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annathepiperIt's Winnowill, the latest machine to join murkworks.net!
Getting the machine to talk to the network was trivial; I just had to give it an IP address out of our pool of addresses, and manually configure the network with the appropriate pointers to our gateway and DNS servers. Once that was done, pretty much as soon as I powered up the box, it said HELLO I NEED TO DOWNLOAD EIGHT MILLION UPDATES, so I let it do that. That took quite some time and even included a firmware update, which required me to let the box reboot, hold down the power button, and wait until it beeped annoyedly. Then it finally finished the firmware thing and let me proceed with installing other stuff.
Testing out the iJournal client here, since I didn't want to download LJKit along with Xjournal; if anybody wants to convince me XJournal is a better experience, I'm open to suggestions! This seems simultaneously less cluttered and a little less useful than Semagic; I'm going to miss having Semagic be able to tell me when my Friends list has changed, as well as easily switching between various journals and cross-posting to several journals at once. If Xjournal does these things, that may make me change clients.
I installed Adium so I'm IMable on this box now. It seems to be a perfectly functional IM client, from the little I've played with it so far. I like its little duck mascot. I changed it to be a black duck, just so it'll remind me of Daffy.
I've spent a good chunk of tonight copying over a boatload of my files off of Newstar--most notably video files and pictures. I think it's extremely groovy that I can drop a bunch of pictures into a directory and tell this OS, okay, change the background randomly out of this directory every time a certain interval passes, or every time I power up, or every time I wake the machine up from hibernation. Now I can swap back and forth between GBS, Russell, the Doctor, and whoever else I feel like plunking onto my desktop at any given moment!
(Though I've gotta say--this black laptop with a white power cord and the white Apple symbol on the lid and the default blue color scheme is very evocative of Winnowill. I need a really good scan of an appropriate pic of her out of Elfquest to be a backdrop, too. This will require some hunting through my graphic novels! Also, at least one icon is called for.)
Video files are a bit more challenging. I have a couple that are WMV format, so I had to install Windows Media Player 9 to be able to play them. I also installed the OSX port of MPlayer--but it plays the files in question rather messily. And for the record, yes, I do need to be able to play the files--they're Great Big Sea performances!
All of my second-tier personal documents--which is to say, anything not vital enough to also live on the handheld--has now been copied over too. The vital documents are going to come over after I install The Missing Sync, tomorrow.
Firefox and Opera have been installed and Firefox set as my default browser. I also wound up installing StuffIt Expander since Windows Media Player asked for it to be able to unpack the installer file. I figured it'd be useful in other contexts as well.
Bonus points to the box for letting me pop my Windows-formatted thumb drive right into the USB port and yoink files right off of it. Very convenient, that. I figured that'd be probably easier than trying to shove vast quantities of data over the network.
The biggest thing to do tomorrow is probably going to be install Leopard. The box came with 10.4 on it, but there's a 10.5 DVD, so I'm going to go ahead and install that. That'll doubtless take quite a bit of time.
Other stuff still left to do:
For now, I'd damn well better fall into bed so I can get up and go to chiro in the morning!
Getting the machine to talk to the network was trivial; I just had to give it an IP address out of our pool of addresses, and manually configure the network with the appropriate pointers to our gateway and DNS servers. Once that was done, pretty much as soon as I powered up the box, it said HELLO I NEED TO DOWNLOAD EIGHT MILLION UPDATES, so I let it do that. That took quite some time and even included a firmware update, which required me to let the box reboot, hold down the power button, and wait until it beeped annoyedly. Then it finally finished the firmware thing and let me proceed with installing other stuff.
Testing out the iJournal client here, since I didn't want to download LJKit along with Xjournal; if anybody wants to convince me XJournal is a better experience, I'm open to suggestions! This seems simultaneously less cluttered and a little less useful than Semagic; I'm going to miss having Semagic be able to tell me when my Friends list has changed, as well as easily switching between various journals and cross-posting to several journals at once. If Xjournal does these things, that may make me change clients.
I installed Adium so I'm IMable on this box now. It seems to be a perfectly functional IM client, from the little I've played with it so far. I like its little duck mascot. I changed it to be a black duck, just so it'll remind me of Daffy.
I've spent a good chunk of tonight copying over a boatload of my files off of Newstar--most notably video files and pictures. I think it's extremely groovy that I can drop a bunch of pictures into a directory and tell this OS, okay, change the background randomly out of this directory every time a certain interval passes, or every time I power up, or every time I wake the machine up from hibernation. Now I can swap back and forth between GBS, Russell, the Doctor, and whoever else I feel like plunking onto my desktop at any given moment!
(Though I've gotta say--this black laptop with a white power cord and the white Apple symbol on the lid and the default blue color scheme is very evocative of Winnowill. I need a really good scan of an appropriate pic of her out of Elfquest to be a backdrop, too. This will require some hunting through my graphic novels! Also, at least one icon is called for.)
Video files are a bit more challenging. I have a couple that are WMV format, so I had to install Windows Media Player 9 to be able to play them. I also installed the OSX port of MPlayer--but it plays the files in question rather messily. And for the record, yes, I do need to be able to play the files--they're Great Big Sea performances!
All of my second-tier personal documents--which is to say, anything not vital enough to also live on the handheld--has now been copied over too. The vital documents are going to come over after I install The Missing Sync, tomorrow.
Firefox and Opera have been installed and Firefox set as my default browser. I also wound up installing StuffIt Expander since Windows Media Player asked for it to be able to unpack the installer file. I figured it'd be useful in other contexts as well.
Bonus points to the box for letting me pop my Windows-formatted thumb drive right into the USB port and yoink files right off of it. Very convenient, that. I figured that'd be probably easier than trying to shove vast quantities of data over the network.
The biggest thing to do tomorrow is probably going to be install Leopard. The box came with 10.4 on it, but there's a 10.5 DVD, so I'm going to go ahead and install that. That'll doubtless take quite a bit of time.
Other stuff still left to do:
- Install The Missing Sync
- Check out the demo install of Mac Office 2004 and set up Entourage
- See how big a pain in the ass it's going to be to copy over all my mail archives off Newstar
- Once Entourage and The Missing Sync are talking, try to sync up the frob with Winnowill
- Install OpenOffice
- Get all my music copied off of Newstar onto Winnowill
- Fire up iTunes and make sure the new computer is authorized to play my purchased songs
- Also make sure the library comes over properly
- Find out for sure if I really need to reset the iPod to Mac format--Googling around tells me it's possible for iTunes 7 or later to read off of Windows-formatted iPods on a Mac box, but it's not officially supported so I'm not convinced I want to do that
- And more as I think of it!
For now, I'd damn well better fall into bed so I can get up and go to chiro in the morning!
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no subject
Date: 2007-12-15 11:26 am (UTC)Google Flip4Mac -- it's a Windows Media plugin for QuickTime. Microsoft doesn't support Windows Media for the Mac anymore, so this is a more reliable solution on the whole. If you need to support AVI files, there's a DiVX plugin that helps with that (although I've noticed it takes longer to open the files in newer versions of QT; not sure why).
As for the system update, it'll take a little while for the computer to chug through the process, but you'll likely find it painless. Mac upgrades are nice that way.
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Date: 2007-12-15 06:20 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2007-12-15 03:56 pm (UTC)Yes, the most portable media format in the world is... FAT32. *sigh* At least it's well-known, and *works*. It sucks for efficiency, fragmentation, and most other things that define a good filesystem.... but it's dead simple and therefore everybody talks to it.
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Date: 2007-12-15 06:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-15 06:56 pm (UTC)But for me, keeping it in Windows format means it'll also work with my Linux desktoppy-type boxes. (Which you don't have any of *yet*... ) Amarok does an excellent job of maintaining my Shuffle. And the interface is almost iTunes-y. Even with the rounded corners on certain details.
But if there's neatokeen stuff it'll do in Mac format that it won't do in Windows format, I'd go for it. The Mac filesystem is pretty stable and it optimizes a lot better than FAT32... which means that if you end up doing a lot of individual add-deletes on your iPod (the Shuffle, you just wipe and rewrite, or at least I think that's the way it works... 'sides, I don't want to wear out the flash, whereas I think the other 'pods have a real hard drive?) it'll work a lot better over the long haul.
But either way, I'm happy to share in your squeeing! Macs are just cool, even though they're pricey... as commercial software (and high-end hardware) goes, it really is decent bang-for-buck. *And* it runs all the cool freeware too!
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Date: 2007-12-15 07:27 pm (UTC)I only really need it to talk to computers I'm specifically using, anyway--any other computer on the house network can see my library in iTunes if I share it out. So I could in theory, if the Mac is on, fire up a Linux desktop and launch something to play stuff across the network from there. Any file transferring needs can generally be addressed by my iPaq or by the thumb drive.
And yeah, my iPod does have a full hard drive. My music collection tends to stay pretty stable over wide stretches of time; I don't often add or delete stuff. But I do a lot of hits on the hard drive with random play, either by the iPod randomly selecting stuff for me or just by jumping around myself from playlist to playlist.
And yay for shared squee! I've got plenty to go around. ;)
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