Category Archives: Mac Stuff - Page 5

The New MacBook Pro is Awesome!

Posted by on November 6, 2008 2 comments

AKA: Yet another reason to love Apple, Inc.

After experiencing months of crippling trouble with the video card in my 2.4GHz MacBook Pro laptop (resulting in multiple logic board replacements, LCD screen replacements, etc.), I was generously given a replacement laptop from Apple. Yes, a full replacement. Stunning level of customer service and tech support – clearly above and beyond the norm.

Here’s the new machine. So nice! This new design and the new specs are so far advanced that I look back to my “old” MacBook Pro with a sense of analog nostalgia.

P.S. By way of Google, I found this image of the new logic board for the latest MacBook Pro. Pretty crazy shape!

P.P.S. The only bummer about getting a replacement computer from Apple is that one’s Apple Care warranty doesn’t follow to the new machine. I’ll have to buy another extended warranty asap. It’s a minor factor, but still – darn.

How I Upgraded From Apple TV and Put $90 in My Pocket

Posted by on August 3, 2008 7 comments

The very day the Apple TV was available in Apple stores, I picked one up. I reviewed it, even made a video about it (which wound up on some big websites). I loved the Apple TV madly. There were a few flaws – like no on/off switch, heat problems and no native capability to watch AVI files – but those little flaws were overshadowed by the wonder and joy of having home videos, movies and TV shows streaming from my computer to my HDTV.

Fast forward a year or so, and you’d see me sitting at my computer, cursing the task of converting AVI files to Apple TV friendly format so I could watch important videos on my TV instead of my little MacBook Pro screen. Curses, wasted CPU time and wasted disk space from double files… that was the price I had to pay for the pleasure of watching AVI video content. Sometimes I would spend as much time converting a video as I would spend watching it. Bah.

A few days ago, I stopped by Best Buy (I’m slightly embarrassed admitting that I went to that store) and found a very nice Pioneer DV-410V DVD player with a little USB input on the front of it. The DVD player handles DVDs and DivX videos among other formats. It also has an HDMI port for connecting video and audio to my HDTV in one tiny cable.

I set up the DVD player and popped in a micro USB flash drive loaded with a few of my favorite AVI videos and voila! it played the video cleaner and better than the Apple TV ever did! Imagine my surprise! A weight was lifted off my shoulders – the world seemed bright and warm. No more wasted time converting files. No need to stream video. No need to keep my MacBook Pro turned on while I watch videos. Sure, I lost the ability to rent movies from the iTunes store directly from the Apple TV, but I had only done that a couple times in 18 months, so it’s hardly a sacrifice.

Now I can quickly load a dozen or more AVI files on a stamp-sized USB drive and watch amazing quality videos. Buh-bye Apple TV – hello HDTV sneaker net!

Some people may argue that the DVD USB option is lower tech and doesn’t really constitute an “upgrade”. In my opinion, anything that produces remarkably better video, faster prep time, fewer steps, less hassle, consumes less electricity and allows more free time for enjoying video… well, that is truly an upgrade; the best kind of upgrade.

If you’ve never tried one of those DVD players with an internal USB reader, you absolutely MUST. It’s awesome.

P.S. As for the $90 in my pocket, I promptly sold the Apple TV and had $90 left over after the cost of the new DVD/USB player. Nice.

P.P.S. The aforementioned $90 lasted about 12 minutes as I bought another cool gadget that I absolutely had to have. C’est la vie.

Pulling Data From an Old .Mac Backup 3 backup.sparseimage File

Posted by on July 22, 2008 2 comments

Looking to recover data from an old .Mac “Backup 3” archive? I had to do that earlier today and, after having canceled my .Mac service over 2 years ago, I didn’t have the old “Backup 3″ app. Not that it would have worked – it requires an active .Mac account to validate against before running.

The new MobileMe service doesn’t include Backup 3. Time Machine doesn’t read/open individual files. Google searches resulted in various complex ways to retrieve data from the backup.sparseimage files that Backup 3 produced. I called Apple support to get help figuring this out. After being put on hold a number of times and having to re-explain the situation again and again, my support rep put me on speaker phone with his supervisor. That supervisor suggested the simplest of simple solutions. Double click the backup.sparseimage file that Backup 3 had created.

Derr. Way too simple. Of course, the backup.sparseimage file just opened up like a DMG file would – as a separate volume (like a drive). I could browse all the folders and files that had been backed up in 2006, drag & drop to my desktop and another external drive as needed. Simple solution.

So, if you have an old .Mac Backup 3 archive that you want to grab data from, and if you are using OS X 10.5 Leopard, just open the old Backup 3 folders until you see “backup.sparseimage” and give it a quick double click. C’est tout. That’s it.

Granted, if your backup.sparseimage is corrupt, double clicking won’t help a whole lot. But for those ex-.Mac users who have stable backups, this is a nice revelation.