digital guerrilla » computers

os x vs. windows: it’s the little things

jason — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 20:00:24 +0000

Today while loading updates in XP and OS X I came across one of those little features that reminds me why I prefer the latter. Both are laptops (MacBook Pros in fact) and both were running off battery power when I started the updates.

I had 14 updates to load in OS X, including the 10.5.8 update. Just before it started downloading a prompt appeared advising me that I wasn’t connected to a power supply. It gave me the option to continue (with or without a power supply) or cancel. I told it to continue and the downloading began.

On the Windows machine I just had Service Pack 3 to install. It also popped up a notice that I didn’t have a power cord attached. However it did this after I had already downloaded the update and right before the actual install. I connected a power cord then clicked Ok (the only option). I assumed it would check again, see it now had power and continue. Silly me. It instead declared that the install had failed and I had to start the install all over again.

I’m not one who despises Windows and refuses to use it. In fact Windows 7 is the main OS I use on my eee (though I also have Ubuntu and OS X installed). It’s the little features like this one though that ensure my heart will always belong to OS X.

have you tried turning it off and on again?

jason — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 06:12:32 +0000

I don’t like to talk about my job here, but…

(via Gear Factor)

gorecto

jason — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 05:13:30 +0000

I keep up with the world via Google Reader (as you may have discovered when I posted a link to my shared items in the last post). I also store bookmarks on del.icio.us. So I was quite excited (in a geeky sort of way to which I will only admit here where few will see it) a while back to discover that Bill Burcham had written up “a Google Reader Del.icio.us Tagging bookmarklet — a Gordita” which allows one to bookmark any post or article from inside of Reader. (A bookmarklet, for those of you who don’t know looks like any other bookmark in your browser, but is actually a bit of Javascript that does something cool. Or maybe something annoying, but the cool ones are better.)

As I’m also planning to breath a bit more life into this blog, I decided I needed a bookmarklet that would work similarly only sending the info to that wonderful blogging software, ecto instead of del.icio.us. While ecto provides it’s own handy “ectoize” link, using that would just grab Google Reader, not whatever bit of brilliance I was reading inside of it. As I am far too confident in my coding ability (see, I can even speak of it with a straight face) (well, of course you can’t see because I’m too lazy to include a picture, but if I did…), I dove into those two jungles of javascript, hacked, slashed, and returned with what I refer to as gorecto. Nothing too amazing, but if you also use Google Reader and ecto, hopefully it will be of some help. (Thanks to Bill for Gordita and Adriaan Tijsseling for ecto!)

taking the high(land) road

jason — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 10:53:29 +0000

So the night of that storm, my internet connection went down. Next day, still down and I was leaving for the weekend for the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games so I didn’t get around to getting it fixed until today. Realized in the interim though how much of my contact with the outside world has become internet based (news, weather, email, blogs, etc.).As for the highland games, I’ll be posting an entry about them soon (no seriously, I wrote most of it while I was there so I just have to revise it a tad). I will say overall that these particular games felt like DragonCon only with all of the geek interests replaced with Scottish ones.

So why am I posting this somewhat non-entry? Because I’ve recently fallen for a new photo website, zooomr and they have offered up free “pro” memberships for any bloggers. While flickr still wins in the “posting from my phone” category (the last time I tried posting to zooomr from my phone the photo never showed up), the one feature that hooked me is the ability to “geotag” your photos, linking them to a specific place. So if you looked at all of my highland games photos, you can actually see on a Google map where they were taken and check for any other photos geotagged as being nearby. I’m not yet ready to really pimp the site, but once I get a chance to kick the tires on the new version launching Friday, I may start talking it up to everyone the way I’ve been trying to push 30boxes (go and use it, your life will thank you).

Next up though will be my thoughts on what it was like to be camped literally five feet from where the pipers and drummers would play after the day’s events were over.

os x virus followup

jason — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 18:55:18 +0000

Just a quick followup to to my last post. I’d advise anyone running OS X to go download and install the free anti-virus software, ClamXav. Viruses and such beasties aren’t really as much of a threat (and in fact the one out this week marks the first one to show up in the wild), but since that software’s free, stable, and reliable, won’t hurt to have it. And like all of the non-free anti-virus programs out there, it has now been updated to detect this new virus.

The day after news about the Oompa Loompa worm/virus/trojan/gunkything hit, a proof of concept worm was announced by security software company F-Secure (actually the first report I read said they had created it, but I’ve seen no confirmation of that so that may have been just an error). Of course, to get this one you would have to have a Mac with bluetooth, bluetooth would have to be on, you would have to be within the limited (30 feet or less) range of an infected Mac with Bluetooth, would have to be running an OS version earlier than 10.3.9 (the final release of Panther) or 10.4.1 (the current version is 10.4.5), and would have to accept three sudden bluetooth file transfers. So yes, even if that one made it out into the wild, it probably wouldn’t get every far.

So if you’re on a Mac, make sure you run Software Update once a month or so (it’s the second option down in the Apple menu) and go download and install ClamXav.

(And as may be obvious from the last several posts, this blog is becoming more “blog-like”
due in large part to my need to get into the habit of writing more.)

os x malware in the wild

jason — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 14:25:49 +0000

Those lazy black hat hackers. OS X has has been around for five (or is it six) years and now they finally release a trojan for it. Short version, avoid files named “latestpics” or “latestpics.tgz”. If you use iChat and someone on your list sends you that file, let them know they’ve been infected and send them to the link listed below.

Full details can be found here

(Yes, I know all about the marketshare argument for why OS X hasn’t been attacked full bore yet, but consider that exploits have been released for Firefox flaws and only recently has it’s marketshare gone higher than Apple’s and it’s been around for a lot less time in it’s present form. So yes, that’s part of the story, but not the whole story.)

(Yes, I also know all about the “opener” trojan that got bandied around a year ago or so, but it never got past proof of concept stage so it doesn’t count.)