Today I was stranded at home, and my cable was severely degraded, unusable in fact. So I just bit the bullet and went to Sprint and bought an ex720 WWAN card, since it sounds workable on OSX.
I’m online on it right now. And it’s impressivley fast. 1.2Mbps down, 567Kbps up.
It’s pretty simple to get going with it, although the one annoying step in the process is the activation application has to be run in Windows XP. So you boot Bootcamp, install the drivers from CD, install the activation application from CD, enter in the card details, connect, done. Then stay in Windows, re-connect with the card, it auto-downloads new firmware and prompts you to update the card, do so, done. Reboot into OS X, insert card, and you’ll be online momentarily. Kinda nice.
Next to do are to work out why PPTP VPN doesn’t work over connection in OS X (it works in Windows) and then figure out how to access the built in GPS.
UPDATE: PPTP VPN working when routing table on OS X fixed.
I don’t know why, but I thought it would be fun to write something that would take a snapshot with my MacbookPro’s built in iSight, then compile all the pics from the day into a timelapse movie. I was preparing to write this all myself, but then I found that someone had already written each piece of this. I have cobbled them together into a hack called MyDayInPix.
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Just in case you haven’t seen this new right click driver for your 15″ MBP, try this. It will enable double-touch trackpad right click. Works very well. Also, going on a long flight and need 5 hours of battery time?
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Yep, thats right. My previous post mentioned the random keyboard and trackpad death that was happening with my 1st one. It happened again a few days ago and I called Apple Support. Now this is where you have to be quite forceful with these people: If I had let Mr Tech have his way we would have rebooted the MBp and then started “troubleshooting” this problem. Cut a long story short, I spoke to a manager and explained this was random, would not be easily detected should I send the thing in for repairs and would generally make everyone miserable. So he suggested going back to the AppleShop and trying to have them swap it out. Luckily I found a helpful manager there and she did so. So now I have a brand new one and the migration of my backed up data and apps from the original machine was as easy as drag and drop. Sweet.
I finally cracked. Last week I bought one of the first 1.83Ghz Macbook Pros to come into the Apple Store at King of Prussia. Possibly the 3rd one they sold. This blog entry is all about switching to a Mac from Linux as my primary platform. I have a Macmini but I use my Linux laptops all day so they are my primary platform. OK, I hear you saying I should change my domain name. No. Linux has been my friend for almost 10 years now. I still run Linux on everything but my Macbook Pro and my Mac Mini. Maybe I’ll try that someday. Read on for my reviews, suggestions, impressions and the story of a UNIX geek switch.
Experience of buying it: Man, that is a large chunk of change to hand over in one shot. Turns out my bank had a default daily limit on my account and so I had to call them and send a fax from the mall to change the limit. Luckily another guy in the store was doing the exact same thing and told me what to do. But the MBPs were flying out of the shop as they were the very first 1.83s in stock. I had 10 minutes to sort out my bank or they would sell it to someone else. Pressure, baby.
Unboxing: Like every Apple product, you can feel the love in the packaging. Seems like they were sad to see the thing leave the factory. Beautifully boxed, made me feel bad opening it up.
Initial use: This is where I love the Mac platform. I hooked up my Mac mini with Firewire, did a migration and most of my apps and data just landed on my new MBP. The apps that didnt get copied for some reason, I just copy and pasted in binary over Bounjour. Now thats ease of use. I love that. In minutes I was iChatAV-ing with a friend in Maryland. Lovely.
Initial speed impressions: The little documented Spotlight indexing is quite a hit on the machine. I was worried it was slow for the first few days, but turns out that after Spotlight sorted itself out this thing is very responsive. I only have 512MB of RAM (more arriving today) and with Entourage, iTunes, Safari and Textmate open I can feel the RAM ceiling. I hope the extra 512 sorts this out.
PROBLEMS: I have had a weird issue where the keyboard dies. Totally dead, not even the Caps Lock light will turn on. I have Apple Care and have logged this issue with them but need to wait for it to happen again before calling them up again. I was initially determined to just get a new one from them, but I’ll give them one chance on this and wait for it to happen again and then call them up.
