Published by JT on 20 Sep 2009

Adventures in Snow Leopard

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Overall, I’m impressed with Snow Leopard. I waited a while before upgrading as I wasn’t too much in a hurry to upgrade everyone in my house to the next “service pack” (as those Windoze fanboys call it.) That changed of course when I downloaded the newest iTunes v9. I couldn’t browse the iTunes store without upgrading my main machine to at least OS X 10.5.8 and Safari 4. I decided that if I was going to go through the effort I might as well go with the latest and greatest.

I was able to upgrade all the MacBooks and my wife’s MacBook Pro over several nights. I did one a night and got everything updated — went up to 10.6.1, upgraded iTunes, drivers, etc. Easy peasy. Really no surprises. Even got back a few gigs on each machine. I’m hoping that the upgrade will fix some of the weird issues my wife has been seeing on her machine.

Then came time to upgrade of the Dell Mini 9 and my big hackintosh machine…not so easy

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Published by JT on 25 Aug 2009

Dell Mini 9 – Upgraded to 10.5.8

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Wow.. I just upgraded my Dell Mini 9 to OS X 10.5.8 and I’m just completely overjoyed on how uneventful the upgrade went. Almost not worth writing a blog entry about it. I made a backup of my DellEFI v1.2 alpha 5 application, upgraded to 10.5.8 via Software update, re-installed the DellEFI, reboot. Done.  

Although it seems like a lot of people have starting doubting the usefulness of these netbooks, I can tell you I get a lot of mileage out of mine yet. It now has a permanent home in my Go-Bag.

Published by JT on 23 Aug 2009

iPhone 3G LCD Screen Replacement

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I’m on a roll! I can’t remember the last time I’ve ordered so much stuff from eBay! This time, I got a LCD screen replacement for a cracked iPhone 3G. This replacement was CAKE! Mainly because I opted to get the right part and save me a ton of work. Details after the jump.

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Published by JT on 18 Aug 2009

MacBook 13.3″ LCD Replacement

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Ahhh… kids…. such bliss. What could be better? Kids and laptops… or rather broken laptops.  

One of the kids’ 13.3″ MacBook LCD screen was damage – magically, of course. The screen had two very serious cracks which rendered the device pretty much useless. However, that didn’t stop them from using it anyway.. In any event, this is a quick article to point out a couple of really great resources to perform your own upgrade.

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Published by JT on 10 Aug 2009

Much needed feature in Outlook

lotusnotesoutlook.pngFinally got around to posting another article on the blog. Real Life has been a bit hectic lately and really hadn’t the luxury of playing with anything new. The biggest news is that I finally got a normal-show-up-everyday-type job. No more selling my ideas or convincing people they are just doing it wrong … wait, scratch that, I still do those things. Just now, it takes longer to convince people.

Of course, new job, new tools. Or in this case old tools. The email platform of choice for this company is Exchange with Outlook 2003 clients. Yup, Outlook 2003 … a product that I thought most corporations had delegated to the binary bit bin years ago. Now, I’m not too much of a prude, but when you’ve been using the best of open source or Lotus Notes v8 (or even v7 or v6), Outlook 2003 seems to be a bit dated. Well, time to make do. I mean, we are only talking about email here. Nothing earth shattering. I used to use Outlook Express for years when I had Windows machines in the house – so I’m not a complete stranger.

However, Outlook is missing one feature that just absolutely kills me. That is the ability to choose to file an email that was just sent into a folder. Lotus Notes had this feature and for me it’s absolute must-have. Its great to be able to go into any project folder and see both the email you’ve received and sent – without have to search for it, go to a Sent folder, etc.

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