So Bush decided to move Daylight Savings Time this year. My Mac did just fine and handled the change no problem. Windows on the other hand has had a few problems. If you aren't somewhat recent in your Windows Updates the changes don't happen. Which means your clock is messed up for a few weeks twice a year. Here is a small and quick fix to fix DST without doing a zillion Windows Updates.
I have been playing around with Parrallels Desktop For Mac on a MacBook. So far it has been pretty cool.
In the past if you wanted to run Windows on a Mac you had to use VirtualPC and it had to emulate the intel processor and using it sucked. The new macs have an intel processor so there is no need to emulate. Apple supports dual booting with BootCamp, but I need to use both at the same time, and having to reboot to do something doesn't sound like fun.
The first thing I have noticed is that it likes RAM, lots of it. It's pretty basic: two operating systems need twice(or more) the RAM. So you have the MacOS and it really likes at least 512MB to do its usual things. Then you run Parallels and it loads the multi-gigabyte hard drive file. Then Parallels lets you adjust the amount of RAM that you want to give each virtual OS and it defaults to about 500MB. When I did this the computer freaked out. The CPUS were at about 15 percent each, but the computer only has 1GB of RAM and it was paging like crazy. I had to scale it back to about 300 to get the Mac useable. Then you get to feel like you are using Windows XP with 256MB of RAM!!!!
There is also a < a href="http://www.multisolar.com/software/PDTweaker/" target=_blank>hack that adjusts some things and makes it a bit faster. Hopefully this will be integrated into a newer version of Parallels.
I have been playing around with Kip. It is really cool. It is basically like iPhoto for PDFs. It organizes all those PDFs you have hanging around your computer and automatically generates tags based on the content.
Apple has re-launched a recycling program. You buy a new Mac and they will take your old one and recycle it for free.
On my PC I have been using AdBlock to block ads in Firefox. On my mac at home I have been using PithHelemt in Safari but its shareware. I just stumbled onto this way of blocking ads using custom css templates. I have only been using it for an afternoon, but seems to work pretty well.
Love Family Guy? Love Stu Tell him what to do
Today Apple announced that they are planning on selling Intel based Macintosh computers. This is a shock to some, but expected by others. There have been rumors of this for many years. It is somewhat known that Apple has had x86 versions of OSX in house, and Apple provides a x86 version of Darwin, the core OS. In the past week there have been many reports that the switch was coming today at the WWDC conference. Looks like they were right. The transition is supposed to start in one year and take one year to move all Apple hardware over to Intel chips.
This is a big deal for Mac fans. PowerPC based Apple computers have had a hard time for years explaining that the x86 is a sub-standard platform. Now everything will have to change.
Software companies will have to compile all their applications for both chip-sets, and Apple plans to support the PPC through emulation similar to the classic environment. This is all crazy.
So I have been running MacOSX 10.4 (aka Tiger) for about a week now. It seems pretty nice. It even seems to be faster on my computer than 10.3. Dashboard is pretty cool. My dual 450Mhz is pretty long in the tooth. It will be five years old in August. I never thought that a computer would last me this long. When I get a job I think I will look at a 20″ iMac.
This morning, in a conversation about archiving email Scott reminded me that a few years back I went through and deleted a ton of email. I found that I had a couple thousand from boss Bob with 'lunch' in the subject. Just goes to show how useful email is for planning what we are going to eat today.
Here is a totally cool web site with other cool sites linked to it. They are all zombie simulations that track zombies being let loose in a city, there is a 3D one, a couple where the humans/military fight back, and two that involve the dropping of nukes.
Check it out, have some fun, kill some Zombies and Zambies(well dressed zombies).