For years I’ve seen commercials on TV urging me to do something about the destruction of the rain forest, which made sense to me because they tell me it’s the earths lungs. Yesterday I saw a commercial on TV telling me that most of the earth’s oxygen is produced in the oceans, for the oceans are the lungs of the earth. Somehow I think there are two organisations competing for protection of the lungs, I just don’t know which one is protecting the real lungs…

Sometimes when people find out I own a Macbook and since a week also an iPhone they call me an apple-freak. There are of course many apple fans always bashing the PC/Windows users and vica versa, but I don’t think I belong to those groups. I like the apple products, and thats my prerogative. And I cenrtainly don’t think all Apple does is great. It’s really funny to watch keynotes and see the crowd going wild when Steve Jobs introduces a new color for the iPod, to observe the way they price the only make the cool colored iPods the most expensive ones and the fastest macbook only in black.

Recently I have been searching the web for ways to sync my iPhone and Laptop wireless and found only rumors that it would be possible and only custom-build workarounds that don’t get the trick just right yet (though it is a good piece of work). Today I think I found out why this is the case when I stumbled upon MobileMe, a online service by Apple which enables users to sync all of their devices wireless. Oh, and I am unable to find on their site howmuch this service costs, only that I can try it out for free for six months…

The presence of the twenty or so flies in my room is really demanding a proper fly-catcher. That’s why there now hangs a sticky yellowish strip of paper from my ceiling which hasn’t caught a single fly. Admitted, it has only been three minutes. Too bad that my constant staring at it doesn’t seem to affect its efficiency.

I enjoy doing a lot with e-mail and having everything in mij own control. No hotmail, gmail or a students email account but a dedicated server (which I rent with a group of friends) and my own domain. To bad that when that server went down for a full day I had to notice it myself, change the MX records to send the e-mall temporarily to gmail (which I normaly use as an off-site backup).

Now for some sleep, and in the morning see off how many mailinglist I have been bounched.

[edit] I seem to have everything, but it is still possible I’ve missed some e-mails. Sorry about that[/edit]

I want to have my screensaver password enabled only if I am not around my computer. I hate typing it in, but I fear leaving my laptop unattended and unprotected at the same time. The same problem occured to Jesse David Hollington and his article helped me a lot.

Downloading and installing Proximity is pretty straightforward, as is configuring it to use my phone and what applescripts to run when the phone enteres and leaves bluetooth range. Following Hollingtons instructions on screen saver passwords by adding some applescript and compiling the notify.c was pretty easy to make the screensaver appear password protected if the phone is out of range and disabling the screensaver password when in range. It is possible to use growl with applescript, so I went on copying the script to register with growl and added notifications to both my scripts. Taking Hollingtons script for iSync as a basis I added some growl notifications to adjust it to my needs.

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Today I decided to obtain a free copy of Windows Vista Business through the MSDNAA (nice to be a computer science student) for installation on my MacBook. Nice service, just go to the website, login with my CS account and I found myself in a Microsoft Webstore containing their top products, all for free.

First problem was that MS provided me with a downloader_of_Vista_DVD.exe. Sounds nice, but running .exe files under OSX may provide a chanlenge. So in order to obtain windows, one has to have… windows! This could be quite anoying for a mac owner, fortunately I have a spare desktop PC running Windows XP. While waiting for the 6628 MB download I ran the Boot Camp Assistant to prepare a cd with the drivers as I read in some tutorials on the web, but that didn’t seem to be necessary since the Leopard DVD should contain those already. Nice!

The download took quite some time. Anoying detail is that de downloader does not say how fast it is going or gives an estimated time remaining, just a progress bar. But some simple mathmatic operations tell me it was around 50kb/sec. Somehow during the night the download aborted, fortunately the downloader has a resume feature that did not work. So when I started the download again the speed was about four times faster. Obviously.

Installation when smooth and took about a half hour. Next step would be to install the windows drivers located on the Leopard DVD, but that DVD was empty according to windows explorer. I have no idea why or how to fix this, so I just resorted to downloading a torrent with the drivers someone extracted from the DVD. Which worked. Now I have everything up and running, yet apart from glancing around and concluding it looks nice I haven’t really found a purpose to use it yet.

Niet dat het boeiend is voor jullie, maar wel voor mij.

Succes

• Quicksilver installeren
• Opera installeren
• Growl installeren en van de extra’s hardwaregrowler en mailgrowler geinstalleerd.
• Mail speciale folders (send, drafts, trash etc) ingesteld door de IMAP folder te selecteren en dan mailbox > Use This Mailbox For > Wat je wil.
• Klok Het formaat van de klok is gedefinieerd bij System preferences > International > Formats > Times (customize button), de medium versie. Door bij de dates de datumelementen te kopieeren en de plakken bij de times kun je zowel datum als tijd in de klok hebben staan.
• Codecs AVI’s met quicktime/frontrow bekijken werkt niet, Codecs van DixX.com gedownload en met de had gedeinstaleerd. Perian geinstalleerd, quick preview en front row werken, quicktime niet (maar da’s misschien omdat ie nog open stond bij verwijderen DivX.com bestanden) maar QuickTime een paar keer herstarten wel weer.
• Adress Book de Addresbook Importer gedownload en het Biton ledenbestand geimporteerd (werkte niet goed met adresbook’s native import functie).
• iSync gehackt om het te laten werken met de Nokia 6086

Matig

• Mail: courier IMAP neemt standaard INBOX als prefix, Mail wil de todo’s in ‘Apple todo’ zetten. De boel gefixt door INBOX als prefix in te stellen (Settings > Accounts > slashpunt > advanced). Vervolgens de notes en todo knopjes uit de taakbalk gehaald, en nu maar hopen dat het goed blijft gaan.

Klote
hoezee, nog niets!

On xkcd’s blag I read a post about an article from about 1900 he found in which a prediction about the coming century is made. Apart from the fact that is a nice article to read I’d like to mention, just for the record, that I have done my part in fulfilling the prediction. What is the rest of the world waiting for?

maar dan heb je ook php geinstalleerd. Er is een hele makkelijke distributie, maar die werkte dus niet bij mij. Dus was het even een kwestie van

• PHP downloaden
• compileren en er achter komen dat er geen cc of gcc geinstaleerd is
• apt-get install gcc, maar dan is er nogsteeds geen gcc beschikbaar
• apple developer tools installeren (Ronald heeft een ADC account)
• php5 compileren
• Net zo lang proberen de libphp5.so module voor apache2 te bouwen totdat ik er achter kwam dan er apache1.3 op m’n mac staat
• De juiste opties vinden en de boel compileren.

Goed, ik had ook kunnen uitzoeken waarom de installer van Entropy niet werkte of waarom apt-get gcc niet het juiste resultaat gaf, maar dit was ook leuk om te doen (en handiger in de trein zonder internetverbinding).

Ik ben nu een weekje een trotse bezitter van een MacBook 13.3\" zwart. Het leek me wel nuttig om hier een opsomming van wat ik er allemaal mee gedaan heb neer te zetten, mocht ik ooit nog eens gaan herinstalleren.

• Lang leve Pims Mac essentials waar een mooie lijst van handige dingen staan.
• Formaat van de klok aanpassen