The Adventures of a Digital Sensei
I am throwing out my Apple 9600 Power PC. I am amazed that it still boots up after 17 years. This machine got me through my graduate school digital media program. When I bought it the system had a “huge” 9GB SCSI hard drive and 1.5GB of ram. At the time is was a beast. Now before I tossed it I was able to back it up with a small 8GB Flash drive over a first generation Continue reading “Old Apples don’t die, they multiply!”
I am upgrading the standard hard drive in my 2007 17in MacBook Pro to a solid state drive (SSD). “Winona” has been showing her age in recently years and I wanted to spruce her up a little bit. And yes, I name my computer equipment (shout out to all of those Farscape fans out there).
The ram in “Winona” was already maxed out so the best bang for the buck upgrade in terms of price and performance was a solid state drive upgrade. Now that I have more leeway in my research and profession endeavors after receiving tenure, I am planning on doing more work with Apple related programs such as iBook Author, Adobe DPS, and xCode to develop interactive teaching applications for the students in the programs that I oversee. It will help to have a decent backup machine for basic tasks, and baring Apple Continue reading “New Year Technology project: 2007 MacBook Pro Upgrade”
The new Mac Mini I bought last Christmas is finally hooked up and added to the network. I waited because I wanted to use it in a shared dual monitor configuration with my custom built Windows system. I will be leveraging the quad core i7 Mac Mini with 16gb of ram more in the coming weeks. Because while I am more than capable of building and maintaining a Windows/Linux DIY desktop, I don’t want to spend time dealing with conflicting dll files, viruses, and system corruptions when I should be building something creative. So now I have been using the Mac Mini over the past few days and the only thought going through my mind is why in the hell did I wait so long to hook it up.
The Mac Mini can’t play games for crap because of the under powered graphics card, but everything else is great. The system is Continue reading “I shall call him…… Mini Me.”
I hate having to spend time troubleshooting system problems when I need to be working on projects. I have some type of system corruption on my PC desktop so now I have spend hours either repairing (which rarely works) or reinstalling the OS. I really hate windows right now. I have stayed away from Windows 8 precisely because of the problems with it. While it isn’t as bad as the infamous Windows Vista, it is still pretty bad. Thus when I built my newest desktop I decided to stay with Windows 7. But even Windows 7 is still Windows.
So I spent the better part of the last two days troubleshooting a problem on my PC only to find out that there was a minor glitch in the system that caused a process to over consume memory. The process was spawned as the Windows 7 OS tried to generate thumbnail previews for the mp4 movie files in my library. I disabled the thumbnail process and replaced it with a third party freeware app to generate the previews and it fixed one of the major problems in about two minutes. My system is still only able to use half of the memory in the machine, but it is a start. Oh, did I mention that I am learning to hate Windows again.
The glitch had the system trying to generate the thumbnail previews until it got stuck in a loop. The loop caused the system to continue Continue reading “I got 99 problems and this glitch is one!”
Since we got back from overseas the kids have been bugging me to get them new computers for their rooms. They still were using an old eMachines PC that I had given them back when they shared a room together. That unit had seen better days and the kids had recently taken to co-opting my desktop for their gaming and homework. I felt that I had to assert myself and put a stop to that practice since it was starting to seriously cut into my World of Warcraft time.
The kids had fallen in love with my MacBook Pro laptop, Winona, over the summer and kept hinting at me to get them Apples. Because they now had separate rooms, they of course wanted separate machines. Since the new iMacs and Macbooks start at about 1100 dollars, I decided that I was going to have to search around and buy them used or refurbished if the kids were gonna get their wish. Continue reading “Used Macs: eBay to da’ rescue”
Okay….with the family away for a week at horseback riding camp I finally was gonna get a few days to myself to work on my laptop computer undisturbed. I had all my training manuals and tutorials laid out so that I could begin Continue reading “Always buy the Applecare!!”