Category Archives: mac

A hard drive crash with a happy ending

Posted on November 26, 2007 by Brian Jepson

Yesterday afternoon, I returned to my desk to find my Mac frozen. When I rebooted, the hard drive started making horrible noises, so there was no question that my 200GB Hitachi drive had crapped out. Fortunately, Time Machine had my … Continue reading →

Posted in hardware, mac | Leave a comment

What’s in the Mac OS X version of Silverlight 1.1 Alpha?

Posted on May 1, 2007 by Brian Jepson

I downloaded Silverlight 1.1 Alpha and poked around until I found out where the .NET stuff lives. Here’s what’s in the bundle: $ cd /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/Silverlight.plugin/Contents/MacOS/ $ ls CoreCLR.bundle System.Core.dll IronPython.Modules.dll System.SilverLight.dll IronPython.dll System.Xml.Core.dll Microsoft.JScript.Compiler.dll System.dll Microsoft.JScript.Runtime.dll agclr.dll Microsoft.Scripting.SilverLight.dll agcore … Continue reading →

Posted in emulation, mac, programming | 2 Comments

Note to Future Self: Causes are Never Obvious

Posted on March 30, 2007 by Brian Jepson

I installed Vista under Boot Camp today, and my Mac wouldn’t boot into Mac OS X afterwards. It was sitting there on the blue screen with the mouse cursor. Of course I blamed it on boot camp at first. I … Continue reading →

Posted in mac, vista | Leave a comment

Remove Boot Camp Partitions from a Three Partition Setup

Posted on January 2, 2007 by Brian Jepson

A while back, I split my MacBook Pro hard drive into three partitions so I could have a small FAT32 partition for sharing files between Windows and Mac OS X. After getting a dedicated Vista system, I wanted to delete … Continue reading →

Posted in hacks, mac | 21 Comments

Connecting to Samba from Vista RC1

Posted on September 21, 2006 by Brian Jepson

One of the things that is annoying me about Vista is that I can’t connect to my SMB shares on my Mac. When I try to log in, it rejects my password. I looked at /var/log/samba/log.smbd on my Mac, and … Continue reading →

Posted in mac, operating systems, vista | 14 Comments

Vista Pre-RC1 on MacBook

Posted on August 30, 2006 by Brian Jepson

There’s been a lot of buzz about the Pre-RC1 build of Vista working with Boot Camp. I decided to give it a try, and it was pretty easy. You’ll want to perform a full backup before you try this!!! First, … Continue reading →

Posted in mac, operating systems, vista | 13 Comments

Exposé, SmackBook Pro style

Posted on May 25, 2006 by Brian Jepson

Erling Ellingsen has written an awesome toolset for smacking your Mac to switch desktops. Here’s a modified version for those of us who are using Exposé instead of virtual desktops. You can smack the MacBook Pro to trigger Exposé. Because … Continue reading →

Posted in mac | 45 Comments

Fedora Core 5 on Virtual PC 7 for Macintosh

Posted on April 13, 2006 by Brian Jepson

I posted an entry a while back about getting this to work under an earlier beta of Fedora Core 5. I think these instructions are much more straightforward. You’ll need to go through the installation. I suggest using text mode … Continue reading →

Posted in emulation, linux, mac | 5 Comments

Encrypted Disk Images? Never Mind.

Posted on February 21, 2006 by Brian Jepson

jwz asks: “FileVault: good idea, or performance killer?” I’m not ready to turn my whole home directory over to FileVault, but I love using TrueCrypt on my Windows machines, so I figured I’d try putting some of my files on … Continue reading →

Posted in mac | 3 Comments

MacBook Pro or Last Year’s Model?

Posted on January 26, 2006 by Brian Jepson

Derrick has a great post that sums up my feelings about whether it’s time to buy a new Mac notebook: buy what you need when it’s available. I’ve been growing unhappy with my 12″ PowerBook, which is still pretty new, … Continue reading →

Posted in mac | 3 Comments