses a lot of ram. I also found it was just as easy to use spotlight to launch apps and find files.
• For torrents, I installed the lightweight transmission, the very nice xtorrent, and the large and bulky java-based azureus. Unfortunately, both transmission and xtorrent were banned on some of my torrent boards for inappropriate protocol implementations. This left me with Azureus. I’m not too happy about that.

On the browser front, I installed camino and firefox to compare them with safari. I originally thought there was no way i’d use safari as gmail isn’t fully supported but since I have google chat in Adium I might reconsider. Camino didn’t have all the options I wanted so I installed Firefoxy which replaces the horribly ugly form elements in firefox (like radio buttons and text windows) with some nicer ones. I think I’ll be sticking with Firefox. I need something like a three finger click for “open a link in a new tab”.

Anyone who reads this, and has a mac, please start recommending software. IM client, text editor, useful apps, useful widgets, rails installer, etc. I installed firefox, is it worth installing camino?

yes, after 5 years of waiting, i finally bought an apple. a black macbook to be exact. it will be replacing my beloved thinkpad t21 which, after 6 years, is really starting to show it’s age. none the less, i’ll still be a strong advocate for the mouse nub. more details on the mac to come…