Kirk Petersen » macbook

Selling Stuff

kirk — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 19:04:07 +0000

I’m selling my 8″ Dobsonian telescope. I’ll probably be asking about $150 and might make it $100 if any friends are interested. It is a great telescope if you have an SUV to haul it around in. It’s about 4 feet tall and the base is very bulky. That’s the downside of a telescope that gathers that much light for that price. I’ll just be using a set of 15×70 binoculars for the 2-3 times a year that I actually look at stars (worked great last weekend).

I’ll probably sell my 15″ Macbook Pro. I just bought one of the new aluminum Macbooks and really don’t need two machines (rather, my iPhone has become my second machine).

Also selling my car (in order to buy a new/newer one). I will probably sell my motorcycle, too. I didn’t ride for a couple years and really felt like getting back into it. But I just don’t ride it enough. Part of that is the bike (not as fun as I thought it would be) and part of that is simply having a million other things to do.

New Laptop Bag

kirk — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 06:27:35 +0000

I just got this laptop bag:

Yeah, it’s called the “Blogger”. Even the Timbuk2 site makes fun of the name.

The last bag I had was a r.e.load messenger bag with a really bulky and stiff strap. I finally got fed up with it. My new bag is much smaller. Now that I’m carrying my Macbook Pro on the bus regularly, I decided to splurge.

Bonus: discovered that I had a $60 dividend at REI which paid for most of the bag.

Ubuntu and Parallels

kirk — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 07:16:27 +0000

I love little little web badges like this:

Not long until Ubuntu 7.10 comes out, supposedly with some nice new features. I’m excited, even though all I ever do is download the latest, install it in Parallels, play with it for a few hours, and forget about it until I’m looking to free up some disk space and notice the 3gig disk image and trash it.

I’ve used Linux as my main OS at work for over 8 years, so it isn’t like I’ve given up on it. I’m just more comfortable with OS X these days. The weird thing is that I can’t figure out exactly why.

One big reason used to be iTunes and the iPod, but I rarely use my iPod(s) these days. And my new phone has an mp3 player and takes 4gig memory cards. And if I buy any music online it is from the new Amazon MP3 store, not ITMS.

The fact that my Macbook Pro always wakes up quickly when I open it is nice, though to be honest I don’t put it to sleep as much because I rarely take it anywhere these days.

Hmm.

I do watch a lot of DVDs on my laptop and I’m not sure if that is very smooth on Linux yet.

BlackBerry

kirk — Sun, 13 May 2007 22:20:00 +0000

I’m at Vivace right now and their WAP isn’t working so I’m using my BlackBerry as a GPRS/EDGE modem. I figured I’d write down the steps I took to set this up. This only applies to Mac users with T-Mobile accounts.

1. pair your BlackBerry and Mac (System Preferences -> Bluetooth)
2. copy blackberry8100.txt to /Library/Modem Scripts
3. go to System Preferences -> Network
4. select Bluetooth
5. click on the PPP tab
6. enter “guest” as both the account name and password
7. enter “wap.voicestream.com” as the telephone number
8. click on the Bluetooth Modem tab
9. select “BlackBerry 8100″ as your Modem
10. open the “Internet Connect” app
11. click “Connect”

The bandwidth isn’t bad but the latency is between 500ms and 1.5 seconds. It makes for a barely-usable network experience.

Update: it has been a couple months and I find the EDGE network to be fast enough for checking email once in a while, when there isn’t an open WAP around. I use it probably once a week.