Today Apple announced an upgrade to their MacBook and MacBook Pro line. This after only three months since I bought my MacBook!

Anyway this is good news for others thinking of buying a new MacBook or MacBook Pro.

Macworld | Apple unveils new MacBook and MacBook Pro

Apple on Tuesday introduced new models of its consumer-level MacBook and high-end MacBook Pro laptops, adding the newly unveiled Penryn chips to its portable line and boosting processor speeds. In addition, the MacBook Pro adopts the MultiTouch trackpad first introduced in Apple’s MacBook Air laptop.

Categories: Mac
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Previously I posted about sharing an iTunes library between users. Unfortunately sharing an iPhoto library between users is not as easy and I just wish Apple did make it easy.

There are many articles about how to do this but I ended up following the “move the folder to a disk image” instructions in this Apple document, iPhoto: Sharing libraries among multiple users. One thing this document failed to mentioned is that the image you create must be readable and writable by all users that will be accessing the iPhoto library.

Another document I discovered later with similar but better instructions is this one, Macworld | One iPhoto, many users. It talks about the one thing that is a drawback of this solution. If you are using fast user switching, then only one user can mount the disk image and only that user can use iPhoto. If another user was using iPhoto that user must unmount his disk image before you can use it. Otherwise you’ll see this lovely warning.

Categories: Mac
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Ji Seon and I both use our new Macbook so I decided it’d be easiest if we shared our iTunes library.

To do this I followed the instructions in this blog article, Sharing iTunes and iPhoto libraries between users.

Basically it involves a few steps.

1. Move iTunes library folder which is found in the Music folder in the home directory to a directory all users can access like /Users/Shared.
2. Change all the contents of the iTunes folder to be writable by all users.

   $ chmod -R g+w iTunes/

3. For each user, make an iTunes alias to the newly located iTunes library folder, rename it iTunes and put it the user’s Music folder.

You would think Apple would make this easier out of the box since this is probably something people want to do quite often.

Categories: Mac
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My brother-in-law imported into iPhoto on my laptop about 200 Nikon RAW files. Unfortunately he somehow deleted these files after import so he asked me to get them to him.

I first tried uploading them but considering that each file was 10 MB it was taking hours to do the upload and the upload kept getting interrupted.

I then tried to burn the original RAW files to CD-R. I used Finder to open the iPhoto Library by right clicking on it and selecting “Show Package Contents”. Then using the Finder I copied the original files from the iPhoto Library to the CD-R. Then I pressed the Burn button. Unfortunately Finder, w/o telling me, used the JPEG version of the files, not the RAW version of the files. That CD-R is now going to my mom.

I then used Disk Utility to create a disk image following the instructions in the help document “Creating a disk image to fill and then burn”. I then copied all the RAW files to this disk image and then burned it to DVD-R using Disk Utility. Fortunately that worked.

I thought the Mac would make burning files easier for me. Sometimes I think the Mac tries to make things so much easier by guessing what I want to do and not necessarily doing what I want.

Categories: Mac
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I love Gmail. It’s fast, it’s way of organizing and viewing mail I think is the best, and it has great search functionality.

However lately I’ve become frustrated with Gmail’s numerous hangups and crashes and with its poor contact manager that insists on saving every person I email. After it stopped working with Safari one night I decided to try setting it up with Apple Mail.

Mail with Gmail offers the advantage of working with Address Book, having a quicker interface and not hanging or crashing. I still prefer though the way Gmail organizies and displays mail.

First I set up Apple Mail using Gmail’s instructions. Because of the tens of thousands of messages I have on Gmail it actually takes a quite while to complete though it is usable almost immediately.

Then I tweaked it using the instructions in this blog article,
Gmail IMAP: Tips and Tricks. The only thing I did different was I disabled Mail’s junk mail filtering, I am just going to rely on Gmail’s which is really the best I’ve seen.

Categories: Mac, Web
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Recently I purchased a Macbook for the family (I’m posting with it right now) and overall have enjoyed the experience. I think the iLife suite is great and I like the general feel of the Macbook.

On the other hand I also bought an Acer laptop from Best Buy for the children and have been quite dissatisfied with Windows Vista. It keeps freezing and now the laptop has completely crashed and I need to reinstall Windows Vista (part of the blame might be Isaac’s but still it seems rather fragile).

David Pogue, one of my favorite columnists, posted this blog article about the “Macintosh Surge”. By the way, one of the things I like about David Pogue is that he and I own the same things, a Prius, a Nikon SLR, etc.

TECHNOLOGY
Pogue’s Posts: Explaining the Macintosh Surge
By David Pogue
Published: January 18, 2008
What’s behind the surge in Apple’s computer sales? Could it be. . .Vista?

Categories: Mac, PC
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