1.5GB for a Printer Driver???

Before I start blogging about OSX Leopard itself, I have to voice one short rant: During the installation (I opted for a fresh install rather than an upgrade), I selected “Customize”, and I’m sure glad I did. It turns out that the default installation includes all printer drivers. This in itself isn’t a bad thing (or at least it shouldn’t have to be), but then I noticed how much space some of these drivers occupy on the hard drive....

October 28, 2007 · 3 min · 452 words · DigitalHobbit

Boot Camp

A few days ago, I broke down and committed blasphemy: I installed Boot Camp and Windows XP on my MacBook Pro. I was originally going to wait until OSX 10.5 / Leopard comes out, but since I am planning to do a fresh install with Leopard anyway, I figured I’d give Boot Camp a shot to see if I like it, and so I can wipe it out when I install Leopard in case I don’t....

October 22, 2007 · 2 min · 328 words · DigitalHobbit

Camino 1.5

Earlier this month, version 1.5 of the OSX Camino browser was released. Camino is based on the same Mozilla rendering engine as Firefox, but unlike Firefox, Camino behaves much more like a native OSX application, without a lot of the overhead (such as the XUL user interface) that Firefox brings with it. Ever since I started using the Mac, I’ve never been a big fan of Safari. I have used Firefox up till now, but I’ve been getting less and less excited about it....

June 16, 2007 · 2 min · 379 words · DigitalHobbit

Setting up a virgin Mac

About half a year ago, I started using an old PowerBook at work. Shortly afterwards, I was hooked and bought a MacBook for my wife. Now I finally bought a Mac for myself: a shiny, nice MacBook Pro. One of the great things about the Mac is that it is highly usable right out of the box. It includes a decent browser, a very nice email application, a chat application, video editing tools, audio software, and much more....

January 31, 2007 · 3 min · 537 words · DigitalHobbit

Setting up a virgin Mac, part 2 (Rails dev tools)

As I promised, here is the second part of my notes on setting up a new Mac. This time I will focus on development tools for Ruby on Rails. In theory, Ruby is already installed on the Mac. Unfortunately, the bundled Ruby interpreter has some problems, and even if it didn’t, you’d want to use a more up-to-date version than 1.8.2 (which is included in OSX as of Tiger) for Rails development....

January 31, 2007 · 4 min · 754 words · DigitalHobbit