warning to leopard/keynote users
Posted by Ian Holsman
I upgraded to leopard, and it has frozen/paniced twice in 24 hours.
I also discovered that keynote doesn’t do a auto-save/recovery. Naturally I discovered this on 20 slides into the deck.
got a spare invite to skitch
Posted by Ian Holsman
for you mac users out there, skitch is a very cool screen capture app which lets you annotate the image, and then upload it or save it as a jpeg. (I’m sure it does more than this, but I like this feature).
anyways.. I have 1 invite left, so mail me if you want an invite.
playing with numbers
Posted by Ian Holsman
So I had a opportunity to use numbers yesterday on ‘real’ work. This involved reading in a CSV file and producing a report out of it. like most people i didn’t read the instructions, so there might be easier way
bad points:
- importing CSV files isn’t as nice as in excel. It doesn’t ask what the delimiter is, or how to split fields.. it just does it
- can split an existing table into 2 tables.
- no shortcut that I could see to create a new table
- the export to excel creates a table of contents page advertising I used numbers. I consider this poor form, it means I must go in there with excel and fix up the TOC page removing the advertising
- no pivot tables. I use this feature alot.
overall there aren’t too bad, and won’t stop me using numbers.
good points:
- It looks pretty, really pretty. It is a joy to use
- I like the table concept, and apple have done this fantastically.
- resizing a table’s column width doesn’t affect anything else. For people who use excel to design professional reports, this takes a chore which usually takes hours into something which will take minutes.
I am going to be playing with it more, but until my bosses get a mac, it will be the export excel feature I most use.
If you haven't installed QT 7.2 and run the beta Java6 DON'T
Posted by Ian Holsman
as it seems to screw up MS word and all the other ancient apps
more details here
Update: after following Bruce’s lead I commented out the java 1.3.1 things in /var/db/dyld/update-prebinding-paths.txt and re-ran update_prebinding.
I now have excel working!
Macbook Pro batter life
Posted by Ian Holsman
I just checked the spec’s on apple’s site and it quotes
15-inch MacBook Pro 60-watt-hour lithium-polymer battery (with integrated charge indicator LEDs) providing up to 6 hours of battery life
My macbook pro with a battery which is less than 1 year old is lucky to get two hours.
Do I have a dud battery or is this what others are getting?
Mail.app died
Posted by Ian Holsman
I’m not sure why, but it died with a corrupt index.
ok… not a major drama. it re-indexed them. and except for a few (hundred) unread markers it seemed ok.
until I got replies from people to emails I sent 6 months ago.
Now I’m not sure.
did mail re-send these? or did mail never send them in the first place, and “found” them now.
Mac Problems -- this time software
Posted by Ian Holsman
Has anyone else noticed that mail.app takes 100% CPU?
It frequently hangs when I search, and consumes all my cpu making my macbook slow down to a crawl.
I’ve tried rebuilding, but it doesn’t seem to work..
anybody else seeing this problem with their mac?
the macbook is back (and only partially fixed)
Posted by Ian Holsman
I have my macbook back. It has a new harddrive, but the heat is still there.. The support tech insisted that the heat was being caused by the faulty hard drive. by that time I just wanted my computer back so I could actually do some work on it. Hopefully I can figure out how to fix the the thermal glue myself without breaking the box.
I’ve decided to start from scratch, and reinstall stuff as required. (I had 3 years of crap on my old box)
I am also doing like Leo is, and running parallels (as a I need a FreeBSD host to do some testing).
problems with the macbook (an update)
Posted by Ian Holsman
I just left the streetwise store who I put my laptop in for a service over a week ago. They haven’t even done anything with it. (It was promised back to me yesterday).
oh.. and the best part.. the tech support guy who ‘helped’ me said the overheating is not covered under warranty and has never heard of the issue before.
This is interesting, as when I spoke to their other tech support person he knew about it, and the suggest fix of wiping the thermal grease off the box.
Luckily for me, I had a open apple case# saying it was a warranty job. So that should set things right.
but the unlucky part for me is I will probably have to wait another week for my machine to be returned.
Oh.. and the hard-drive is unrecoverable. 2-3 months work down the drain. (I was backing the thing up when it broke)
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