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10 Things To Do And Look Forward To When I Get My MacBook Tomorrow

Friday, December 11th, 2009

macbook

Yup, I’m getting a MacBook! It’s free!

Well, not really free. I see it more like a subsidized price paid in installments over 2 years and comes with a 10Mbps ADSL line. Here’s my list of things to-do and things-to-look-forward-to:

  1. A less buggy with far better performance of iTunes. iTunes for Windows is like Eclipse: it’s nice to use once it’s finished loading all those gazillion bits, but I will never set it as a default program to open a file with.
  2. Speaking of Eclipse, install Eclipse and make the MacBook my default machine for messing about with code.
  3. Get the iPhone SDK and Xcode IDE to poke around.
  4. Mess about with the iLife suite.
  5. As usual, get Firefox. Safari may have better javascript performance, but I want, no NEED, all those addons I’m super used to.
  6. Install all my games that have a Mac version. And bug developers/publishers for a free Mac version of the game I bought if there is one.
  7. Oversized multitouch trackpad FTW! No more squiggly little trackpads. I’ve always wondered why other manufacturers don’t atetempt to provide a better trackpad experience, since it’s as important as, if not more than, the keyboard. Especially more so since modern OSes have a very mouse-driven interface.
  8. No more shutdowns, but sleep and hibernate instead for faster-to-desktop times. One thing good about Apple is that since they control the hardware, the OS can be highly optimized to the hardware. If I’m not wrong, sleep and hibernate are two operation that are quite hardware sensitive. So Apple has a good advantage over Windows and probably Linux in this regard.
  9. Chiclet keyboard! w00t!!!
  10. Drool over the design. Seriously, don’t touch my MacBook. It’ll be sticky.

By the way, this list is by no means in order of merit. Just because I haven’t done no. 2, doesn’t mean no. 10 hasn’t happen. It’s your risk.

(Image taken from, where else, Apple Online Store.)

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Posted in Hardware, Software | No Comments »

OSX On My Dell Mini 9!

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

I have always wanted to try out OSX. i’ve heard only good things of it, and I’m just simply curious. What’s so good about it?

One of the reasons why I jumped at the opportunity to purchase the Dell Mini 9 is because it is one of the few netbooks where OSX can run without a hitch. I got the the netbook with the default specs. It has a default 8GB of SSD storage. Of course, it wasn’t enough for anything but XP (and Ubuntu). I decided to swap it for a Runcore 64GB SSD, which costs the same as the netbook itself! Lucky me, it was a worthwhiole upgrade; read-write speeds was much faster than the old brand, and everything zipped around, despite the much-maligned Atom processor.

At this point, I’ve been reading up on how to run OSX on it. However, all of the guides pointed out that an OSX 10.5 Leopard retail disc was needed. So I scrapped that idea for the time being. I whacked Windows 7 on it and was surprised at how well the netbook handled it. It felt much more responsive than Windows XP for some reason. Is it the snappier Runcore SSD? Probably. I was too happy with Windows 7 running perfectly on it to care too much about trying out XP on it.

And then Snow Leopard got released.

One of the huge perks of Snow Leopard when it arrived is the fact that an upgrade disc costs only S$48 (US$29)! My interest in OSX perked up again and I scoured the MyDellMini forums for news and updates on installation of Snow Leopard. So far, there were some problems with getting audio to work, so it was a big deal breaker for me.

Last week, I decided to check up on it again. This time, there were many reports of people getting it to work. There was a new release of NetbookInstaller & NetbookBootMaker, version 0.83 RC3, from mechdrew, the software responsible for making this work. Then, it was a simple matter of following instructions (which I have long since realised is a very difficult task for some people.).

And lo and behold, I now have a 9″, 1kg laptop running OSX 10.6.1 Snow Leopard!!

DellWithOSX

OSX is running very smoothly on this small Atom-powered netbook. I guess the 2GB ram and 64GB Runcore SSD upgrades helped tremendously in this regard. Another surprise is the fact that the touchpad is capable of multitouch! It supports up to 3-finger touch/swipe. I am absolutely fond of 2-finger scroll. It makes life so much easier on the touchpad.

Of course, there were some things not working out of the box. Sound is only available through the in-built speakers. To get headphones and the microphone jacks working, VoodooHDA is required. There are problems with hibernate, but sleep is fine. So after installation of SmartSleep, I needed to disable the hibernation and only enable sleep. Using an external monitor, I am not able to mirror, else both screens will be garbled. The older kexts (something like drivers in Windows, but for Mac) for the Intel GMA950 works, but graphical performance is a bit sluggish. There’s no fix for that yet as of now, except to use the older kexts, which I don’t recommend.

Other than that, everything else works! From the in-built webcam to the some special function keys, like volume. The whole thing just rocks!

Of course, being a purist, I am now bugging my wife to get an actual real-life breathing Macbook. A nice 13″ Macbook will do nicely. The Macbook Pro line isn’t necessary, since now even the Macbook has a 9400M as its graphics adapter.

I do hope that such projects will thrive and Apple will leave them well alone. Because of them, I manage to try out OSX with relative ease and without actually having to buy another laptop. A big thanks to mechdrew and all the guys over at MyDellMini forums!

Posted in Hardware, Software | 1 Comment »

Railroad Tycoon 2 Gold: Plug And Play

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Disclaimer: This worked on my Windows 7 64-bit but it should theorectically work the same on Vista 64-bit as well.

RT2Gold_cover

Apparently, Railroad Tycoon 2 Gold does not require any fancy-smancy registry entries. I’m currently running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, and i was pining for some nice strategy game. For reasons unbeknownst to me (read: wife), I did not want to purchase a game for that. (But I do have that Stardock code, and Elemental sounds cool…) I remembered purchasing Railroad Tycoon 2 Gold some time back, so that seemed to hit the spot. The sad part: RT2Gold uses a 16-bit installer. Bummer.

So I decided to check XP Mode out.

XP Mode is not too bad an addition to Windows 7. It is a complete full virtualized Windows XP running on Virtual PC. What prevents it from being described as “good” or even “great” is that fact that you need a processor that supports hardware-level x86-virtualization. That’s Intel VT or AMD-V, depending on which camp you are in you stupid dumb idiotic fanboys. The other requirement is that this is only for the Ultimate version of Windows 7 (not sure about Professional edition though). There are free ways to getting this of course (Virtualbox + who-doesn’t-have-a-not-so-legit-copy-of-XP-by-now) but the nice thing about XP Mode is that you don’t have to go through the entire XP installation routine and everything, including license and the fact that all your drives on the host are seen as network drives, has been preconfigured. Plus, any application you installed in the virtualized XP can now be run via your Start menu in Windows 7 and you can simply invoke the program to run as though it is in XP, UI and all. That is quite impressive actually.

Anyway, I’m digressing. For a multimedia intensive application like a game, trust me, you don’t want to run in a virtualized environment. There’s just too many graphical glitches that makes it seem as though the game is unpolished. It’s one of the major reasons why I’m not in favour of running Linux at this time, but let’s not stir a hornet’s nest shall we?

One can install Railroad Tycoon 2 Gold on another machine and simply copy it over to another and play it there! RT2Gold can now join WoW and other games I can archive and take all over with me! Cool!

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Posted in Gaming, Software | No Comments »

Of Megabytes And Mebibytes

Friday, September 4th, 2009

Snow Leopard has been released! Whoopedoo! But I got no Mac to play with right now. Not counting my Dell Mini 9 of course..

One of reported goodness that comes out from changing the species of OS X is that the harddisk space is finally displayed correctly. You buy a 500GB drive, and “500GB” is displayed, instead of “465GB”. What happens to the missing space in the latter, you ask? This happens to be one of the many questions that keeps surfacing on tech forums.

Let’s take that figure, 500GB, as an example. From manufacturer’s point of view, 500GB, or 500 gigabytes, means 500,000,000,000 bytes. Thus, giga- means multiplied by 1,000,000,000. This is what I like to call “human mode”. We give abbreviations to every three zeroes that we see. 1,000 = kilo; 1,000,000 = mega; 1,000,000,000 = giga. We are creatures who live, breathe and sleep in base-10. I’m guessing this is because that particular base is conveniently equivalent to the numeric system. We use 10 symbols to represent numbers, so we think in base-10.

However, computers think in binary, in base-2. Somehow, we also programmed that into our software as well. So in most OSes, a kilo = 1024; a mega = 1024*1024 = 1048576; a giga = 1024*1024*1024 = 1073741824. Thus, taking 500,000,000,000 divided by a computer’s giga, we get 465 gigabytes.

So which one is correct? Are manufacturers screwing us all this time?

My answer: no.

I guess I prefer standard units as defined by a proper governing body, not marketing. I hate it when people use terms such as “HD-Ready”, “Full-HD” or “SATA2″, because there is no such thing. HD format is usually displayed in 720i, 720p, 1080i or 1080p. Any screen capable of displaying this is HD. There is no specification for SATA2, only SATA-150 or SATA-300. Somehow, people have gotten used to thinking that SATA2 is the latter, which is again fundamentally wrong.

The terms “kilo”, “mega” and “giga” are all standard SI-unit prefixes, along with other prefixes shown in this table:

SI_Prefix_Table

Because the SI prefixes strictly represent powers of 10, they should not be used to represent powers of 2. Thus, one kilobit, or 1 kbit, is 1000 bit and not 210 bit = 1024 bit. To alleviate this ambiguity, prefixes for binary multiples have been adopted by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) for use in information technology.

Thus, the correct SI prefixes for binary numbers are:

SI_Prefix_Table2

That is why, in this case, the space reported by an OS (except Snow Leopard) is wrong and should use “kibi”, “mebi” and “gibi” instead, to properly distinguish itself from the prefixes for powers of 10.

I’m glad that Snow Leopard is at least attempting to get it right. Of course, on the flip side, people are reporting outrageous space savings when moving from Tiger/Leopard to Snow Leopard. I do know that there are savings, but to report space savings of 20GB is a bit too ridiculous. I’m sure engineers at Apple are freaking smart, but they’re not miracle workers.

Apparently, the SI prefix for binary numbers have been set since 1998. The standard has been set more than 10 years ago! Why are Windows still stuck reporting GB as GiB? Is it so difficult to change that behaviour? Or is Microsoft just scared to change, in case the millions of idiots using Windows start a class-action lawsuit?

I just hate discrepancies.

[SI prefixes] && [Prefixes for binary multiples]

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Posted in Hardware, Software | 2 Comments »

My New Way To Copy: Teracopy

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

I have found a new software must-have: Teracopy. I think I may be the only geek in the world who still uses Windows explorer for file copying.

A feature list of Teracopy, lifted word for word:

  • Copy files faster. TeraCopy uses dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times. Asynchronous copy speeds up file transfer between two physical hard drives.
  • Pause and resume file transfers. Pause copy process at any time to free up system resources and continue with a single click.
  • Error recovery. In case of copy error, TeraCopy will try several times and in the worse case just skips the file, not terminating the entire transfer.
  • Interactive file list. TeraCopy shows failed file transfers and lets you fix the problem and recopy only problem files.
  • Shell integration. TeraCopy can completely replace Explorer copy and move functions, allowing you work with files as usual.
  • Full Unicode support.

teracopy_less

Teracopy is quite simply a file copy management tool. I like it for its simplicity and ease of use. For small files, drag-and-drop in explorer might be fine. However, if you’re multitasking, you may notice that copying of large files can get interrupted or will simply take longer, even on a dual core. If you copy a file, and then start another copy process, one thing I don’t like is that Windows explorer tries to do both at the same time, making the task seemingly inefficient and resource hoarding (at least, in my eyes. I have no idea how the copying process is worked at a lower level.). The time calculated for the copy process will also shoot up probably for this reason. Teracopy does not spawn another process, but instead, it will add to the list of files to be copied to. Teracopy will also show the speed at which the file is being copied, a feature that I sorely miss on my XP machine.

Teracopy’s shell integration is also good. Upon installation, it will add itself to the context menu of a file and folder options, making it real easy to launch. Just select all the files needed, right click and select Teracopy. Off you go! If teracopy is already running, like I mentioned above, it will not start another instance, but adds the additional files to the copy queue list.

teracopy_more

Of course, the best part about Teracopy is its in-built recovery system. In explorer, if a part of the copy process fails, then it will immediately terminate. Any files that are already copied will be in the destination folder, while files that are queued after the error will not be copied. Hence, you are essentially screwed. You have no way of knowing which files are already copied, and which aren’t. And like me, you will probably just copy the whole thing over again, which is redundant. Teracopy provides a handy and visible queue list and status of the files. If there is an error, the file will be marked for you to take action. And if the error occurs while the copying is running, it will skip the erroneous file, and proceed with the rest.

I wondered how I survived Windows explorer before this. I love simple programs like this. There is also a pro version, which does not seem to add much value in my opinion. The free version will do just nicely. Teracopy works on both XP and Vista.

Additional note: just when I finished this draft, XKCD had to pull this one on me:

Brilliant!

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Wierd PC Problem: Unable To Run Exe Files

Monday, April 27th, 2009

I recently met one of my old buddies from my firefighter hey-days. (Yes, I was a fireman once as part of my national service, don’t ask.) We talked some and he found out I was working with computers (it’s hard to explain what software testing is all about in layman terms). And of course, I got the obligatory question: “Do you know what’s wrong with my computer?”

Apparently, his PC is unable to run any exe files. It was intriguing, as this is the first time I heard of such a thing. So I decided what the hell, since he stays very near me, I might as well take a look.

Whenever his PC tries to run an executable file, it will open up Microsoft Word (of all applications) and because it is unable to read the file, some file conversion dialog will pop up and display the contents. Of course, since it is a binary file, the data displayed are all weird logos. I forgot to take a screenshot, but it looks similar to this one I found in Google Image.

fileconversiondialog

This happens for most exe files. I said most, because apparently, from the Start menu, you can run IE if you click on the top-most “Internet” shortcut. But if you were to try to start a browser from Start > Programs, it will fail. Rebooting into Safe Mode didn’t help either. It was still exhibiting the same behaviour, so I suspect it has to be a corrupt registry setting.

First thing I did was to check the Task Manager. Nothing seems out of the ordinary. All the processes running seem to check out. I googled those with weird names and found out that they were legitimate.

The Startup folder in the Start menu also did not contain any funny looking shortcuts.

Next, I wanted to check the registry, which was a problem in itself, because I am unable to run cmd.exe or regedit.exe. Knowing that the problem was with the exe setting, I decided to try running a batch file.

echo This is a test...
pause

Surprisingly, it did run in a command shell and printed those out. Next I tried to run regedit.exe from within a batch. It worked!

echo This is a test...
regedit

Found a workaround! Of course, I have no idea why. If someone could explain why running an executable from a batch file is different from starting it via windows explorer or a command prompt, it will be great.

So I poked into the normal areas where processes are executed upon startup (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, etc). It all checks out, so I’m guessing that the rogue process is no longer there. Googling this problem brought me to this page. I wasn’t keen on running the com file hosted there at first, but everything that was listed in Method 2 checked out perfectly. Taking a gamble and performing the cliché act of swallowing my saliva before taking the plunge, I downloaded and executed the com file.

It worked!

I’m not sure why it is so, when all the registry entries I checked out in the section Method 2 is fine. Anyway, if you’re having the same problem in XP, be sure to grab that file.

[Unable to Start a Program with an .exe File Extension]

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Posted in Software | 4 Comments »

Vista’s Persistent “Scan And Fix” Issue

Monday, April 20th, 2009

My thumbdrive has been plagued with this issue for centuries!

vista64persistentscanandfix

Each time I plug in my thumbdrive, I would have to click Continue Without Scanning, as I knew my drive is in (somewhat) perfect condition. Of course, being the lazy ass bum that I was, I decided enough is enough. As usual, Google to the rescue! And within seconds, I found the answer!

The problem was that I have not always been very diligent in clicking Safely Remove Hardware before ejecting the drive. I do that most of the times, but there were quite a few moments where I would just forcibly eject the drive. Of course, I did this fully aware that there were no write operations going on at the time. Never ever eject a drive while it is writing something to the drive! Of course, this means no pulling out the drive when you’re copying/moving files in, running programs (like PortableApps) from it, or even during boot-up. I’ve heard of a few cases where it totally killed the drive. Though I can’t verify the authenticity of such stories, I would rather play it safe than sorry when it comes to my own data.

I did the fix recommended by the site and it resolved my issue! Amazing! I reproduced the problem and re-tried the fix, and again it worked the second time. Nice.

The fix is to select Continue Without Scanning when you receive the message. Then immediately open the Windows command line and run chkdsk drive /f, where drive is your USB drive.

vista64persistentscanandfixgone

I guess this is one of those instances where Vista adheres strictly by its rules, but instead comes off as annoying. Wait a sec, Vista abiding too hard and not being flexible, coming off as annoying?

(Vista == SG ruling party) ? "Yikes!" : "...";

[Resolve Vista Scan and Fix Error When Plugging in IPOD or other Devices]

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Posted in Hardware, Software | No Comments »

Desktop Enhancement Software: Fences

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Stardock, the people behind WindowBlinds and ObjectDock, has now given us another nice desktop enhancement software.

It’s called Fences.

Fences allows you to group your desktop shortcuts into one particular area. As you can see from the demo video above, it not only allows you to group your shortcuts, but it keeps all your shortcuts in that area only. If you have too many, then a scroll bar appears if you hover over that fenced area, allowing you to scroll using your mousewheel. You can also give this fenced area a label, like “Work”, “Temp” or “Games”. Somehow, it gives me a sense of more control over the icons on my desktop.

One killer feature I love is that all these fenced areas and shortcuts will disappear when you double click on any empty area on the desktop. Of course, if you don’t like this, you can exclude a Fence from hiding, or exclude a single shortcut.

I find that this is a very simple idea that could have been a nice key feature of any desktop in any OS. I always like to group my desktop shortcuts according to type in a certain area. This desktop enhancement software feels right at home.

[Fences - By Stardock - Clean up your desktop clutter.]

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Free Acronis True Image 10 Personal Edition!

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

We all love free stuff don’t we? Even more so if it’s a quality product.

Coming from the glorious folks at lifehacker, Acronis is giving away free Acronis True Image 10 Personal Edition.

I very much prefer Acronis than Norton Ghost to do my backup. Amazingly, Acronis 10 is able to detect SCSI harddrives in RAID in a server machine. Norton Ghost did not. Acronis also has a better user interface than Ghost, especially when booting directly from the CD. I also find Acronis to be more user friendly.

One feature I like is the ability to add incremental updates to an image. Say you’ve already took an image of your harddisk. Then you made some changes and you would like to create another backup. In Acronis, you would not need to recreate the entire image again, but simply create an incremental backup. One feature I have not yet tried is saving the backup image to a network shared drive. I’m not sure if that is available for the Personal Edition. But you can backup to a USB drive instead.

What’s the catch? This is a legacy version. The latest version is Acronis True Image Home 2009, which costs £39.95 per license.

Note: The site may be unavailable. I had to try and refresh a few times before I got the registration page.

[http://www.acronis.co.uk/mag/ati10pe]

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Posted in Software | 2 Comments »

I Have 4GB Of RAM, So Why Does Windows Show Only 3GB?

Friday, January 30th, 2009

I find your lack of faith in 32-bit systems disturbing.

I’m no expert in it either by the way. But I found a nice post on this common problem plaguing non-techies and the geeky.

Since the plummeting of prices of DDR2 RAM (last I checked, it’s $15 for a 1GB stick, $25 for 2GB), a lot of people have moved to using 4GB of RAM. I don’t recommend it, but it does makes running multiple applications superb! And Vista (64-bit) does seem more responsive than XP (32 bit) if given such a disgusting amount of RAM for it to feed on.

Problem statement:
I just bought a system with 4GB of physical RAM in it. The BIOS posts 4GB, but Windows tells me that I have anywhere from 2.75 – 3.5GB of RAM. Where is the rest of my RAM?

Summary:
If you are running 32-bit Windows, you must live with it. You will not ever see all 4GB of RAM you’ve paid for.

If you are running 64-bit Windows, you may have to live with it. Depending on your motherboard’s chipset, your system may support memory remapping. If so, you will be able to use all 4GB of RAM.

The way I understand it, it boils down to the ability of an operating system to provide address space. Addresses is akin to your home address. It describes the location of a piece of data. 32-bit systems can provide 2³² addresses, or 4,294,967,296 addresses. The problem arises when you have 4GB of RAM that requires addresses, but other hardware components require it too, most notably the graphics card. Graphics usually has its own memory for it to use (onboard graphics use a portion of your RAM, usually configured in BIOS), so it too requires addresses. So in the end, Windows will allocate a portion of address for graphics and other components, and give the rest to your RAM. So in the end, a 32-bit flavour of Windows will only see 2.7-3.5GB out of the 4GB.

Do note that this is a very simplistic explanation that may be a bit skewed. For a more detailed and technical reason, do click on the link below.

[The 3GB-not-4GB RAM problem]

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Posted in Software | 4 Comments »

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