Horses are terrible people

In trying to diagnose why my systems feeling sluggish today I ran across this:

which begs the question of why these minor apps, which I rarely use, are using so much memory. Then I found iTunes was eating a lot of virtual memory so I restarted it. This is a fresly started iTunes:

What the heck?

I ditched the new keyboard in favor of the old one.

Back to ->

The new iMac arrived yesterday, it's quite a nice machine. I have the previous generation iMac at my office with similar specs and the most noticeable difference is the glossy screen. Colors seem richer and the screen just pops. I've only scraped the surface of the new iLife and iWork suite but it seems to be a good improvement. My only long term concern is the keyboard. While it looks cool, the feel is quite different and I don't know if I'm going to stick with it. The other odd thing about it is the location of the Function key. Unlike the MBP, the function key is to the right of the delete key, which makes for an odd reach when wanting to use the secondary functions in the function keys.

I used the new iPhoto web gallery feature to publish the unpacking photos. You can view them here.

According to Fedex, it's made it from China to Alaska. I should get it on Tuesday.

Boy am I behind the times.  Not only is Coverflow not a new application, Apple released iTunes 7 today with Coverflow integrated.  The author of Coverflow has said on IRC that he can't say more and the Coverflow site is down.  I imagine he must have gotten a pretty sweet deal from Apple for it to be integrated.  My complaint about the iTunes integration?  It doesn't have the letter based slider that Coverflow originally had.

Tonight I stumbled upon what has to be one of the cooler useless apps for OS X, Coverflow.  Coverflow provides you an album cover view of your iTunes library and lets you select what you're listening to right from the UI.  Find an album you like and double click on it and it starts on iTunes.  While the UI is a bit large for everyday use, I am enjoying "thumbing" through the albums and playing with it.

I’m excited about the MacBook, I’m in love with the iMac. But why did you add this annoying little bar to the bottom of iTunes? It is obtrusive. It is obnoxious. If I want to deal with music store content, I’ll go to the music store. If it’s true that 850 Million songs have been sold at a rate of over 3 million a day, is this not just a bit obnoxious. How about having it off by default and telling us it’s there? Most people will leave it on because they don’t know you can turn it off. I’m sure you’ve been counting on that. Don’t get me wrong, I still love you, but you’ve gone one step too far and should go stand in the corner and be ashamed of yourself.

Ok, it hasn't been a month yet, but I wanted to drop a note that I've been liking my Mini at work, I've switched to using one at home. Out of the box, it's not that great of an advertisement for Apple. The performance is slow and not usable. But using the mods I talked about in my previous entry, it's a nice machine to use. If you want to go this route you definitely need 1GB of ram if you expect to use it on a regular basis. The 7,200 RPM hard drive is essential too. Why Apple doesn't ship with this by default is beyond me. The wholesale prices on these guys must be negligible, and they should eat the loss to broaden their userbase. When someone pulls one of these quite boxes with a tiny footprint out of the box, they should be impressed with how speedy and nimble it is, not just the small price tag and elegant OS.

I've been using a Mac Mini with Tiger for about the last month at work. Tired of dealing with video related lockups on my AMD64 in Ubuntu, I decided to give a spare Mini a try. Out of the box, the base Mini is not usable for a power user. It's at best sluggish, and at worst, like rush hour traffic on the 405 before the Sepulveda Pass. The primary culprit? The Harddrive. The slow speed (4200 rpm) of the drive is enough to make the box unusable. For the average computer hacker (not cracker) this isn't much of an issue. A couple of putty knives and a 7200 rpm 2.5" drive, and bam you're off. I got the Hitachi 7K60 for around $175 at Fry's, if I recall the price correctly. Fast forward a few weeks of use, and I'm able to use the box, but it still lags at times. The reason? 512MB of memory for a power user on OS/X is not do-able. The max is 1GB of ram in the Mini, and for $99 I just got new PC2700 ram, and let me tell you, it makes all the difference. No more lag when typing, opening applications, or tabs in Firefox. Give me another month of this and I'll let you know if I'm still as happy with the choice as I am now.