macbook

I love letting other people see what tracks I listen to and I love being able to find artists similar to what’s on my playlist, that is why I love last.fm. Even though I don’t use my MacBook for listening to music much, when I do I still like to scrobble, or submit, the tracks. My problem has always been finding a good Mac client to do this. I used to use Menuet, but every time I right click the icon in the menu bar it crashes. So, I’m saying goodbye to that. I downloaded and installed the official client from last.fm and that was deleted almost instantaneously. The client gives you the option to place an icon in the menu bar but doesn’t give you the option of hiding it on the dock when it’s open. I don’t want it on my dock. At all. Deleted. So, right now I’m trying iScrobbler. We’ll see how I like this one when I’m actually able to listen to music. Does anyone have a suggestion for a last.fm app? Do you use something you think is better? If so, let me know.

I love my MacBook. I love it more than my previous Compaq laptop. It’s so much lighter, thinner, and well, OSX is much better than Windows. The reason I went with a MacBook and not a MacBook Pro was because I didn’t want a laptop that was as large as my old one. I wanted it lightweight and compact. The problem I see now, and it’s not so much a problem as a minor annoyance, is that I miss the larger screen. My old laptop had a 17 inch widescreen. My desktop has a 21 inch widescreen, and the MacBook has a 13 inch. The only time I really need it is when I’m working on website stuff. I like to have multiple windows open, along with IRC and instant messenger, and be able to move stuff around. More screen space equals more productivity for me. With a 13 inch screen Firefox or Smultron or Transmit take up the entire screen. Oh well, I still prefer working on my MacBook to my Windows Vista machine 99% of the time and I have no regrets in buying this over the MacBook Pro. I really can’t wait for my next desktop. I do believe that will be a Mac too.

Let me start this post by saying I love my MacBook. I use it every single day and am not disappointed in my purchase in the least. In fact, unless the next Windows blows me away (or the current version of Linux out there) my next desktop computer will probably be a Mac. That being said, I just love how Apple’s mantra is (or was) It just works. I’ll give you an example that I came across yesterday of it not working.

We all know that OSX Leopard update 10.5.2 came out on Monday. I upgraded, welcoming all the new fixes and updates. They changed Stacks a bit, which is good, but I still wish they would make Stacks how it was originally supposed to be. I want to create a stack on the dock for, say, all my communication apps: Adium, iChat, Colloquy. I want to click on that stack and have it expand to show those apps. The video for stacks before Leopard came out did exactly that, then the feature was removed. This post isn’t about that though. Stacks worked for me, even if it isn’t how I want it to work. My problem was with Time Machine.

I don’t keep my MacBook hooked up to the external drive at all times. In fact, I only hook it up when I want to make a backup. After updating to 10.5.2 on Monday I decided to make a Time Machine backup. The only changes that really occurred since the last Time Machine backup were adding maybe two files to the Documents folder. So I run Time Machine and it said Preparing backup. 30 minutes later, it still said the same thing. After about 45 minutes I decide to cancel the backup and try again later. Tuesday (on my snow day) I try again. It sat at Preparing backup for an hour before I canceled it. I go do some searching on the Apple forums and find numerous other people having problems backing up since 10.5.2. One solution that a user found was erasing the drive and starting over. I figured, why not, everything is still on here, it won’t hurt to erase the disk so I can backup again. So, I do it and what do you know? Time Machine works again. So, Apple, you release updates to fix the broken and you wind up breaking more stuff. Seems like a lot of Apple things don’t just work lately. Keep it up and I’m going to start calling you Microsoft. ;)

More and more I find myself browsing the net using Safari. I used to loathe Safari, and on Windows I still do, but it’s starting to grow on me a bit on the MacBook. On several Windows systems I found it to be much slower than Firefox, despite Apple’s claims. In fact, Opera and Firefox were faster at launching and loading websites. The only major browser it did beat in my experiences was the horror that is known as IE7. It does run faster than Firefox on the MacBook. The things I hated about Safari before still exist; the lack of an address drop-down until you type, the lack of extension support, etc. I still use Firefox for 99% of my web browsing, but I am slowly moving to Safari for more and more casual browsing (I’m writing this in Safari now). If I am doing web work or more heavy-duty browsing, Firefox is still my number one choice, and probably will be until Apple decides to add extension support. There are a few I can’t live without.