After getting my hands on a iomega UltraMax I started to think about how to share the data on my local network. I have a Windows XP Mediacenter from Sony but being Windows it is not extremely stable nor adequate to really serves as a file server. Plus, it wouldn’t allow me to use the drive with Time Machine on my MacBook Pro. Therefore, I needed a machine running on Mac OS X so I can plug the hard drive and share it on the local network. So, yes, I bought a new computer. I wanted something not too expensive and small enough to fit nicely in my leaving room. Without further ado I present you the Mac Mini:

I’m still setting it up but it looks promising so far. Now, I stop spending money…well, maybe!

I’ve been thinking of getting a new external hard drive system for some time. What I was looking for was an affordable RAID-1 (data mirroring) solution so I don’t have to worry about losing data if the hard drive fails. Earlier this week I spent some time browsing for such solution and came across the iomega UltraMax:

According to the reviews I read it seemed like good value for money. It supports both RAID-0 and RAID-1. On Saturday I popped down the Apple Store on Regent Street and there it was on the shelves. So, after arguing with myself for about half a second I decided to pick one up. Once back home I read the doc, set it up in RAID-1 (RAID-0 is default) and nothing happened. It wouldn’t appear on my desktop. After fiddling around for about an hour with no success, I checked online and found out that the doc provided with the hard drive was not complete and did not mention that after setting the hard drive up in RAID-1 you need to press the Rebuild button! Once the damn button pressed it was all fine.

Besides the fan being a bit noisy, it lives up to my expectations.

Today I attended the Symbian Smartphone Show here in London. And while listening to Mike Lazaridis from RIM, I couldn’t help but draw a comparison between the successes of the Blackberry and the Mac. Both platforms focus on providing a rich and seemless user experience. But they can do so only because they keep tight control over their platform. And although the closeness of these platforms can also be motivated by more monetary concerns, it is to me one of the key enabler for offering your customers with a complete experience.

You must have heard that Apple is releasing a new version of its operating system in a few days. Given that I bought my laptop only a few weeks ago, the news wasn’t that good to me. Now, I am faced with the choice of whether to pay the £85 to get an upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5, or not! Some of the new features seem rather nice. Plus, I always like to be up-to-date. So my first thought was to go for it. But now I’m thinking that it probably is going to be a bit buggy so I might as well let other people feel the pain. I guess I’ll just wait a couple of weeks and then I’ll upgrade.

Following on my recent purchase of a MacBook Pro, I have to admit that I really enjoy the Mac user experience. The UI is very sleek. Plus, everything just works. Well, almost everything. As I mentioned in my previous post, my internet connection seamed very flaky on the Mac. it turned out it wasn’t my connection but the router (as my girlfriend suggested). So, guess what, I popped down the Apple Store again today and bought an Airport Extreme, the Apple router. After a bit of messing around, I got it to work fine with my current network configuration. So far, it’s all good. Let’s hope it stays that way.

On Saturday my laptop decided to surrender. More precisely, the screen started acting very weird and distort the image, rendering the computer virtually unusable. I thought it was only Windows messing around but it turned out to really be the display. I left it off for a few hours hoping it would fix things up but it didn’t. So what now, you ask? Well, a trip down the Apple Store, here I am sitting with a brand new MacBook Pro. I owned a few PCs but this is the first time I purchase a mac. So far the experience is quite pleasing. I’m still struggling to get all the software I need up and running, but mostly because of my rubbish internet connection.