Category: Technology

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Windows solutions for an Apple (at least a MacBook)

This article, “Guide for Choosing Boot Camp or Parallels to Run Windows on an Apple MacBook” at NotebookReview.com, looks like a thorough and useful discussion about Apple users’ options for running MS Windows, either BootCamp or a software product called “Parallels.” Interesting article with lots of details.

Actually, what might be more interesting if you can wait (as I’ve written about here before, a new MacBook is about a year or so away for me at least) is what will happen with OS 10.5. Among other things (including some very interesting collaboration tools), rumor has it that the new operating system will have “virtualization” built into it. In fact, I’ve heard (again, just a rumor) that the goal is to have an Apple OS where you can just install and use .exe MS Windows apps.

I think I am basically the “ideal user” for these kinds of solutions, both at work and at home. At work, I do 99% of of my work on the Mac exclusively with no problems; but there are some Windows-only software products that might be nice to be able to use (I’m thinking especially of some database software they use at EMU for admissions and such), and it would also be nice to show a confused student how to do something in my office with a computer running Windows.

And at home, the reason why I’d want to do this is probably obvious: games. I don’t play many of them, but to me, it’d be worth the cost of MS Windows to play the few games that I do play.

Of course, if I can run apps designed for MS Windows without having to mess with installing a new OS (and this is what I understand may be on the horizon with 10.5), then that’d be better.

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"Nifty OS X Apps"/And back that Mac up, too

Here’s a list of some cool (and basically free, I think) apps for the Mac. I have some of them, but there are some others here worth checking out.

Also, there’s this fine advice on the Mac Observer for backing up your Mac. Actually, this advice is pretty much appropriate for any computer, and really, since PCs are more vulnerable to various viruses and such than Macs, advice on the need to back up is probably more important for PC owners.

I have to say it is not quite the new “the dog ate my homework,” but “my computer has a virus” or something like that is close to does surface as an excuse once in a while. Maybe I need to create some sort of student guide to computer maintenance…. or somebody does….

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Online Book Reviews, Blogger Conventions: two links for later…

Both of these are links I’m interested in keeping track of for teaching (I can easily imagine them as a reading (or really, listening) assignment for Writing for the World Wide Web or my graduate course in computers and writing:

  • “Upon Further Review,” which is an NPR Morning Edition Sunday story about how the new book The Stolen Child has become very popular not as the result of professional reviews but because of “amateur” critics on amazon.com. Nice and crabby comments from “professional” critics about how the amateurs can’t possibly get it right.
  • “Lefty Bloggers Assemble in Las Vegas,” also on NPR Morning Edition Sunday. I had read about this in the NYT a couple weeks ago (and still have that article kicking around someplace), but this is a nice addition to the coverage of the Daily KOS convention. The question is if you put a bunch of bloggers into a room together, would they actually talk to each other? Or just tyle with/at each other?
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"Datamining" with Google advice

Here are a couple of sites I will want to come back to later when putting together some various syllabi: “Google Guide: Using Search Operators” and this entry from a blog called CyberWyre, “Data Mining on the Internet with Google.” They both outline a lot of special search operators that you can use with Google that I had certainly not heard of before.

BTW, I came across this site via the del.icio.us/popular page, which has become a part of my morning coffee reading. It took me a while to figure out the point of a service like del.icio.us, but now I’m all for it. I think I need to start playing around with this digg thing next…

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The rise of YouTube…

I was actually looking for something else, but I came across this page on NPR’s web about “Viral Video and the Rise of YouTube.” This is one of those things I’ll need to come back to later when I start planning English 516 for the winter…. Well, that and maybe the next round of the Writing for the World Wide Web class, too.

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Two cool tech/computer things

I came across a couple of interesting tech things this morning. I know that the first one, Flickrexport, which I came across via cbd, actually works. Basically, it allows you to export from iPhoto directly to a Flickr account. Reason number 3,404,678 to get a Mac.

The second one is a WordPress plugin, a Trackback validator, which mainly seems to be a way to track spam. I haven’t tried this one out, but it reminds me once again that the “to do” list this summer includes updating this and my unofficial blog.

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If Blogger and MySpace had a baby which grew up to have plastic surgery by Apple…

Via the blog TechCrunch comes news that SixApart is going to be introducing “Vox,” which TechCrunch describes as “half a blogging platform for newbies (albeit with rich and deep functionality) and half social network.” There are some screen shots on this site, and that’s the reason why I suggested the plastic surgery make-over curtesy of Apple: it looks a heck of a lot like iWeb to me.

All of which reminds me that one of my “to do” items this summer is to redo the look of this blog….

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Just in case you wanted to take apart your new MacBook

See this iFixit guide. Of course, they don’t really explain how to put your MacBook back together once you have it completely apart.

Actually, one thing that is very cool is this tutorial makes it pretty clear that putting in RAM or a new hard drive into one of these babies is easy. I managed to upgrade the RAM in my iBook (with much coaching and help from my colleague Steve Benninghoff), but I have been told that swapping out a harddrive in this machine is something an amateur does not want to mess with.