Macintosh

Airport Express

by

I just bought an Airport Express so I can connect wirelessly in my hotel room. As soon as I plugged it in, it automatically worked, since the connection uses DHCP. I didn’t have to set anything up initially, although I ran the setup utility to rename it and set a password. When I get home I’ll connect it to my stereo for AirTunes.

Laptops going to kids at 4 Broward schools

by

From the Miami Herald: Within a few months, 4,500 Broward students — some as young as 9 — will be on the front lines of a technological revolution in the county’s classrooms. Each student in the pilot project will be issued an Apple iBook computer.

The School Board has spent $5 million from its capital budget for the iBooks — the first step toward putting a personal computer in the hands of every child in grades 3 to 12.

School officials caution they’re still working on details of what’s called one-to-one computing, which is planned for Monarch High in Coconut Creek, Miramar High, Attucks Middle in Hollywood and Broward Estates Elementary in Fort Lauderdale.

But technology leaders are already thinking bigger. “One-to-one is a big initiative for us,” said the school district’s new chief information officer, Vijay Sonty. “We want to reform and restructure how technology is used in schools.”

ADHOC Blogging

by

I’m now at the ADHOC conference and David Pogue is giving the keynote. My first impression is that it’s a lot smaller than the usual MacHack and has a very low-budget feel. There are only about 100 people rather than the usual 200-300. A lot of people who were here previous years weren’t here. I think this was the first MacHack that Leonard Rosenthal didn’t attend. Even Miro isn’t here.

We only have half of the main hall where the keynote & hack show was held. Internet access was a bit different. There’s no DHCP server; we have to obtain a static IP address.

At first there were no power strips in the atrium. We had to beg for them in the machine room. The keynote is as much fun as always, so maybe things will pick up for the rest of the conference.

Browsers Revisited

by

Over the weekend I decided to do some speed comparisons on the various browsers I use (strictly by “feel”, not scientific) and I found that Firefox was by far the fastest, even faster than Camino. I’ve now been using Firefox as my default browser for a few days and I’m very happy with it.

Memory Upgrade

by

I now have 1Gb of RAM in my Powerbook and it’s much faster. Before, when I ran ‘top‘ it would show only 5 or 6M of free ram, and it would be painfully slow from all of the swapping. Now I see at least 500M free with no disk swapping. I now see only one swapfile in /var/vm; with 512M I would see 6 or 7 after running for a while with several applications open.

More RAM

by

I just ordered 512M of RAM for my PowerBook G4. I find that with only 512M of RAM, it can get extremely slow when I’m compiling something big. Top shows only 5M of free memory when I have lots of stuff running. Unfortunately the current configuration is two 256M DIMMs, so I’ll only have 512M with the upgrade. I will probably replace the other DIMM with a 512M or larger one later.

Mozilla takes a dump

by

I installed Mozilla 1.7 final and used it for a few hours. It suddenly froze my machine completely – I couldn’t even SSH to it from another machine, so I did a hard reboot. The next time I ran Mozilla, all of my preferences were gone, including all of my email accounts, cookies & saved passwords.