AuburnCom Weblog

 A brief question from a valued client: 

Chris has mentioned you set him up at home where he can use virtualdesktop to log into work? Can you send me the instructions for this or alink to the download? Ideally I can do this with our imac so I do notneed to bring my lap top home.

  You’ll need VPN access to your work network, once you have that you need to make that connection, if it’s a simple VPN connection, then the built in VPN functions of the Mac can get you connected, if it’s more complex or secured, you’ll need “VPN Tracker”($119), available from: http://www.equinux.com/us/products/vpntracker/Once you can get connected to the office, you open and execute “Remote Desktop Connection”($Free) from Microsoft, available here: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/remote-desktop/default.mspxThe VPN settings for your company should be easy to get from your Tech Department, putting those into the Mac or VPN Tracker may be difficult, but after that, setting up “Remote Desktop Connection” is pretty straightforward.Don’t hesitate to ask more about this, I build VPN solutions often for clients, for both large and small companies,

Thanks to John Gruber for pointing out this article on Tom’s Hardware.As a client of mine pointed out just before I bought my Air, the early SSD drives are not mind bendingly better at saving power than the good seagate spinning disk hard drives. They DO however have a much much much lower failure rate.Average hard drives fail between 1 and three years into usage, Hitachi’s sometimes in the first week, that’s why we supply and install only Seagate hard drives that come with industry leading Five year warranties, meaning that as long as your time machine backups are being kept, your hard drive will be replaced free up till 2013 (when hard drives will be a distant memory ;)  

Oh, Yeah!Adam C. Engst reports for tidbits that

“Precipitate Shines Mac Spotlight into Google’s Cloud”Stuart Morgan of Google has released a free Mac OS X preference pane called Precipitate that enables Spotlight and Google Desktop to search documents stored in your Google Docs account, along with your Google Bookmarks. 

 Try it out here: http://code.google.com/p/precipitate/

Segway’s now former CTO Doug Field, has just joined Apple, working directly with Johnathan Ive (arguably todays DaVinci, he creates some of the most beautiful functional design around), The executive is rumored to be working on a scooter for Apple, imagine that! Wouldn’t that be awesome?! 

WSJ’s Walt Mossberg has written a neat article over on the All things digital website, it covers some simple things to know for switchers, like:

 Menu Bars: In Windows, each program typically has its own menu bar. On the Mac, there’s a single menu bar at the top of the screen that changes, depending on which program you are actively using.

Task Bar: The equivalent of the Windows XP Task Bar on the Mac is the Dock. Unlike the Task Bar, which primarily holds icons representing open windows, the Mac Dock primarily holds icons of programs you use most often. To place a program onto the Dock, you just drag its icon there. To remove it, you just drag its icon off the Dock and it disappears in a puff of animated smoke.Start Menu: There is no Start Menu on a Mac. Its functions are divided between the Dock and the Apple menu at the upper left of the Mac screen.Control Panel: The Mac equivalent of the Windows Control Panel is called System Preferences, and it can be launched from either the Dock or the Apple menu.Keyboard shortcuts: Common Windows keyboard commands, such as Ctrl-S for Save, Ctrl-P for Print, and many others, are also available on the Mac. However, instead of using the Control key, they use the Mac’s Command key, which bears either a cloverlike symbol or an Apple logo. So, on the Mac, for instance, Command-S is for Save.

But, best of all are the comments, of which there are currently 43, which all have more advanced tips like:

 If you are lucky enough to live close to an Apple store, they offer a great program called One to One, which is personal training. For just $99 a year you can come in up to once a week for training on your Mac. My neighbor just got her first Mac and it’s amazing what she has learned so far. She says that the trainers are very patient and make the lessons on what she wants to do with her laptop. She hardly calls me anymore with computer questions. It’s a bargain! 

—————————–One argument I often hear from Windows people is that menus belong to an application so should be in the window. This is logical programmer’s thinking, but Apple thinks different. Well for one thing that wastes screen space because every window requires menu space. But there is a much more fundamental reason - Mac menus are much faster for the user. It’s called Fitts’ Law and is expounded by Bruce Tognazzini at:http://www.asktog.com/basics/f…..l#fittsLaw

What this means is that an object (the menu) at the top of the screen is infinitely big in the up direction. Thus a user needs only flick the mouse upwards and has an easy-to-hit target. In Windows, the user must carefully position the mouse over the menu before clicking. The claim (backed by some tests) is that Mac users are five times faster hitting menus than Windows users. It is probably why Windows users much more rely on so-called keyboard shortcuts, which aren’t even shortcuts compared to the shortcuts on the Mac.IanPosted by Ian Joyner at July 3rd, 2008 at 8:15 pm  

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I switched last December. My concern at the time was the learning curve after using Windows all my life (I’m 64). Within hours I was up and running and had no problems what so ever. I believe that the iMac I purchased was one of the best investments I have made and even today it still amazes me.

Posted by Allan Sherman at July 3rd, 2008 at 9:01 pm  

 

 

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You can find an excellent free switchers tutorial at MacProVideo, as well as other quality video tutorials… Highly recommended!

http://www.macprovideo.com/tutorial/xpToLeopard 

A lot of folks love Google Talk over any other instan messanger, even Adium or iChat, because of a couple of features,

one, it works in your browser with no extra software,

two, it saves all your chats, and includes their text when you search through your emails

three, it has a neat “off the record” feature that disables item two, other software like ichat is either in “always record conversations” or “never record conversations”

Well, starting today, Google talk has a slick new webapp for the iphone that gives you all your Google talk benefits right to your iPhone or iPod touch, try it out here: google.com/talk

As First reported by AppleInsider,

The MacBook Air premium model, that’s with a 64gb Solid State drive, and a 1.8Ghz Core 2 Duo processor has come down from $3098 to $2598, and, with an apple developer membership, only $2338!

Sustainability and greening are the hot topics of the moment, roughly 100 years on from Nikolai Tesla’s experiments with electricity that gave us this wonderful current through our villages and cities, we, as a responsible race have looked to make these tools as energy efficient as possible.

Green Laptops

There’s a great new showing of Buckminster Fullers work at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York now running till the 21st of September, and , when I read about how keen he was to make the most out of limited supplies, I correlated his work with my newest technological toy and current love, the MacBook Air.

As well as receiving the popular vote in a three way usability test recently, the MacBook Air has in fact been praised by Treehugger, they quote a Businessweek article written by Bruce Nussbaum that states

It doesn’t have mercury or arsenic in its LCD and glass. The aluminum frame can be recycled. The circutry is PVC free. And there is less packing material than other laptops. 

Also remember that the MacBook Air has an LED backlit display which saves power, and uses a maximum of 45 watts at peak operation, a regular MacBook uses 60 Watts, and MacBook Pro’s can use 85 watts at peak, that means your air is using half of a standard incandescant bulb at it’s very hardest, most of the time, the air is using under 20 watts!

With the rapid rollout of LCD tv’s, I thought we’d catchup on the simple information about HD, 1080p, Blu Ray and all that Jazz.

Back in the 90’s, our early early computers had screen resolutions of 640×480, that literally meant that there was 640 vertical lines(left to right) and 480 horizontal lines (top to bottom) displaying the image our eyes could see.In those days we never discussed how many lines a TV had because those TV’s were analog, light shining on glass that was rarely measured and never discussed, the resolution at a rough estimation of these TV’s was 320×240, about half of what Computer monitors were displaying, which is why, when you plugged the video output from a pc into a TV it looked blurry and enlarged, because the stadard TV couldn’t display the text and images at a sharp enough resolution.

Computer monitors started accelerating their resolution improvements and quickly jumped to 800×600 and then 1024×768, TV screens followed suit, and the better CRT models got their resolution up to 640480 too, this is what is called (Standard Definition, this didn’t occur in any major sense until 2005, when Plasma screens were already well entrenched (despite their price tags in the low teen thousands) and LCD Tv’s were beginning to gain raction in the consumer market place.

Today, 1080p indicates that a screen can display 1920×1080 resolution and comes standard on 40 inchand 52 inch tv’s, (I like the Samsungs best), 720P is about normal for the 30 and 32 inch models, but, how do Macs stack up against these impressive figures, and, can a Mac show you a picture much better than these TV’s?

Judge for yourself: 20 inch iMac: Resolution: 1680-by-1050 

24 inch iMac Resolution: 1920-by-1200 

 So, before you choose to watch all the upcoming HD movies, like 

Wall.E , Indiana Jones, Journey to the Center of the Earth or the Mummy 3, be sure to carefully pick out what’ll serve you best.

Slightly Obfuscated question from a client:I have a G5 that needs a little work. I would like to update the operating system – currently has OS X, version 10.3.9. I would like to upgrade to Tiger or Leopard. I would also like to have MS Office Suite added to the system.Details about my G5 I purchased G5 4 years ago. It has a 1.6HHz processor and 1.25 GM DDR SDRAM memory. It has OS X, version 10.3.9. The hard drive It’s got a 75 GB hard drive and I also have another 100 GB external hard drive. It also has an airport to connect to wireless network - DSL. What can you recommendThe G5 computers are true milestones in Apple’s history, they’re fast, handle video and media really well and look good. Do you have a PowerMac or an iMac?OS X leopard retails for $129 from Apple and that’s what I sell it for too, it IS available from Amazon for $119 with free shipping, MS Office 2008 sells for $149 at the Apple Store or through me, from Amazon, it is $129 If you can, I would highly recommend using Apple’s iWork 08 over MS office, you can read more about it on my website, it’s $79 from Apple or $69 from Amazon If you require my direct consultations or work on your Mac, you can come to our office at 660 Alabama Street (that’s near 19th street), 94110.