Newer things
I had hoped Apple would update the Macbook 12 inch, but we know now that this is not
going to happen. I liked the light design of the macbook. My newest laptop is
therefore a macbook pro 13 inch. I had been a bit reluctant to go with that because
the ESC key in that model is in the touchbar. I use ESC a lot when writing in VIM.
After reconfiguring CAPSLOCK to become ESC, things are actually
quite nice. What is of course also beneficial is to be able to have a larger
harddrive and have multiple USBC ports which had been a quite severe limitation on
the Macbook.
In general, I think, the last 10 years, we have been living in a OS heaven
and I hope it will continue. I hardly need to do any sys-adminstration (also in linux).
Machines just work, time machine takes care of backups, upgrades work. Issues
are usually quickly resolved. The latest was a migrating issue when moving over to
a new laptop: the old itunes library database would be missing. The solution was just
to copy over the file ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Library.itl manually.
Still, in 2019, I'm getting hunted by the case insensitivity of OS X. I have files
INDEX.html and index.html which sometimes can get merged when moving forth and
back from a OS X (I keep part of my project pages synced between laptop and
linux desktop so that I can work anywhere and such a round of syncing can produce
an equivalence relation on file names ...).
Old Macs
I have been using
virtually all of the macs, including the Next computer, which was
a fantastic machine. Here is a picture from 2007, where I marked
macs I have used (substancially, which means several hours a day
like at school) or owned.
older remarks
The following was probably updated last 2005
- I use linux and OS X simultaneously on the same screen.
A Gefen KVM switch works now reliably in a 1900x1200 resulution.
Unfortunately, DVI/USB switches are still quite expensive and nothing seems to work
well for larger resolutions.
- Windows compatibility: Parallels (mostly to test things) and bootcamp (for games)
solve all the needs.
- I use case sensitively formated external hard drives to bypass the
insensitivity of the HFS filesystem.
- I always have to be careful about things like cp -r test.key/ ~/desktop
which move all keynote files in test.key onto the desktop with the need to cleanup zillions of
files. This is different from
cp -r test.key ~/desktop
which does, what one expects. In linux, both commands do the same. The hickup happens often
because the bash commandline completion (using [tab]) always adds a slash at the end.
- On my Happy Hacking Keyboards, there is no key for
opening the CD tray. But the commandline helps drutil tray open
or drutil tray close.
- Despite the lack of a CAPS key, happy hacking keyboard rarely
switch into CAPS. In case, it does, solves it.
- In OS X it is possible that the window size can become too large to be adjusted. This can happen for
example due to a screen resolution change (presentation). For webbrowsers, the sceen size
can be adjusted with javascript: type something like javascript:window.resizeTo(400,400)
into the address bar.
- My wishlist for the iPod Touch (Oct 2007):
- sync PDF's in the iTunes library with the ipod.
- Safari to download pictures and put them into the Photo folder.
- A todo list.
- Games
