Digital Impulses

Mac Mini gets an Ethernet cable

In a move I should have done a long, long time ago, this evening I bought a 15-foot Ethernet calbe and connected my Mac Mini DIRECTLY to my Linksys N Router.

Seeing as to how this is the machine I seem to spend most of my time at home and seeing as to how I manage all of my music, images and iPhone from here, having this machine using Wireless to connect to my router and thereby the Internet made very little sense.

Already I am seeing improved snappiness when accessing certain web pages and while downloading podcasts via iTunes.

Well, what's done is done and now I have the fastest connection possible attached to my main mac.

Better late than never, as they say.

Free, I am Free!, At last!

Nice!

This evening after work I stopped by my local AT&T store and picked up a wireless card for my work laptop. 

The card I decided to go with is the AT&T USBConnect 881.  The card was $174.95 (Incld. $24.95 tax) but I will get $100 back via a mail-in rebate.  Also, my company has a corporate discount program, so I will be getting a discount off of the monthly plan that offers unlimited data.

This is a BIG deal, as it allows me the COMPLETE FREEDOM to work from WHEREVER I WANT.  Having been granted the  authorization to work from home or anywhere else by my boss last week in Colorado, this was the last piece of the puzzle I needed to be completely untethered from the office.

For those who know me, this is pretty heady stuff, as I now have the ability to work from wherever I like, whenever I like.  Mom's, my office, my bedroom, a park, Starbucks, Barnes and Noble... the possibilities are endless.  The mind boggles.  Well.  My mind boggles.

Free. Damn, that's cool.

Instaling Mac OS X Leopard (10.5)

This afternoon, after "The Interview", I decided to dedicate a few hours to installing Mac OS X Leopard.  Unfortunately, seeing as to the problems I had with iPhoto '08 earlier this year, I was very hesitant to start the upgrade without making absolutely sure I had backed up completely.

After much indecision and research of Mac backup programs, I just made sure that my iPhoto and iTunes library were indeed safe on my external hard drive and just plunged ahead with the default 'Upgrade Install'.

All in all, although it took a long time (over 90 minutes), the install itself was utterly painless.  I booted with the Leopard DVD, clicked a couple of buttons, answered a few questions and let the install do it's thing.

I returned to my Mac Mini about an hour and a half after it started the install and I was presented with a beautiful Leopard desktop, ready for me to explore and test.

I spent the next few hours going through the new features and making sure my hard disk(s) and the data thereon had survived intact and it had.  Everything was working as it should and nothing was out of the ordinary.  The install completed seamlessly and with nary a hiccup.

Score one for Apple in my book.

A trip to the Manhattan Beach Apple Store: Buying Leoaprd OS X 10.5

Just got back from picking up a copy of Leopard OS X 10.5 from the Apple Store in Manhattan Village Mall.  I decided to take the plunge on some very positive reviews from Leo Laporte on the TWiT Netcast network.

I bought the single-user, $129.00 copy and will be installing it either tomorrow or the day after, with Thursday being most likely, as tomorrow is Halloween and I will be going trick-or-treating with the kids and my siblings after work.

I am really looking forward to putting Leopard through it's paces.

Installing 2GB of RAM on my Mac Mini

On Monday afternoon after work, I drove up to my house just as the UPS delivery guy was getting in his truck to leave after delivering the 2 GB of RAM that I bad bought from Crucial.com.

So today, after breakfast with my son at IHOP, I came home and decided to dedicate some time to installing the RAM into my Mac Mini. I carefully looked up some of the tutorials on-line and finally settled on one that seemed to be fairly recent and had plenty of pictures.

It took about 20 minutes and in the end, was not as painful as I had imagined it.  I did end up breaking a couple of tabs on one of the sides of the Mini, but after everything was said and done, the Mini seemed to re-assemble without too much of a problem.

The whole process consists of about 10 steps, roughly outlined as follows:

1. Use thin paint scraping spatulas from Home Depot to coax the cover off of the Mac after flipping it over.
2. Locate and remove the Airport Wireless antenna from one of the corners.
3. Locate and remove 4 screws, one from each corner.
4. Unplug a very tine cable from one of the side of the Mini, the side that has the giant watch battery on it.  The small cable is located to the right of the watch battery.
5. After the screws are removed, lift the chassis off of the Mini to expose the RAM slots.
6. Remove the existing RAM by pushing on the clips.
7. Insert the new RAM.
8. Replace the Mini chassis.
9. Re-connect the small cable.
10. Replace the 4 screws.
11. Replace the Airport Wireless Antenna.
12. Connect the Mini back up, boot, check RAM quantity by going to "About this Mac" on the Finder menu. you should see your new amount of RAM listed here. 
    
    If all is well, then you can:
    
13. Disconnect all of the cables.
14. Replace the cover on the Mini.
15. Reconnect everything and enjoy your new RAM!

Some of the steps take some patience, but if you take your time and are careful, it should all proceed normally without too much trouble.

After the RAM surgery, I played around around with the Mini for a while, putting it through its paces.  Man, it is, understandably MUCH smoother.  This is an upgrade I should have done a while ago.

RAM Upgrade kit for my Mac Mini

So, I just went to Crucial.com and purchased a 2GB RAM upgrade kit for my Mac Mini for a very reasonable $59.99.  With tax and expedited (2 business day shipping for $6.99), the total came to $71.39.

I had no idea RAM was so inexpensive. If I did, I would have upgraded the RAM on my Mac Mini months and months ago and avoided the frustration of getting the dreaded "Spinning Beach Ball Of Death" whenever I launch more than 1 or 2 apps and try to switch between them by tapping Cmd-Tab on the keyboard.

Regardless, I took the plunge and bought the RAM in anticipation of the coming of Leopard OS 10.5 which will be released by Apple tomorrow night at 6:00 P.M.

I think I am going to go ahead and follow one of the on-line Mac Mini RAM upgrade tutorials and do the RAM install myself rather than taking it into an Apple store and having one of the Apple Geniuses do it for me and paying through the nose for it

New Keyboard and Mouse for my Mac Mini

I just finished installing the Microsoft Wireless Laser Desktop for the Mac that I purchased earlier today with the gift cards that I got from my mom and sister for my birthday.

I drove to the Apple store in Manhattan Beach after work and after some looking around, I determined that this keyboard and mouse combo was just what I needed, since I have really never liked the "Mighty Mouse" that I got with my Mac Mini last December.

I can tell right away that I am going to be much, much happier and productive with this new optical mouse than I was with the Apple Mighty Mouse.

I have to admit that I found myself rolling over to my Windows machine whenever a long session of typing or web surfing was called for because I simply did not look forward to navigating with Apple's mouse.  I should have made this move a long time ago.

10 months of being uncomfortable on my Mac was retarded.  Now I know for next time.

Dead Sunday and fighting the very last of the Great Cold of 2007

Ugh.

Aside from adding the X-Box 360 Elite that we purchased on Thursday to our home network (and thereby allowing the sharing of all media from any of our computers), I walked over to Piggie's for breakfast, watched a little football and then just lazed around the house and my room, trying to get rid of the stupid cough that is just lingering and lingering.

Most of the afternoon and evening were spent in my office, working on my computers and getting caught up on a bunch of Podcasts that I had fallen behind on.  It's a great life if you don't weaken.

iPhoto '08 photo library corrupted

So this evening, after stopping by Best Buy to pick up a sandisk Multicard reader, I took the time to install it correctly and then I made a MONUMENTAL GAFFE:  In trying to free up a USB Port on my Mac Mini to plug the card reader into, I UNPLUGGED my External Seagate 320 GB hard drive that is home to my iPhoto library. With iPhoto '08 OPEN.

Not good.

Upon restarting my Mac after all of the iLife 08 patches had DL'ed and been installed, iPhoto 08 presented me with the dreaded "gray box with the dotted lines outline" where most of my pictures used to be displayed.

After a bit of Googling this problem, I learned from the Mac Observer that you can hold down "command-option" and double-click the iPhoto 08 icon.  This will result in iPhoto '08 launching with a dialog box that prompts you to select a number of different rebuild and repair options for your thumbnails and your photo library.

Unfortunately for me, none of these options worked for me and nothing I did brought my images back into iPhoto.  Now the images appear to still be on the external Seagate, so I should be able to ferret them out and get them re-imported into iPhoto '08.  It was nearing 10:30 P.M. last nigt when I gave up the ghost and decided to call it a night and tackle the issue again tomorrow evening after work.

We will see how I fare in my first iPhoto '08 disaster.

Awesome Father's day

Neato.

Started off by a wonderful, friction-free breakfast with the family.  Before breakfast, my son and I stopped by the bakery to see his mom, and also ran into my mom there. 

Ritz Camera is AWESOME
After the bakery visit, we stopped by Ritz Camera in Manhattan Beach, where I picked up a spare battery for my camera and my son bought me the Quantray  Yellow, Orange and Warm filters for my Nikon D40 digital SLR camera.

Why the need for a spare battery?  Well, like a big dummy, I had left my camera on the entire day before and drained the battery.  So, of course, the new battery I bought was also not charged. 

In a brilliant fit of wonderful customer service, the lady behind the counter at Ritz offered to let me borrow the (charged) battery in the floor model Nikon D40.  So, I simply traded batteries with her and we agreed that I would just come by the store again after breakfast and swap batteries with her.

The Ritz Camera store in Manhattan Beach, CA at the intersection of Rosecrans and Aviation simply rocks.  If you are ever in the South Bay in Southern California and need anything in emergency photographic equipment, stop by and see Dan Purdy or anyone else there.  Highly Recommended

More CONCACAF Soccer
After breakfast, we stopped by Ritz again and swapped camera batteries. We then went home to watch Mexico beat Costa Rica in an exciting match in which Mexico prevailed 1-0, thereby earning a spot in the semi-finals  against Guadalupe, who later in the day beat  Honduras  2-1.

Seagate MyBook 320GB Hard Disk for my Mac Mini
Right after the match, I took a quick ride over to Best Buy to get myself a Father's Day gift of a Seagate 320GB External 'Essential MyBook' hard drive for $89.99. This was intended to hang off the back of my Mac Mini, whose internal puny 60GB hard disk had gotten full to capacity over the weekend when I transferred my Dodger Stadium images into my iPhoto library.

Watching The Departed
After the Soccer match and my trip to Best Buy, my son and I went to my room to watch The Departed, 2007 Oscar winner for Best Movie and Best Director for Martin Scorsese.  Although a bit long and somewhat confusing, the movie once again proved to be ultimately satisfying to see again.  My son seemed to enjoy it very much also.

Screwed by iTunes
After watching The Departed, I retired into my office until well after 11:00 P.M. to install my new external hard drive on my Mac Mini.  What took place over the next 4 hours is something worthy of a post in and of itself. Grizzly is one way to put it, I think.

Thus concluded one of the funnest, most satisfying Father's Days I can remember having in a long, long time.