Sat 19 Jul 2008
Macworld has a column, A look at Sun’s VirtualBox, with a video about installing and using VirtualBox on a Mac. I think it is exciting that a free open source solution like VirtualBox can be used to run Windows on top of Mac OS X (though in this video it was used for running OpenSolaris). One has to believe this is a big issue for Parallels and Fusion.
Sat 19 Jul 2008
Macworld has a series of articles that I found helpful on maintaining your mac.
Perhaps the most important component to test is RAM… Thankfully, it’s not difficult to do so, although a comprehensive test can take a while. Apple Hardware Test, included on the Mac OS X Install disc that comes with all recent Macs, has an Extended Testing option that tests your RAM.
Myth #2: “You need to run the Unix maintenance scripts.”
You may have heard about a collection of magical Unix maintenance scripts that OS X is supposed to run automatically. The story goes that because these scripts are scheduled to run in the middle of the night, putting your Mac to sleep or shutting it down prevents them from running—so you need to do so manually…An easy way to run the scripts manually is by using Mike Vande Ven Jr.’s free Maintidget 1.3, a Dashboard widget that shows you the last time each script was run and lets you manually run one or all with a single click. There are also innumerable tweaking utilities that provide similar functionality
Thu 10 Jan 2008
On November 23rd I ordered my first Mac laptop since my Powerbook in grad school, a white Macbook. 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. So far I’ve been reasonably impressed but one thing I wanted is for the menu bar to display the full date. It always bothered me that you can’t do this on Windows w/o third party applications.Fortunately on Mac OS X there is somewhat of a hack to do this, How To: Display Date in OS X Menu Bar.The format I ended up choosing is:Thu Jan 10 7:07 PMwhich I think is a little cleaner than the one used in the aforementioned article.Update: As of March 19, 2008, this cute hack no longer seems to work. Seems like one of the Mac OS X updates changed the way the date is displayed in the OS X menu bar. Now my date looks like this:Wed 9:23 AM PDT