So sorry about sucking up bandwidth

It all started when I was trying to find some good Mac realted video Podcast. Being a long time twit.tv listener, I instantly turned to MacBreak. Then I saw the entry "MacBreak (HD)" on iTune. I told myself, cool, let me try the HD one and see how great video quality is. So I picked a few episodes, downloaded, and then a few more episode, and so on and so fore. By the time I was about to leave office, I almost have all the entries listed on iTune downloaded. That was when I realized that I already downloaded 7.8Gb of MacBreak content form iTune!

..............

On the plus side, the video quality is pretty awesome.

Now my Nokia 5300 talks to my Mac

I found a way to sync my Nokia 5300 with my Mac using iSync. I basically follow the instruction layout by this blog, and within minutes I have all my iCal calendar synced to my phone while the phone book was synced to the Address Book in the Mac. Couple of observation:

• I don't even need to have the Bluetooth dongle connected while the Mac is booting up. In fact I should NOT do it because the dongle was not being recognized if I leave it at the USB port while I boot up the machine. I have to unplug and plug back in again. So just plug the dongle it when you need to do wireless sync, as of most of the other USB devices.
• The iCal sync is pretty awesome because my iCal was synced to Google Calendar. So now I indirectly have my mobile phone synced to Google calendar.
• Now I have one more reason to do backup more frequently.

Too bad that there's simply not that many people calling me at all. Thus I actually don't see way a lot of values syncing my phone with my Mac. But I do think that there's value syncing my iPod Classic 80Gb to my Mac. Just wish that there's way to wirelessly sync my iPod with my Mac.

Very impressed by Garage Band 2008

I didn't realize how awesome the experiment was to play with Garage Band '08 on my Lenovo until today. There are several things that really impressed me:

* The latency of audio playback from my laptop's SoundMax sound chip is very low. I can totally foresee myself cranking some simply music out using just the laptop itself (with musical keyboard).
* The user interface is so intuitive. Everything just make sense when I use it to record music.
* There's not much learning curve on the application. Within today I already cranked out a few okay short tracks.
* The sampling and loops that comes with the application is very professional. Standard Apple quality.
* The application is powerful enough to create a decent work, yet not overwhelmed by features.
* I can use my MidiMan 2x2 with a cheesy MIDI keyboard to create some real work.

Bottomline: awesome.

Problem with 10.4.8

I was having some sort of wishful thinking that using MacOSX 10.4.8 on my Tablet PC may be allow me to achieve holy grill experience with Mac OSX. Specfically, I was hoping that the following will work after I put in 10.4.8:

• Tablet Digitizer
• My external USB based WiFi adapter

So I tried, and failed. Neither of them were being recognized. And by then I was not even bother to try Firewire Solo driver anymore for there's no point to try it afterall if I am not staying with 10.4.8.

So now I have restoring the Mac 10.5.1 from a saved partition. Thanks to Acronis True Image 10, I can switch between OSX without the need of manually reinstall tons of drivers and settings and apps.

Fun with Garage Band 2 and Safari 3.0.4

I tried out Garage Band 2 today and it was very fun.  I particularly enjoy the musical keyboard which turned my computer keyboard into a music keyboard.  This allows me to mess with music while my MIDI and music keyboard are away from me.

On the downside, I found out that the latest driver for Firewire Solo for Leopard has not been released yet.  Guess I need to wait for a while before I can really use it with Garage Band 2.

I have Firefox 3, Camario and Flock installed on my Mac, but it turns out that Safari 3 is the most stable browser among all.  Plus now it supports multiple tabs and spelling checker for everything I type.  So guess I will use Safari a bit more.

Running Windows in VMWare inside Mac OS X on a Lenovo laptop

It's kind of ironic that I was running a Windows XP OS within a VMWare Fusion virtual machine under Macintosh OSX on a Lenovo X60T Tablet PC.  

Ironic aside, the WinXP runs very well in VMWare Fusion 1.1 Build 62573.  I did find it, thought, that the VMWare OS I created on my desktop PC wasn't working on the Mac.  When I reference the disc file, the VMWare application just crashed and quit.  So I have to build a new OS from scratch on the Mac.  Also the virtual machine has to be in native Mac partition.  It can't be a FAT32 partition, which totally make sense because FAT32 can't handle huge file.

And you know the real reason why I want a WinXP on Mac?  It's because I want to find a way to remote desktop to my PC desktop, and there's no Windows remote desktop client for Mac OSX.  (I remember that there's was an old client that works on Mac OS, but has some serious problem here and there.

Also funny thing about running PC under Mac OSX is that the new Mac Space really works.  Like right now I have virtual space 3 running full screen WinXP, Space 2 running full screen VLC playing Touching Daisies Episode 3, and space 1 running Safari with multiple tab writing this blog.  Multitasking is fantastic.

Folder Sync in Mac OSX

I enjoy using Adium on my Mac OSX, but I also need to find a way to sync and thus back up files from my MacOSX on my laptop to my desktop. So I tried to use a tool called iFolder 3, but so far I have problem even getting it running.

Adium X 1.2.1 solved Yahoo problem

A while ago I was having problem using Adium X 1.2 with my Yahoo account since I changed the screen name.  The problem has been fixed in 1.2.1 .  So I am a happy camper again.

By the way iTune sharing works great on audio (MP3), but not so great on video.  Oh well.