TheJoe gets a Unibody 17″ MacBook Pro… Twice

Let me start by saying, “I did not NEED to upgrade my laptop”.  I did so because I promised Andrew that when certain things happened, that he would get my late 2008 17″ MacBook Pro.  Those things occurred and I made good on my promise.  So, I had to get a new computer.  This is where the adventure begins.

After some hiccups at the Santa Monica Apple store (idiot clerk and manager), I have a unibody MacBook Pro 17″ with the Anti-Glare (matte) option in hand and take it home.  It sits on the shelf for a couple of days while I get the stuff that I normally add to my MacBooks when I buy them.  Palmguard, keyboard protector, etc. (this took an act of congress because everyone was out of stock and I had to order it all) Read more

What sign are you?

I got this in an e-mail and thought I would share…

Do you believe in astrology? Do you read what the stars say about you, checking the papers everyday? Here’s another take.

What is your sign?

Read more

iPhone 3G in Hand feed with TWIT.TV

First off, I just want to thank Leo Laporte for adding our camera feed of us waiting in line at the AT&T store for our iPhone 3G.   Our internet connection dropped minutes before the door opened and we were unable to broadcast our purchase.  Angel hung in there with me and we got our phones very quickly.

Apparently, there was an issue with activation and we were told they would do the sale of the phone to us and we would have to activate it through iTunes when we got home.

So, I put together a quick and dirty video of what happened when I plugged my iPhone 3G in the second time.   Bear with me, I was tired and punchy

I will try to do a better video later. I am gonna go relax now.

Thanks again LEO!

AHHH! There’s a 500GB 2.5″ Drive out there!

I just finish installing the Western Digital 320GB Drive in my MacBook Pro.  Get everything installed and OH SNAP!  I find a 500GB Hitachi 2.5″ Drive.

Well, needless to say, I am a space whore.  So, I ordered one from Other World Computing.   I did the Express overnight.  I ordered it yesterday morning, and today, it’s sitting on my desk.  It’s slightly larger than the regular 2.5″ drives.  It’s 12.5mm vs th 9.5mm height that most 2.5’s are.  However, I have done some research and it looks like it will go into a MacBook Pro 17″ with no issues.  I guess we’ll find out.

I am going to install it soon.  I’ll let you know how it all goes.

Here’s the link to what I got: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Hitachi/0A53487/

MacBook Pro 320GB Hard Drive Upgrade

I spent part of my afternoon today upgrading my Macbook Pro’s Hard Drive to 320 Gigabyte from the 200 that was in it originally. Boy, does Apple pack some stuff in the space.

Anyways, I took video of the whole deal. I’ll be working on it at some point this week and get it up on YouTube. It was fairly painless.

After the install, I just did a fresh install from the Leopard disks that came with the system. When it got to the point when it asks if I want to restore an account. I just inserted the old drive in my trusty Thermaltake BlacX and it found all my settings and went to town. It even transferred my VM’s with no issues.

Great stuff!

Switch to VMWare Fusion

I have been a VMWare fan for a long time. However, on the windows platform I found that it was somewhat easier to use the Virtual PC software to meet my virtualization needs. Recently, I switched to the Mac OS X platform. One of the deciding factors for me to do this was that VMWare released Fusion for the Mac.

This is an amazing software, it allows me to run Windows and my Linux distributions within the Mac environment. It extremely stable and very responsive. As shown in a previous post..

MacVista – Mac on top, Vista on the bottom

Here is my “MacVista” screenshot.

I highly recommend VMWare Fusion.

For more information visit:  Switch to Fusion or Windows on Mac

Good Stuff!

Hackintosh OS X install on the Big Black Box

We finished the install of OS X Leopard on the big black box that was intended to be our media server. We took a video of the install and posted it on YouTube.

We’re gonna do some more videos on how to do stuff like get unity working on vmware, install X11, and nvinstaller.

Wha Hoo! MacBook Pro

So, we’re back from the Apple store.   I returned the MacBook Air and got the MacBook Pro.  17 inch jobby at 1920×1200 resolution and 200 Gig 7200 RPM hard drive.  It’s got 2 Gigabytes of Ram but I have some good ol’ 4 GB corsair memory that I can pop in it.

We’ll be shooting the video today on the un-boxing and some video of our current set-up.

Thanks to Heather and Jared at the Apple Store!

The quest to try out OSX

With the recent release of Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) and my current frustrations with Vista,  I have decided to take a look at the Mac platform for my production work.

Yes yes, I know that I have been blogging about Linux and it’s variants, but for what I do, I need something that I don’t have to fuss around with much.  I need to be able to edit video and audio.  I need it to “just work”.   Linux is making great strides in multimedia, but from my perspective, there is still too much configuration required to make it work the way I want it to.

Moving forward, I have decided to try OSX out on a “hackintosh” BEFORE I spend real money on Apple hardware. (again, I know this is oxymoronic considering what I said in my last paragraph, but I don’t mind playing with the OS first then getting the hardware properly)  

With all that said, I decided to see if I can get Leopard running on one of my test machines.  Specifically, one of my Toshiba laptops with an AMD processor.  Since I do not trust downloaded software for the most part, I decided to buy a legitimate copy of Leopard to work with.  I figure, if all doesn’t work well for me, I can sell it.  (normally, I would just buy a Mac, but I can’t float the 2,000 for the time being – besides, 150 bux is better than 2k to try it out)  

For yet another piece of irony, from my research so far, I need to have a running copy of 10.4.x to get the AMD patches onto a Leopard install DVD.  (I had to download a copy of this – LOL)  It’s just temporary, but it’s funny to me none the less. 

I am in the process of doing the 10.4.x install now and was bored during the wait so I decided to do this post.  I will post the details of the install if all goes well.