Deux Gig Mac-ina
Now I can get serious.
Thankfully, the hard drive is larger than 2GB, since half the 60GB drive is filled, and I haven’t yet installed a guest OS or stashed a lot of photos etc. on it. The difference between the cost of 2 gigs of memory from a well-known online computer parts retailer and buying it direct from apple is between $250 and $400 (depending on which discounts you get), and similar remarks apply to hard drives. It’s not so hard to install your own, as various videos illustrate, but be sure you have a Philips head screwdriver with an extremely fine point.
It may well be that this laptop is, by some reasonable measure, the fastest machine in the house now. I mean, my desktop is so antiquated, it’s got just one core. One core! Ha! (feel free to make the dismissive sound of your choice at this juncture). Perhaps the bus and the hard drive speeds on the desktop make up for the difference in the speed of the cores, though, I’m not one to run a lot of benchmarks.
I’m still feeling my way around the OS. Scrolling with two fingers on the mouse pad rocks (and almost makes up for the lack of a second mouse button =), and I haven’t had too much difficulty picking up the OS X keystrokes so far. On the downside, it took me much longer to install the Python libxml2 bindings than it should have, and it’s harder to take a screenshot than it ought to be (yes, yes, you can use Grab, but even though there are menu entries for it, they seem to be disabled). While Safari seems generally reasonable, it’s simply not as good as Firefox; one thing that’s really annoying is that Safari doesn’t show you where links go when you hover the mouse over them. There are other little things that I’ve found annoying, although they’re on the fringes — or example, Apple’s JVM apparently doesn’t recognize the (perfectly legitimate) SSL certificate authority in use on sites I would like to use.
It’s still a *nix underneath, and I find I’m using the terminal a lot. It eases the transition somewhat that the userspace tools are more like those you find in GNU/Linux than they are like the ones you find in a default Solaris install … speaking of which, I still haven’t installed Parallels …
Posted: August 11th, 2006 under nerdination.
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Comment from james
Time November 19, 2006 at 1:25 am
In my safari (2.04) and firefox (2) when you hover over a link the description tag is displayed by the mouse pointer while the link is displayed in the status bar at the bottom of the browser.
Maybe the status bar isn’t switched on by default in Safari, I can’t remember. Go to -View- then -Show status bar-.
I generally prefer firefox but safari seems faster. I also find the activity window in safari useful.
As for taking a screenshot with Grab:
Command-Shift-3: Immediately takes a picture of the entire screen.
Command-Shift-4: Changes the cursor into crosshairs. Drag the crosshairs over a section of the screen, then release the mouse button to capture the shaded area.
James