I’ve been throwing around the idea since they came out. In my head it could just be another cool toy to occasionally play with but I’m hoping I can find more value in it than that. I knew I couldn’t just go buy one randomly and be like “wow, I have an iPad… now what?”

I needed to at least make an attempt to justify it to myself. The best I could come up with is to use it to replace my laptop (currently a late 2007 Macbook). I really only use the Macbook when I’m on the couch – checking email, tweeting, some occasional video editing with iMovie. And that’s about it. I do take it with me when I have personal travel (I take my work laptop any other time). But it mainly just sits there on the couch, doing not much of anything. If I have any graphics or photo work to do, I still have a Windows 7 desktop that I use. And that certainly is not going anywhere.

Well with this recent surplus of overtime and other potential bits of income, I figured it was time to look into this iPad thing. I started reading around the internet and a lot of people swore up and down it would not be a laptop replacement. There’s just no way.

Thing is, the iPad is to be used for what you need it for. If all I do with my Macbook is surf the internet, read some news, check email, tweet a bit… then those are things the iPad can handle quite well – and did I mention the games? Ya, it can do those too.

So the current deal with myself is to try out the iPad for a while and see if I can get along day to day without using my laptop for anything specific. The only thing I’ll have to find out about is video editing – but I just have to find something that I can do on Windows for that. Not a big deal. If the iPad proves useful, I keep it and sell the Macbook (which might fetch up to about $600 on eBay – not bad for a 3 yr old laptop that was $900 new). If I can’t find a place for the iPad, I’d either sell or return that. Either way, I get some of the money back and end up with one device that I know will meet my needs.

Initially I had tried to order one via Apple.com but it wouldn’t even ship until 6/29 and likely not arrive until 7/2. Well, normally not a big deal, but I leave for Salt Lake City on 7/5 and a) I’d like to take the iPad with me and b) I’d like to have more than 2 days to get used to it before traveling. So I canceled the Apple.com order and called up the “local” Apple Store – which happens to be in Victor NY (near Rochester) at the Eastview Mall. There’s also one in the Carousel Mall in Syracuse, but that’s about a half hour longer drive. Victor is almost 1.5 hours as it is.

I should backup a second… I decided on the 32 GB version with Wifi + 3G. I decided I don’t care about the data fee for the thing if I’m really going to use it everywhere. Of course I’m not going to tote it literally EVERYWHERE with me like a little fanboy, but if I feel like taking it to visit family so I can show off pictures or something, I want internet. And the 32 GB should be plenty for some movies, all of my photos, and some music… oh and apps.

Anyway… the Apple Store in Victor tells me they do have a few of the 32GB 3G models but they CANNOT hold one for me. Eh… fine, whatever. That was early in the morning. I start thinking about it and if I end up leaving after work to go get this thing and I end up making a 3 hour trip for nothing if they’re sold out, I would be PISSED. So after lunch, I decide to head out early. I call them up again and confirm they still have some in stock – they do – and again I plead to hold one at least for the amount of time it takes me to drive there – nope. No can do. Fuckers.

So Jen and I make the drive to Victor and thankfully they have ONE left in stock of the particular model I wanted. Close call. I must admit, at this point, I’m half giddy, half in shock. Do you realize how much these things cost? I just paid almost $800 for a tiny little tablet that I’m not even sure yet will do what I want. Ouch.

No matter… after some other shopping (while we were there) and a partial nap on the way home, I can finally get it out and see what it can do…

That’s kind of where I am with it now. I’ve got a bunch of apps installed (lots of free ones) and I’ve setup my mail, contacts, and calendar through Gmail/Exchange. So that’s all good. Now it is a matter of getting to a comfortable point with it.

I also picked up some other super awesome apps that you may want to look into…

• Flight Control HD – Firemint – seriously addicting game
• Pulse News Reader – Alphonso Labs Inc. – fantastic RSS reader (for real, I’ve never used anything RSS before this)
• Strip Designer – Vivid Apps – fun for making little comics… like the ones below

The “combo drive” (CDRW+DVDROM) in my Macbook decides to shit the bed. OK, so it’s not totally dead – but it makes some awful noises and decides to randomly spit out a disc it’s trying to read. Definitely a drive problem. Does the same thing in Windows. I wasn’t even able to play Starcraft that I installed on it. Just ejects my disc.

eBay to the rescue though. $60 later and I have a replacement drive on the way. This time figured I’d go with a “superdrive” … or what Apple calls a DVD burner. Damn things are expensive.

A new replacement drive is $100+ and some were as high as $200 depending on where you look (iFixit, I’m looking at you). With instructions from iFixit, it shouldn’t be too hard.

I do this shit for a living… replace hardware in laptops I mean. I have no problem swapping a system board or a processor or display in a laptop. Sure, it’s a smaller space, but patience and attention to detail is key. With an Apple though… it’s a whole different ballgame.

Ok, maybe not. But it will probably be a bit different than most of the “Wintel” junk I tear apart all day.

Oh… and my Windows 7 freezing problem is STILL not fixed. Tried new video drivers. Didn’t help. Also just now turned off Aero. Why am I thinking video issues? Well when I go to wake it up (and it just sits there like a dumb cow) I can hear a fan spin up in my case – which sounds small enough to be the fan on my video card. I don’t know for sure, it’s just another hunch. We’ll see how it goes.

Sad part was that I hadn’t ever gotten to use it. Ya, our stuff was backed up OK – but that’s just it. We never needed to recover anything.

I finally got my feet wet in the recovery process last night.

Why did we have to restore from a backup? Well Jen has a few things that she needs to do for work that we couldn’t get to work properly through OS X (some webinar type of things). I also tried virtualization and it still was not working properly. Figured I might as well put Windows on her Macbook via Boot Camp. But wait… it won’t let me. That thing would not partition to save its own life.

A few months ago when we ran into this problem I figured I would fix it all when Snow Leopard came out…. but being the idiot that I occasionally am, I didn’t do a clean install, so the HDD remained in its unpartitionable state. Until last night. I finally gave up and decided to reinstall completely – but in order to do that, I’d have to make sure she had a full backup completed.

Easier said than done apparently. Her system hadn’t been doing any backups since I put SL on – something to do with what her laptop was named, apparently (it was long, had a couple spaces and an apostrophe). I found a few threads on the Apple support forums about the same issue. So I renamed her Macbook, deleted the old sparsebundle file on the Time Capsule and let it complete a couple backups overnight.

Finally last night, that had been completed and I could reinstall SL. Of course, I wanted to integrate her backup and do a complete restore… just from scratch so the drive could be partitioned. OS X made this ridiculously easy. I booted to the disc and selected Restore from Backup from one of the menus, made sure the system was on wifi and found the backup device, selected her backup, and clicked Restore.

About 4 hours later it was done. Good as new and nothing out of place. First thing I did though was go right to Boot Camp. That thing partitioned like a champ and I proceeded to put XP SP3 on it so she could do her work things at home when needed. Showed her how to switch between the two.

Done.

Firefox has all of the extensions and options that I like (and am used to) but Safari is a great browser and feels a bit faster many times on my Macbook. I’ve been trying to become more used to it lately and see if it’ll do what I like and am used to on Firefox.

One thing that has been bugging me is that there is no obvious option to open links with a “_blank” target in a new tab. Ya, I could COMMAND+click it or right click it, but that gets old after a while – not to mention that I don’t always know which ones are going to do what. OK, I could look at Safari’s status bar and see what it is going to do – but I don’t always think to do that. Instead it is much easier to just set all of them to open in a new tab. That’s just how I like it (Firefox has an option for this out of the box).

A quick Google search turned up this random blog post with a quick Terminal tip to give me what I want. So props to whoever put that up, as that was the first helpful one that came up.

Basically you just exit Safari and open Terminal, then type this and hit enter:

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

Then you can close Terminal and open Safari and try it out. Perfect!

The little light on it has a mind of its own. Normally it should be green when fully charged and amber/orange when charging. It should never be off.

Mine has been expressing its independence lately and turns off randomly. Strange thing is that the laptop continues to charge and seems to function OK. It shows no sign of an actual problem with the power supply from the laptop. It just seems to be a problem with the LED.

I was checking this support document from Apple and everything seems OK that I can tell. No stuck pins. Not incredibly dirty or anything. And it has been working fine on the same outlet since we’ve plugged it in. No signs of any damage that I can see.

I suppose I’ll just have to keep an eye on it and take it in if it gets worse. Very strange though.

To be honest, I haven’t really noticed much of a performance difference yet. I didn’t really do any tests before and after… but things seem to run mostly the same. There is definitely more free space (and I freed up even more afterward by deleting unnecessary stuff) – but part of that is actually up for much debate on the internets right now.

Apparently Apple decided to change the way SL measures hard drive space. It’s still the same amount of space free and used… but measured differently. It’s actually difficult to explain even if you completely understand it – and I don’t even know if I completely understand it yet.

Anyway, everything went very smooth with the upgrade. I have a Family Pack license and also need to upgrade Jen’s laptop while she’s home this weekend – as well as install a copy of Windows on it for her. That’s going to be some fun I can maybe do tomorrow during the Penn State game.

Lian-Li Case

Desktop:

• Lian-Li Black Brushed Aluminum Case (pictured)
• Rosewill Stallion 450W Power Supply
• Intel Motherboard (G965 Express)
• Intel Core 2 Duo Processor @ 2.2 GHz (E4500)
• 4 GB Crucial Memory (DDR2 800, PC2 6400)
• XFX GeForce 8600 GTS (256 MB GDDR3)
• 74 GB Western Digital Raptor for OS (10,000 RPM)
• 1 TB Western Digital Caviar Black for Storage
• 1 TB Hitachi Deskstar for Backup
• Encore 802.11n Wireless PCI Card
• Windows 7 Professional

She’s not much of a supercomputer, but does what I need to do without much whining. I’d like to build another some day but it’s not very high on my list. My monitor is an old 18″ NEC LCD that I got while still in college – at least I’m getting my $500 out of it!

The laptop is not much of a list. It is just a Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, Late 2007 13″ Apple Macbook. I use it mainly for playing on the internet on the couch or wherever. I also do some very light video editing with it. There is much more Apple gear spread throughout the apartment though. As I’ve detailed previously, my home network is 100% Apple – complete with Time Machine backups to a 500 GB Western Digital connected to the Airport Extreme. Delicious.

Previously I’ve been using an Apple Airport Express. It certainly fits the “simple” property. You just plug the brick into the wall and plug in the network cable and it works. Of course, being me, there is still a bit of configuration to be done, but that’s really about it.’, ‘Lately Jen and I have been looking at ways to setup Time Machine on our Macbooks to get the backups to kick in. I had tried sharing a drive off my Windows PC and it would work sometimes but was definitely not reliable. We scrapped the idea. I have since changed my drive setup on the Windows PC and no longer need the 500 GB external hard drive for that.

Figured this was as good of a time as any to jump into another network upgrade. I could have went for 2 in 1 and just bought Apple’s Time Capsule… but why pay extra $ for the storage when I already have a perfectly good USB drive? So the obvious answer was an Airport Extreme Base Station… with it’s USB port, I could easily plug in that USB drive, share it, and set Time Machine to backup the systems on that drive.

All while upgrading my network! Truly a win-win situation if there ever was one.

So now my network is setup like this… Airport Extreme in the second bedroom as the router/file server. Airport Express in the “master” bedroom for AirTunes (to a set of bookshelf speakers) and extending the wireless network. Another Airport Express in the living room doing the same thing – AirTunes to my receiver and extending the initial wireless network.

But wait! There’s more. I have a previous generation Airport Express (pre 802.11n) in the dining room sharing a printer. Figured the slower, non-n ApEx would be best for the printer duties… it handles them well. The setup was cake on my Windows desktop and both of the Macbooks.

I hate to sound like a fanboy… but Apple definitely makes it easy. Did I mention we have 5 iPods in the house between the two of us?

What now? Well as some of you may or may not know, there is currently a beta of Windows 7 floating around. I was finally able to get a key from the Microsoft site and just downloaded the beta from one of my “usual” sites, so it’s still legit.

Trouble is that I didn’t want to disrupt the current “OK-ness” of my Vista desktop. It has been fairly stable lately and I don’t want to really mess around with that. So what does that leave me to do?

Install it on my Macbook, of course!

If you didn’t know… any Apple computer (as of… well, not long ago) can also run Windows along with OS X (it runs both, essentially, but one at a time – you can reboot into the other). You could also use Parallels or Fusion to run it within OS X… but I don’t want to bother with that. My 2.0ghz Macbook can handle it on its own.

Started up Boot Camp and popped in the disc. Took about 20 minutes to install (surprisingly!). My first impressions are actually pretty good – like the rest of the internet, it seems. Just about everything was working instantly upon install. I installed the Boot Camp software just to have it completed. Performance seems nearly on part with my Vista desktop (with lesser specs, even).

I still want to test startup time and see what I’m looking at, but I expect it to be decent. My Vista system boots up to the login screen in just about 45 sec to 1 min.

So far so good though… only major “complaint” I have is that right click is a bit awkward. But that’s mostly just because there is only one button. I have to hold two fingers on the touchpad and then click. Thankfully I don’t right click often, so it’s not really a big deal.

EDIT: Turns out it only takes about 50 seconds to boot up to the login screen. And really only a few seconds after I enter my password to get to the desktop.

EDIT2: Apparently I don’t have any sound… Hmm.

I usually just acquire my software through um… “other means.” Mostly because they’re just things I rarely use and I’m not paying hundreds of dollars for something I’m not going to use on any regular basis. I don’t care how much work someone had to put into it… most software prices are absurd.

That’s why it is, again, surprising that I would pay for software. So what is it that is so good that I decided I should pay for it?

iLife ’09

No, it’s not incredible or anything… but some of the new features of iMovie look really cool as well as some new things in iPhoto. Don’t care so much about Garageband (though there are some cool new ideas there to) or iWeb (don’t use – but who knows).

And since Apple licensing is odd and Jen also has a Macbook, I figured why not go for the “family licensing” 3-pack. iLife itself is $80, but for anotehr $20, you get 2 more licenses. No brainer – even with an extra license. And the nice thing is that I get more of a discount through Corning… so the family license pack comes to just over $82 + tax.

Too bad it doesn’t ship until February.