Can you spot the difference?

This is the same picture, spanning both of my screens. The screen on the left is a white Macbook, the screen on the right is a 20″ Apple Cinema Display. I spent about an hour yesterday trying to calibrate the Macbook’s screen to be as vivid as the Cinema Display. What you see here is actually an improvement over what I started with. It seems to affect yellow especially, but all the other colors I’ve tested still look muted on the Macbook.

I think I’m going to get a Pantone huey and see if that helps correct this problem. More later.

Wires are ugly

I spend a lot of my day at work typing, when I’m not being called in to solve technology problems across the building. I recently purchased this wireless keyboard and mouse to reduce the clutter on my desk, and they’re working beautifully so far.

If you use Apple Remote Desktop in a specialized lab environment where you assign your users to a generic UID and home directory, and you want to be able to see their actual usernames instead of the generic UID username, here’s the way to do it. In a terminal window, input as one line:

defaults write com.apple.RemoteDesktop showShortUserNames -bool true

You can find this tip on page 313 of the Mac OS X v10.4 System Administration Reference, Volume 2 book from Peachpit Press.

Here’s one for the sysadmins out there, in order to get this more exposure for easier searching:

If you’re using Mac OS X Server 10.4 and seeing a bunch of Delete .DS_Store -5000 0 0 errors show up in your AFP access logs, it probably means the .DS_Store file on the root level of your share is locked down to only owner privileges. Open it up (rw-rw–w-) and the errors will go away.

Here’s where I found the fix, hopefully they’ll keep the archived post for awhile: .DS_Store saturating the file server.

Recently, Apple announced that they are going to transition all Macs from using IBM’s PowerPC processor to Intel’s processors. Others, like those at Ars Technica, have addressed the technical issues in much more depth than I care to in this post (here and here).

Personally, I think it makes sense. Intel seems to be on the verge of delivering some serious advancements in hardware technology, and Apple is the perfect company to take advantage of them with advancements in the software and integration advancements they are famous for. Hopefully it will also bring down prices a bit, though high-end PCs (of which the Mac is one) are always expensive. At least now I won’t have to go through lengthy discussions about the merits of RISC processors vs. CISC processors.

In the end, what really matters is how well it works. If Apple can deliver at least as good of a user experience as they do with PowerPC chips, then I don’t see any problems. If Apple can make transfering code to the new processor architecture as easy as they show it to be in their demonstrations, that will help a lot.