Platform Peace

A few days ago, the rumors of an Apple Tablet PC escalated due to a report / rumor that Asus is helping Apple build a tablet device.  I am a big fan of the Tablet PC concept.  I owned an Toshiba M200 for several years and really liked it.  However, I am still waiting for [...]

Besides VMWare Fusion and Parallels, Quicksilver was probably the foremost application that got me interested in buying a Mac.  I kept hearing great things about it from many different sources.  I have always been a big command line user and prefer using the keyboard as much as possible so any application that helps minimize mouse [...]

So I knew when I was buying my MacBook Pro that I was taking a risk of having to pay full price for Leopard.  At the time, the release date had not been confirmed and there were no announcements (at least that I was aware of) about upgrade pricing.  Thankfully, I timed it right and [...]

Sometimes I need to know the IP address of a specific Windows computer on my local network.  OS X doesn’t appear to automatically resolve a NetBIOS name to an IP address when using the ping command from the Terminal.  So, instead, you can use nmblookup. <!– Code highlighting produced by Actipro CodeHighlighter (freeware) http://www.CodeHighlighter.com/ –>ryan@Augustus~$ [...]

So, what virtualization software should you use to run Windows simultaneously on Mac OS X?  Well, the good news is that the two primary choices, Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion, are both excellent options and the choice really just comes down to personal preference and your intended usage. There are several reviews and comparisons you [...]

Growl is a notification system. It provides a consistent framework that various applications can use for notification purposes. For example, Adium leverages Growl for its notifications. Plugins can be created for applications that don’t directly support Growl. GrowlTunes, for instances, can be used to show notifications for the currently playing item in iTunes. There are [...]

Adium is a free cross-protocol instant messaging application. It supports AIM, MSN, GTalk, Jabber, and others. It has all the features you would expect in an IM application and a great, customizable interface. There are also a ton of extras you can download to customize it even further. If you are like me, the first [...]

I purchased the 15-inch 2.4 GHz MacBoook Pro.  This utilizes Intel’s Santa Rosa platform which enables OS X to address up to 4 GBs of RAM.  Since running virtual machines requires lots of RAM, I decided to manually upgrade the RAM to the maximum.  Because of Apple’s outrageously priced 4 GB upgrade (+$700),  I purchased [...]

I am a longtime Windows power user who just recently purchased a MacBook Pro.  This will not be a “switcher” blog as I have no intention of abandoning Windows which, believe it or not, I really like.  Instead I will attempt to cover my experiences running OS X and Windows at the same time on [...]