Shortly after the unofficial method of running Windows XP on Intel-powered Macs was released, Apple released a public beta of Boot Camp, their own solution to the problem. Given that I'd just used the unofficial solution on the Core Duo mini, I was the logical candidate to do the same via Boot Camp. So I did, and wrote about the steps involved.
Before the days of Boot Camp, some very bright folks figured out how to get Windows XP running on Intel-powered Macs. I volunteered to give the process a test run on the Core Duo mini, and wrote about my experiences.
Sorry it's been so quiet around here lately, but I've been doing a lot of big projects for Macworld. Last week, I wrote a series of articles on the new Intel Core Duo mini. I even wrote about why I'm sometimes SO DIMM, concerning a small (or not so small) mistake I made when purchasing RAM for the new mini.
This week, I took that same mini and turned it into a dual-booting OS X / Windows XP box, and detailed my experiences during the project. So that's why things have been a bit slow around here lately; after finishing up my daily duties, the fingers and brain have been too worn out to blog about some of the things on my mind. But this particular item was too good to ignore, so I worked on it last night and I'm posting it now for your enjoyment...there's even a bit of a tip in here, though not an OS X tip.
A couple weeks ago, we bought Disney's Lady and the Tramp DVD for our daughter. When I put it in for the first time, it was hard to miss Disney's new feature--Fast Play:
While you're looking at this pretty screen, whose buttons don't show up for several seconds, you're listening to the announcer say:
This Disney DVD is enhanced with Disney's Fast Play. Your movie and a selection of bonus features will begin automatically. To bypass Fast Play, select the Main Menu button at any time. Fast Play will begin in a moment...
My first thought was, wow, cool, a way to skip all that cruft they load our DVDs with nowadays?! Too cool! A not-so-quick experiment, however, proved my initial thought wrong...very, very wrong! Select Fast Play on Lady and the Tramp, and here's what you'll get:
Add it all up, and it takes roughly seven minutes and 10 seconds!! to go from the first time I saw anything onscreen to actually seeing the movie. Fast Play? They call that Fast Play? How long does the Slow Play alternative take to start the movie, three days?
I restarted the disc, and clicked the Main Menu button as soon as I could. From there, I chose Play Movie, then Widescreen. Next I got to see the two Disney splash screens and the two piracy screens, then the movie started. Total time required, only one minute and twenty seconds. But you can actually do better, much better, than that. And this tip works with pretty much every DVD I've tried it with.
After inserting a DVD, press the Menu button on your remote, or an onscreen button, whatever you can, to get to the Main Menu as quickly as possible. From there, click the Scene (or Chapter or whatever they choose to call it) Selection button. Then choose the first scene in the movie, which is almost always the opening credits. Then select your screen format (if necessary), and you're done. The movie will simply start playing. No Disney splash screens. No FBI warnings. Nothing but movie, the way things were meant to be.
For Lady and the Tramp, this process takes only 28 seconds, from initial screen activity to viewing the actual movie. Now that's what I call Fast Play!
After receiving my first-ever Intel-powered Mac, a new Core Duo mini, I spent the better part of a week testing out the machine in nearly every aspect of performance I could think up. This started as a three-part series, but based on feedback from the first three parts, we added two additional sections. Here's how the entire series came out:
While not at the technical level of an Ars Technica report (I won't even pretend to have the skills to go there), this is a very detailed look at the machine from a somewhat typical user's perspective.
Ever wondered how to tell if you've bought the wrong brand of RAM for your mini Mac? Thanks to a recent misadventure, I can now tell you exactly how you'll know. Ugh.
Yes, I really did purchase standard-size RAM for the mini, and (even worse than buying it) not even notice that it was way to large to fit inside that small case until I got it home.
For a long time, Apple has simply done packaging 'right,' especially for the iPod.
Although the packaging for iPods isn't the flashiest on the shelf, it is a marvel of simplicity and amazing design, like the machine itself. The experience continues inside the box, where it seems the iPod engineers must have been involved--everything has a place, and space is never wasted. I still recall opening the first iPod I ever bought, fascinated by the multi-foldout design that let so much stuff fit in such a compact space. As a matter of fact, that box is still on my shelf. But this post isn't about the inside of the box, it's about the outside of the box.
iPod packaging is clean, well thought out, and almost spartan when compared to similar products from others. Where competitor X will have multiple font sizes and colors, huge blocks of text, splashes of varying color and style, and legal mumbo jumbo, the iPod box simply tells you what's inside in a few words and images. It stands out because it's not garish and overbearing, unlike everything else.
Which is what makes this video parody (alternate lower-quality link), in which Microsoft redesigns the iPod's box, so amazingly funny. Forget that it's even Microsoft being parodied; it could be nearly any of the other major players in the technology business. This spot is very well put together, and to me, it really demonstrates how very hard it must be to go simplistic and clean when everyone is probably pushing quite hard to "fill that empty space with something!"
And no, I don't normally post just links to other things, but this one is so well done, it really is worth watching!
Ever wondered about the various settings in the Font smoothing style pop-up of the Appearance System Preferences panel? Thanks to a recent crash, I was forced to revisit the font smoothing settings, which I literally hadn't looked at in years.
I found the results of my tests somehwat interesting, so I wrote them up for macworld.com.
I was playing around with Google Earth (a recent Pick of the Week over on macosxhints) tonight, when I stumbled across the very odd image you see here.
For those of you who have Google Earth, here's a location file that will take you right to the spot. It's the San Luis reservoir, located in California off of highway 152, between Highway 101 and I-5. (I used to drive this road often when making the trek from San Jose to Los Angeles.)
The oddity is--what's with the bottom third of the reservoir? Has it really frozen solid along an arrow-straight line? Has it been converted into salt flats? Some strange cover to prevent the satellites from seeing what's hiding in the lake?
If you zoom in using Google Earth, you can see that the odd fill color runs precisely along the edge of one particular 'piece' of the overall image, so it's clearly just a glitch in the satellite or the software that processes the images. It definitely caught my eye, though.
2,023,406,814 hours! Wow! By my calculations, that's roughly 84,308,617 days, or 230,824 years, give or take a half-year or so. I hope the dual dual-core Intel-based Pro desktops are released soon; it seems I really need a faster Mac!
In all seriousness, this archive actually expanded relatively rapidly. However, I think the structure of the archive really messed up StuffIt's estimating abilities. The archive was a 220MB file containing Italian scenery files for the X-Plane flight sim. After expansion, it contains about 1,350 files, spread across 74 folders. While that doesn't seem overly excessive to me, apparently it's enough to greatly confuse StuffIt!
I was frustrated after writing my Leap-A Q&A for Macworld yesterday, as I couldn't get Oompa Loompa to do what it was supposed to do--it wasn't infecting my files, and it wasn't sending itself out over iChat. So today, my friend and coworker Kirk McElhearn and I spent the better part of the day testing Oompa Loompa on a couple of controlled Macs. We wanted to figure out exactly what it did, or did not, do, and what to do about it if you found it on your machine.
You can read the results of our efforts in the article titled Digging deeper into the Leap-A malware. It took quite a while, but we think we finally figured out exactly how it works (and doesn't work), and offer some advice on removal. Among the more surprising findings was that it will not attempt to send itself out over Internet iChat, only Bonjour iChat. It also won't affect applications that are system-owned, only those that have been installed by a user (and are therefore user-owned). Both of these are why I wasn't seeing the behavior I expected to see yesterday. My test machine had only Apple's stock Tiger applications on it, and Kirk and I were testing with an Internet iChat.
I am now officially very sick of Leap-A, having spent probably 18 hours on it over the last two days. The short summary is that it's a bad piece of malware that could have been worse...but it's far from the self-propagating internet-spreading virus/worm that's been described on other sites. At the end of the day, it's really just a good reminder to be very careful about what you download and install on your Mac.
Have a nice weekend everyone!
-rob.