Saturday, September 30, 2006

AWESOME New Apple Zoom Feature!

First off, are you running OS X Tiger 10.4.8? If not, you should be for speed reasons. Secondly, if you haven't updated your system recently, or for some reason the apple updater didn't update you to 10.4.8, go to the apple menu and select "Software Update..."

OS X 10.4.8 zooming
OS X 10.4.8 zooming 2

Check out the new zooming features in the mouse section of the system prefs! Hold down Ctrl and scroll with your scroll wheel/ball, or trackpad and you can zoom into your screen to get a close up!

SeaMonkey

From the people who brought us Firefox, Mozilla now has this new project called the SeaMonkey project. This is a new browser, email client, irc client, and html editer... all-in-one!

seamonkey

Apple Update Fixes Speed Issue!

The recent 10.4.8 update seemed to have fixed a bug that was keeping us mac users from experiencing the full 'comcastic' speed.
speed test 8Mb guage speed test 15.5 Mb
(Left: 8.1 Mb connection, Right: 15.6Mb connection!!!)

As you can see from the results above, we are now able to get REALLY fast speeds with the Mac OS. Thank you Apple!

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Free ADC Membership?

Most people probably don't even know what the Apple Developer Connection is. Well basically it's a membership where you, as a developer, get exclusive access to lots of geeky goodies. Such as most recent stable versions of Xcode (Wikipedia), Apple's IDE (Wikipedia), most recent beta Core Audio updates, and beta Java upgrades, and other fun apps Apple wants to have developers test.

Apple Developer Connection

I'm taking a class right now called Digital Programming, which is just C and C++ programming, and I needed an IDE to work with. Of course I went right to the best software developers in the world, Macintosh, so I could get something easy, fast, and powerful to use. When I first starting looking around it appeared that only Apple Developers could get access to the goods, and that I would have to pay like 400 bucks to become a member, which I wasn't going to do, or torrent the file. I was browsing one night when I stumbled upon this site that said I could sign up for a basic membership for free! So I checked it out, and it turns out all I had to do was fill out a form that explained who I was and what I needed to use the developer's kit for and they gave me a free basic membership, which includes all the downloads they offer to the paying members.

If you think you would benefit these super geeky features, then check out the
Apple Developer page!

Saturday, September 9, 2006

Comcastic?

Recently my suite-mates and I purchased a tv and high-speed internet package from Comcast because our school sucks and gives us nothing good... anyways, when we went to test the speeds we were quite surprized as to what we came accross...

----------------------------------------down ---------- up ---- ping delay
Speedtest.net 4.9Mb
Speedtest.net 17Mb

What you're looking at are the speed test results from speedtest.net (the coolest online speed tester we know of), the top result was from our Mac OS X running notebooks, and the bottom result is from a desktop with Windows XP. We were baffled to see that repeatedly we were getting the normal speeds on our Macs and somehow the XP machine was getting 17.3 Mb speeds, which is like downloading a file at over 2MB/s!!!

We think maybe the XP has some kind of hardware that is getting through the Comcast speed cap.



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