Heimic

I’ve had VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta1 installed now for a few days and managed to give it a good test in that time. Below is a few screen grabs which show some rather nice changes to the products GUI, unfortunately I cannot show it in comparison to what they use to look like. Unless I wanted to reinstall it and capture them.

VMware has revamped the Virtual Machine Library window, and I must say I do like it. Although I think the image shown to the right could do with a bit of work to make the scaling of it work a little better. It looks a little wrong.

Further more, they have improved the dialog for editing the settings for the guest operating systems and I do like this too.

Unfortunately one thing I do think that is lacking is the that when I add another Hard Disk, it doesn’t prompt you to create a vmdk that is split or not. This is a bit fustrating, as it only appears to do this during the inital configuration of a guest from scratch. Something that needs to be improved.

It would appear we still haven’t had the development of a network configuration tool to manage the virtual network interfaces, it would appear we still have to edit this stuff via the command line.

On the whole, an improvement. But I would love to see certain things fixed as suggested (and I hope they do in future builds).

Rewired our home theater setup and wired the PS3 into the TV. I must say I am very happy with the result. It worked perfectly fine. Bluray movie playback on the TV at 1080p is really sweet. It looks very good. The PS3 menu even looks a lot better, not to mention GTA IV.

Very happy with the result. All I need now is to test a few good Bluray movie titles. DVD upscaling is very good too, I think I will watch my DVD’s via the PS3 rather then via our Beyonwiz DP-S1.

Downloaded MediaLink for OSX and it seems to work really well. It implements a uPnP server on OSX for sharing out iTunes and iPhoto data, along with other folders of files as you select. Playback of content like DivX and XviD files is very nice. I think I’ll even purchase a license for MediaLink as it works without any effort.

As of yesterday I finally caved in and purchased a Sony Playstation 3. Being a fan of GTA for a long time, it finally swayed me. Although the cruncher came when my wife discovered that the May issue of Australian Womens Weekly contained a Target discount coupon. After tracking down a store with stock, we told them I will be in by close of business to pickup and pay for it. Store in question was happy enough to hold a pack.

So as of lastnight, I now have a PS3 and GTA IV game. I really like the game, it’s quite good. The detail of the city is great. I have to say the cars in the game are very good too, as is the driving around the city and having accidents etc. I think I will have some fun going forward trying to complete it.

Target’s PS3 + GTAIV pack price was $729, so I ended up getting $70 off this price with the voucher. So final buy price at register was $659. And then when you minus the price of the game (or the lowest price I’ve seen the game for of $78), the console cost us $581.

Plan for the weekend is to grab a HDMI cable and hook it upto to our TV this way, so we get the best resolution possible (especially when it comes time to play Bluray movies). I also want to grab an optical audio cable so the audio can be sent directly to our Yamaha AMP for the best possible sound output.

We’ll for the first time in a long time I am down to a single system. I recently decided to sell my Mac Mini 1.66 Core Duo. The machine had served me well and was 2 years old. Since I was using it a little less then I had hoped, I figured why not just sell it so someone else can use it more then I do.

I had every intension of selling it in a years time anyways, so I just did it earlier. I also decided to sell my ACD 20″ Display which had served me extremely well. So both items got a new home.

I use my iMac 20″ 2.16 Core 2 Duo for pretty much everything, so this machine will continue to be used for everything day to day. The plan has been to pickup a MacBook to replace the Mac Mini (and use the MacBook for day to day stuff which doesn’t require me to be tied to the desk at home). I think it’s going to be fairly important to break free of the desk as much as possible and use computer via wireless as much as possible (especially when we have kids).

So I am expecting to purchase white MacBook mid-range model and bump it to 4gb ram, since ram is so well priced atm. This machine will suit me perfectly. The way extra ram will allow me to continue running a number of virtual machines via VMware Fusion with ease. I don’t really need a MacBook Pro for the beefed up Video. Maybe I can step upto this at a later stage if and when it’s required. Maybe to replace the laptop + iMac down the track. We’ll see what happens.

As per subject, I’ve compiled and packaged the latest GNU Wget 1.11.1 for MacOS X. It’s a universal binary too.

Download a copy from here.

If you download this, please make a comment. Feedback is most welcomed.

Our 1Tb Time Capsule arrived last week. I immediately got home with the unit and opened it up.

Not much inside the box, configured the unit. Then set 2 machines to backup to the unit. Things have been going fine since then.

Speed wise from the ethernet based machine seems okay, from the MacBook Air it tends to vary a bit. It works well enough and hopefully future firmware revisions improve things.

I’ll do another post in a few days time that includes screen grabs from all the options that can be configured as seen from Airport Admin Utility, which I couldn’t find on the net before I purchased.

Finally had the chance to do some maintenance, so I have upgraded to the latest WordPress. The site appears to still be working, so it seems to have been a success so far.

I didn’t appear to have any errors during the upgrade, so will keep an eye on it in the meantime.

Well my wife finally got her new notebook/laptop. She opted to get an MacBook Air. I must say I am very impressed so far.

Job for tonight is to do a reinstall and remove the extra install items that we don’t need so we free up some space. Then I will move over all her data which is currently sitting on my iMac.

Unfortunately, the 1Tb Time Capsule I ordered with it has been delayed. It appears Apple are having troubles making enough of them for demand. So the reseller is filling orders as they arrive. So eventually we will make it to the front of the order queue. I believe they said they got 5 units in stock earlier in the week and fulfilled 5 orders. I am looking forward to this item arriving, then I will be happy to know the MacBook Air is being backed up every so often (without the need to manually do it each week).

The phone service was fixed by about 10am yesterday. It would appear the fault was probably at the RIM as we thought. Which ironically means I was entirely correct in saying the DSL tech who did the ADSL activation caused it.

All fixed, but it did take them longer then expected. At least ADSL remained intact.

My wife had a nice little argument with a Telstra Supervisor just on Tuesday. It appears our attempt got parked. So she proceeded to let them have it.

By the time that 30min call ended, they had found a port and set the service to provisioning.

Wednesday evening it had DSL sync and working.

Unfortunately it came at a cost. That cost was the fact the foolish person who provisioned it, managed to screw our voice service. Yes, you guessed it. We now have no dial tone on our phone service. So I can’t make calls or even accept them.

Logged a fault today, they said it will be fixed by Tuesday. Of course I got the usual spill about troubleshooting, so I repeated myself a few times to indicate it was fine until your incompetent tech attempted to enable DSL. Before that, never had a issue. After that, no dial tone. Unbelievable.

In any case the ADSL1 1500 line speed seems fine. It’s stable and as fast as it should be for this service. Attainable line rate appears to be not crash hot, but it’s fine for the service I have. So that’s good enough for me. Just a real shame they had to kill our phone service in the process. Wish I checked it 2 days ago. We don’t usual use the land line during the week..

In other news though, 2 days after my wife’s call the Telstra Wholesale report came out and indicated that several days earlier the RIM had 40 available ports. Be interesting to see how many of those are still available in the new report due out on Monday I believe.