Lamborghini Countach Walter Wolf
The Honeymoon Phase Is Over
I have completed my first full week using my brand new 15” MacBookPro. I participated in my first major “Black Friday” purchase and bought (among other things) my beautiful new laptop. I wanted to write a post about the experience and what I thought on the weekend I got it, but I thought it would be better to wait until after the “honeymoon” phase of people in the Apple Store high-fiving me (which did happen by the way) and that intoxicating scent of an aluminum unibody (which now has an ever so slight scent of hot sauce and pizza) wore off.
Some things that I value the most about this machine are the little touches. The fact that the iSight camera is behind the glass makes cleaning worry free, the little light-up battery life indicator on the side is very useful when the laptop is on its side in my backpack, and the backlit keyboard is a gift from heaven. The most notable thing about the laptop for me (beyond the internal hardware specs) is the battery. The battery is amazing. I love that I can put my machine to sleep and wake it back up all throughout the day for word processing and web-surfing and not have to plug-in once.
This is definitely the most sturdy and well-built laptop I have ever used. The aluminum unibody gives the whole laptop such a classy touch. The wide spaces to rest your palms on each side of the trackpad make typing for long periods of time less painful. O yeah… the trackpad. When I bought this machine I was positive the trackpad was going to be my biggest complaint. The trackpad has changed the way that I use my computer entirely. The gestures are incredible. My favorite gesture is easily Expose’s, or as my friends and I like to call it, “FOUR FINGER DOOWN!” The trackpad makes all the difference. And when I use a laptop without that kind of trackpad; I know I will be hopelessly swiping my fingers across it to try to switch between applications to no avail.
But enough about the machine itself, the real fun part is what I did in OS X. Oddly enough, when I opened the laptop for the first time Leopard 10.5.7 was installed instead of Snow Leopard. However there was an included Snow Leopard disk so I just popped it in and Snow Leopard installed in about 40 minutes.
I was nervous that some of my favorite 3rd party apps wouldn’t work in Snow Leopard. So far the only thing that I can’t seem to get working is a plugin called Safari140 that gives support for link posting to twitter within Safari. Snow Leopard is definitely worth the upgrade. The slight changes and improvements of the GUI really make OS X better. Snow Leopard is now 64bit instead of Leopard being 32bit. If you don’t know what that technically means, know this: it’s a lot faster. It recognizes more than 4GBs of RAM and 64bit apps operate much quicker and more effectively. You can also use 64bit versions of Windows in Bootcamp which improves the Windows experience considerably. The Snow Leopard install will also free up to about 6GBs of space on your hardrive, which is really nice. I recommend running Monolingual. It is an app that will remove all the extra language packs that you will never use (unless you are fluent in multiple languages) and it ends up freeing about 2GBs of space.
There are several 3rd party apps I can’t live without on my new machine (all of which run in 64bit mode) : Quicksilver, Adium (don’t use it without visiting the xtras page too), Skype, Transmission, Cloud (it’s in private beta though, sorry :( ) and Tweetie. I recently stumbled on an app called Socialite. Socialite is meant to be an app to irrigate all of your social networks, but it has a Google RSS reader as well. It is fantastic. I turn off all the other features and just use the RSS reader.
If you’re like me, you’re into minimal workspaces and aesthetics. Frankly, the default OS X icons just don’t cut it for me. I use an app called Candybar to changed app icons, system icons, and dock for my system. The app has a sleek, intuitive, and easy to use look and feel to it. I get most of my icons from a site called Iconpaper. I like to have my icon’s color scale match my current desktop wallpaper. If you want some really nice, minimal, hi-res wallpapers- head over to SimpleDesktops.
So there ya go, a brief look at my new MacBookPro. Hope it was helpful and insightful.
iPhone Wallpapers from Michael Paukner
By now, you have seen some of his work circling Tumblr. Michael just put together a pack of 13 free iphone wallpapers for download. Just click the image above…
(image via flickr)
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
“Assasin”- John Mayer, Battle Studies
“I work in the dead of night, When the roads are quiet
No one is around, To track my moves
Racing the yellow lights, To find the gate is open
She’s waiting in the room, I just slip on through
You get in, You get done
And then you get gone
You never leave a trace or show your face, You get gone
Should have turned around, And left before the sun came up again
But the sun came up again
Enter the morning light, To find the day is burning the curtains and the wine
In a little white room, No, I’m not alone. Her head is heavy on me, She’s sleeping like a child
What could I do?
You get in, You get done, And then you get gone
You never leave a trace or show your face
You get gone
Should have turned around, And left before the sun came up again
But the sun came up again
I was a killer, was the best they’d ever seen, I’d steal your heart before you ever heard a thing
I’m an assassin and I had a job to do
Little did I know that girl was an assassin too
Suddenly I’m in over my head and I could hardly breathe
Suddenly I’m floating over her bed and I feel everything
Suddenly I know exactly what I did, but I cannot move a thing
Suddenly I know exactly what I’d done and what it’s gonna mean to me, mean to me
I’m gone
I was a killer, was the best they’d ever seen, I’d steal your heart before you ever heard a thing
I’m an assassin and I had a job to do, Little did I know that girl was an assassin too
She’s an assassin, She’s an assassin
She’s an assassin, She’s an assassin and she had a job to do”
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
“Crawl”- Chris Brown
“Everybody sees it’s you, I’m the one that lost the view
Everybody says we’re through, I hope you havn’t said it too
So where do we go from here, With all this fear in our eyes
And where can love take us now, And we’ve been so far down
We can still touch the sky
If we crawl, ’till we can walk again
And we’ll run, Until we’re strong enough to jump
And we’ll fly, Until there is no end
So let’s crawl…crawl….crawl
Back to love
Why did I change the pace, Hearts were never meant to race
Always felt the need for space, And now I can’t reach your face
So where are you standing now, Are you in the crowd of my voice
Love can’t you see my hand, Lend me one more chance
We can still have it all
So we’ll crawl, ‘till we can walk around
And we’ll run, Until we’re strong enough to jump
Then we’ll fly, Until there is no end
So let’s crawl….crawl….crawl
Back to love
Everybody sees it’s you, Well I never wanna lose that view
So we’ll crawl, ‘till we can walk again
Then we’ll run, Until we’re strong enough to jump
Then we’ll fly, Until there is no end
So let’s crawl….crawl…crawl
So we’ll crawl, ‘till we can walk again
Then we’ll run, Until we’re strong enough to jump
Then we’ll fly, Until there is no end
So let’s crawl….crawl…crawl
Back to love….”
The F-Circle (conceptual Japanese cell phone). Designed by Yuji Ito.
That looks like it can help me turn into a power ranger.
Thumb twiddling is an activity that is done with the hands of an individual whereby the fingers are interlocked and the thumbs circle around a common focal point, usually in the middle of the distance between the two thumbs.
Thumb twiddling can be seen as an expression of which hand is dominant with the individual. The weaker handed thumb will “follow” the dominant handed thumb in the activity.
