Addition to the family
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m proud to introduce the 15-inch MacBook Pro to the family. I was slightly embarrassed while walking out of the Apple store whilst everyone in the store, including customers, applauded as if I was Steve Jobs himself at one of his Keynotes.
Half-Life 2 on Mac
I can’t express how much I’m in love with the recent release of Steam on Mac. Portal and Half-Life 2 look pretty sweet and I can’t wait for Counter-Strike: Source.
Resize a disk image
I was struggling to resize a disk image in Mac OS X and I stumbled across this post.
hdiutil resize -size xx{m or g} filename.dmg
Example: hdiutil resize -size 1g mydiskimage.dmg
Stattoo from Panic
First of all, Happy New Year! I’m looking forward to 2010 as I feel a stronger shift in my life is about to happen. I’m half way through my graduate role at the Department of Communities (formerly Department of Housing due to machinery-of-government changes). I have met and grown into a dedicated team and will be taking on a lot of work in the near future.
As for New Year’s Eve, I slept right through it due to a massive headache.
Anyway, getting on to the subject. I’ve come across a little app called Stattoo by Panic for the Mac OS X. It allows you to place certain status icons such as time, weather, hard drive capacity, iTunes current song and etc right on the Mac OS X desktop. At a price tag of US$12.95, it is well designed but not perfect. It does seem to have a couple of small bugs (icons disappear when shifting them into different places). Also, I would like the Mail capsule to display latest email first rather than last however, there seems to be no way to change this.
Resize an off-screen window
Tip of the day: To resize/reset an application window in Mac OS X, hold down the Option key while clicking on the Zoom button (Green circle button).
MacBook kernel panic
My unibody MacBook has crashed on several occasions for no freaking reason whatsoever! The laptop was just sitting there running Mail and Adium and then goes into a kernel panic. Not happy Jen!
iPhone OS 3.0 is a piece of s***
The long anticipated iPhone OS 3.0 has arrived. However, to my disappointment the update is quite buggy, forcing a couple of native apps to crash occasionally. MMS still does not work on the iPhone. It kept producing “Message send failure”. I called up Optus technical support but they couldn’t find what the problem is and now I have to take my iPhone into a store to look at the possibility of a defective phone.
I’m really beginning to dislike the iPhone.
EDIT: 25/06/09
I went into the Optus store at Australia Fair and after many trial and error, the sales rep called Optus technical support and after many tweaking (supposedly the MMS profile was changed on their end), MMS finally works!
PolarClock
Here’s something cool. PolarClock is a cool screensaver for Windows and Mac. There is also a version for the iPhone and dashboard widget.
How to take screenshots in Mac OS X
I’m using my MacBook as my primary computer now after hooking it up to my 26″ widescreen monitor with external keyboard and mouse. One of the “issues” I came across is taking screenshots on my MacBook. After some digging I found this article explaining the various keyboard shortcuts used in Mac OS X.
Command+Shift+3 to capture the entire screen.
Command+Shift+4 to capture a portion of the screen. If you want to capture a specific application window, press the spacebar to change the cursor to a camera icon, then click on the desired application window.
MacBook in Closed Clamshell mode (display closed) with an external display
Today I got the wired keyboard with numpad and Mini DisplayPort to VGA adaptor for my MacBook. Hooked it up with my 26″ widescreen monitor and was scratching my head on how to get the external display to work when the MacBook lid is closed. Then I came across this article regarding the Closed Clamshell mode.
Note: I had some trouble with it and then came to realise that this only works if the power adaptor is plugged in. Without the power adaptor, the external display will keep on “falling asleep” after a few seconds no matter how many times you try to wake it up.