SubEthaEdit Blogzot on today!

It's Blogzot 2.0 on MacZOT.com! MacZot has tempted me into buying a bunch of Mac Shareware so far but no price is better than free! Especially when it comes to SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys, a cool collaborative text editor.

If enough people blog about it, the price will reduce all the way to free. MacZOT and TheCodingMonkeys will award $105,000 in Mac software (that's 3000 licenses worth $35 each) so here's my 5 cents worth - go do your bit!

Mac Newbie Tip #1: Turn on the tabs!

There are a number of things I do to set up my Mac OS X environment when I start using a new Mac or set up a new version of the OS. A few of you that read the blog (Arjun, Sudhish) are starting to use the Mac OS for the first time and I figured that I would write down a few tips here in the hope that they others may find them useful now and in the future as well.

For tip #1, I'll start with Safari which is the default browser included with the OS, a pretty good one if I may add! Inexplicably, Apple ships Safari with a couple of key options turned off.

First, you may want to turn on the pop-up blocker. There's still a great many sites that will annoy the hell out of you with pop-up windows so I find it very useful to turn the blocker on. This is easily accomplished by turning it on from the menu. Here's where you can find it.



Next, I recommend you turn on tabbed browsing. I love tabs in my browser, as anyone using Firefox would also attest. IE 7 in Windows Vista will have this feature next year but Safari has had it for a good few years now. To turn this on, go to Safari->Preferences and select 'Tabs' on the top strip. Here's what you'll see. The keyboard shortcuts are handy too.



As a bonus, try Command (this is the key with the Apple logo) and the comma key. That is an almost universal shortcut for the Preferences window in any application.
Mac Newbie Tip_

Spending time spending money - Pt. 2

I've been meaning to continue this series of short intros to my new toys that I am most happy with. For part two, I'd like to bring up my 20GB iPod click-wheel (4G). I used to own a 40GB version of the same iPod that I sold less than a year back but the prices on these have dropped so much that I just couldn't resist buying one at $100. I already have a vast iTunes library and both our cars are wired for it, so it was a no-brainer. Another addition to my library of personal audio players (yes, listing them all out would be a whole new post!).

So far in 2006 -

1. Sony MDR-7506 Headphones - $90
2. Apple iPod 20GB (4G) - $100
Spending time money_

Happy Tamil New Year!

It's the Tamil New Year today, wishes to everyone - have a great year ahead!

Tamil New Year normally sees a whole slew of star movies but this year everyone's focus is on the upcoming elections in Tamil Nadu. There's still a bunch of movies out though, here's a link to an overview.

Happy Vishu to our Mallu friends.

A month's wine - Mar 2006

A month's wine - Mar 2006
Originally uploaded by Jillako.

I've neglected the blog a bit over the last couple of weeks, hope to get back to normal soon enough. In the meanwhile, here's a delayed look at last month's wine. There were some real surprises here.

Obligatory Boot Camp post

So Apple has been on a tear the last couple of days and it's not just the stock! The whole world has been inundated with the news but being that I have a strong Apple focus, it would be kind of odd to leave this bit out. So, here's the short n' quick post.

It all started with Boot Camp, software released by Apple that makes it a cinch to partition your drive and dual boot into Microsoft Windows. All on the Intel Macs, of course.

Makes things really interesting, now that you can officially boot Windows XP and even Vista on your Mac!

If you decide to do it, don't forget the firmware update you need to apply to your Mac before you do the Bootcamp install.

Game benchmarks are apparently looking good!

If you read the first comment in there, you already know - Parallels has released Virtualization Software for the Mac.. like VMWare.. that you can use to run Windows!!

Would love to try all this stuff out, but I don't have an Intel iMac! Arjun does, however and will be trying some of this out over the weekend.