A new printer.

Yesterday I bought a new printer. I bought a "HP Photosmart C3180 All-in-One" multifunction inkjet printer. It was a breeze to install. Just plug it into a free port in the USB hub, insert the CD with the drivers and install. All the software were installed without any problems. It didn't take long for me to print my first documents and photos. If you are looking for an affordable, well designed printer, with memory slots for memory cards such as SD & MMC I suggest you take a look at the C3180 from HP.

Finally, a problem...

Yesterday I had my first serious problem with my Mini. What happened was that my girlfriend inserted into the cdrw/dvd-combo station in the Mini a CD that the Mini had problems reading and tried to burn a copy of it with Toast. After that the Mini froze and kept the cd spinning. No, the CD didn't contain any form of copy protection, which I at first thought was the culprit.

What I did afterwards, I did a hard shutdown (ie pressing the powerbutton down for a couple of seconds for forcing the Mini to shutdown). After that when I booted it up, I kept the left mouse button pressed down in order to eject the problematic CD. When the CD ejected I was granted with the traditional bootup logo screen, and then just a blue screen reporting not any error messages of any kind (even the Windows blue-screen-of-death or the Linux kernel-panic error messages are preferred to none at all).

So I whipped out the MacOSX installation CDs and booted into the installation setup, ran Disk Utility, selected the partition I have OSX on and pressed Repair Disk. A moment afterwards, the partition table was fixed, and I rebooted. Everything worked after this procedure.

So, what have I learned after this incident?

1. Keep the OSX installation CDs close at hand.
2. Don't trust the internal CDRW/DVD-ROM combo station with CDs, use an external USB drive instead.
3. Make regular backups of important data. (This I did for the first time ever through Déjà Vu onto my removable USB HD).

My Mini have not had a serious problem like this for a very long time. I don't remember what the previous serious error was either. Of course there are issues, like the one with the internal CDRW/DVD-combo station having problems reading certain CDs and freezing up iTunes or the Mini.

iTunes Store CoverFlow conspiracy...

I updated iTunes and Quicktime today. So far I'm really pleased with the iTunes update. But, I wonder what Apple do with all that data they collect from the users that have an active iTunes store account.

Let's face it, both me and you have music on our systems that is not "legal". So, let's say that I have an iTunes Store account (which I don't, I refuse to purchase music that has any form of DRM protection), and iTunes download that cover for that specific track, album or movie etc. Well, what will Apple do with all that data they generate? Consider this scenario:

Your authenticated computer downloads through your iTunes account a cover for an album which you have downloaded "not legally", and then somtime later RIAA "asks" Apple to turn over all the data for the cover downloads. If you have been caught in their "legal" pursuit of shared music downloading net users, they now have another piece of juicy evidence against you.

If I were you and if I were living in the US, I'd see to it that I wouldn't use iTunes as my primary digital media centre, and I'd also get in touch with those that protect your privacy and freedom on the net, to try and get Apple to tell what they will do with this generated data.

A new Mac...

I've really been seriously considering buying a new Mini, a Duo Core 1.66, but I think I will wait until Apple releases Leopard, then I will get a new Mac. What I'm getting instead is a V7 19" Widescreen LCD monitor (L19WA) and more system memory (a 1GB stick). Now you might wonder why I don't get myself a new iMac instead? Well, I will tell you why.

I've really considered my reasons for not buying an iMac, and they are:

1. It is not possible to connect any other computers to it, which means I cannot use my PC with it. And no, I'd totally refuse to install Windows onto it. It would be great to be able to connect other computers to it and only use the screen for that.
   
2. Leopard hasn't been released yet.
3. I will not be able to connect my future Xbox360 to it. (Yes yes, it's a MS product, but hey, it's a great product and it will be better when they release the second generation of it which will have a cooler running CPU in it).
4. If the screen gets broken, my computer is dead if the warranty is not available anymore.

No, so an iMac is not a good option if you are looking for a new for a Mac in my eyes. A Mini or a Mac Pro is a better choice, there you can decide which monitor to use and when to replace it. It's also more easily to upgrade those systems. The Mini can be a handful, but if you know what you are doing, then it will not be a problem at all. Besides, the coolness factor for the Mini is greater than the iMac too, so...

Apple Servers, the way to go...

These past two days, I've been struggling with getting RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 U4 onto a new server from HP (a HP Proliant DL140 G2). I've never seen such a difficult thing to get to install, it's even more evil than Gentoo Linux ever was when I used to install it onto servers. One would think that using a supported RedHat product like RHEL would ease the problems with installation issues, but no... RH couldn't even help me and neither did HP or LSI Logics for that matter. What I did later today was install Fedora Core 5 onto the server and lo and behold, it worked straight from the go sign.

What have I learned so far? I'd go for an Xserve (which I've also have installed and continue to work with, although there have been problems with that one too, but not installation issues atleast) or a Mac Pro with OSX Server any day over RHEL. My advice to those that think of buying a new server, check with the OS vendor for which release and update the OS has been verified for being compatible with that particular server.

Oh, and I know, this has nothing to do whatsoever with a mini-switch, but I just had to get these things off my chest :)

No iPod for me...

For some time ago I bought a portable CD player that plays MP3 audio too. Sure it isn't as small as an iPod but it was a lot cheaper. I paid 30 Euros for it. With it came a lot of accessories:

• carry pouch
• headphone
• AC adapter
• rechargable batteries
• an adapter for use with cassette players

A real bargain. I decided to use this as a portable player instead of buying an iPod, because empty CD media is really cheap if you order it online, and burning my mp3 audio onto cd's is a lot cheaper and convenient than having to boot up my Mini everytime I want to change my music on the iPod.

Annoying ad service terminated...

Today I surfed the net and came across a site that had an image that the Adblock extension for Firefox could not block. What to do? Well, I used a "hack" I remembered that I also used on my Linux PC. The site I wanted to block was ad.doubleclick.net. Now, what I am about to write about now is quite technical, and following this tip is entirely at your own risk, I accept no responsibility for anything which might happen if you use this tip, even if you break your system ;) Ok, now that part is over and done with, so this is what I did:

• Start Terminal
• Type sudo -s
• Give your root user password and press the Return key.
• Edit the file hosts file in /etc/ with the following command nano -w /etc/hosts
• Add the following line at the end of the file:
  

  127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
  

• Note that the space between 127.0.0.1 and ad.doubleclick.net should be a tab space not a regular space character. Blogger doesn't allow inserting tab characters it seems, even though I used the pre formatting HTML tag.
  
• Press the key combo CTRL X
• Press the key y
• Press the key Return (remember not to alter the name of the hosts file as the hosts file is a critical systemfile).
• Quit Terminal, and restart Firefox.
  
• This tip will work for any annoying ad service out there or any other site for that matter you wish to block that Adblock or any other blocking extension out there is not able to block.
  

There you have it fellow netsurfers, those pesky irritating ad services terminated once and for all. Oh, there might be a problem with this solution though. If you are running a webserver (Apache) on you Mac and it responds to calls on port 80, you may have to edit your httpd.conf in order to tell Apache that it shouldn't listen to the localhost IP 127.0.0.1.

This site has a more detailed and extensive hosts file for you to download and install. Although there may be some extra steps needed to do in order for it to work properly. Good surfing, everyone.