Apple

If you bought a Macbook Pro in the last couple years, like me, you may be pushing the limits of the factory installed 250Gb hard drive. So far, the factory installed Toshiba hard drive has been rock solid, no complaints. I just need more space than 250Gb.

As of right now, the current Macbook Pros come with 500Gb or 750Gb hard drives (with an option to upgrade to 1Tb).  Back when I bought, they had 250Gb and 500Gb options. If you want more storage in your Macbook Pro, read on!

Select a Hard Drive

The first decision you have to make when buying a hard drive is how much space do you want?

I figure storage is relatively cheap, so why not go as big as possible? After a bit of research, the disk I chose to go with is the Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1 TB Hard Drive. The decision was mainly based on the size of the disk, but several reviews I read all stated the disk is quiet and reasonably fast for it's size. The price is right as well (right around $100US).

I was recently faced with having to change the domain name on a Mac OS X Server. If I had to do this on a Windows machine, it would be a relatively simple process using a GUI interface. However, on a Mac server, there isn't (as of version 10.6.8) a way to change the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) via a GUI. Thankfully, there is a way to change the domain settings using the CLI and it's a piece of cake.

The changeip command was created to allow administrators to change the ip address and FQDN in static config files on a Mac OS X Server. For example, if you setup the DNS and iCal services, instead of manually updating the config files associated with these services, simply running the changeip command updates the files for you. 

The syntax for the command is as follows:

If you are ever in a situation where you have an img (disk image) file, but you want it to be an ISO file so you can mount it rather than burn it, then we have something in common. I stumbled on a quick and easy process using the free Mac OS X Disk Utility (free if you have a Mac) and have created a quick video to demonstrate the steps. Check it out...

Update: Thanks to an anonymous commenter, the much simpler way to achieve the same results is to rename the file extension from img to iso. I just tested this and it appears to work. Who would have thought?

It's finally here and may just be that last bit of justification you need to buy an iPad 2. Redpark has released a serial console cable that is Apple certified and will work on Apple IOS devices such as the iPhone and iPad. The console cable sells for $69.00 USD and is available via Redpark's online shopping cart site. 

Once you get the cable, what good is it to you without a terminal application? Well, if you don't want to jailbreak your device and load a terminal program that way, there is an app called Get Console available in the app store. Their How It Works page is very informative, they even have the following YouTube video to demonstrate how it works:

Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac launched in September and I finally got around to upgrading to the new version on my Macbook Pro. They claim there are some pretty lofty improvements in Windows 7 performance and startup times.. Oh, and you can play 3D games in your VM too. After playing with it a little bit, surfing the net in the W7 VM does seem a little snappier, but it still takes a couple minutes to boot up the VM from scratch. Not sure if I need to enable something to make that move faster. I normally just put the VM to sleep anyway, which is pretty fast to wake up.

What caught my eye this morning is a new feature which lets you access applications running in your Windows VM from an iPhone or iPad.