This weekend I decided to dismantle an old laptop that I had. Trying to figure out what to do with it, I turned to the web for ideas. I found a couple of sites that talked about turning your old laptops into digital photo frames so I thought I’d give it a shot.
Here is the finished product.
Yep, the whole setup is mounted behind the frame. More posts to come on how it was made.
Now that I’ve been Mac’n for a while I got to thinking, how do I make my Windows computers more “Mac friendly”. Hello Google. There are some tools out there that can mimic the look and feel of the major Mac features on a Windows machine. The best I’ve found are at Stardock. For free you can get a reasonable shareware version of ObjectBar and ObjectDock which will mimic the Mac desktop. You can get a good OSx background for ObjectDock from WinCustomize.
Though not always perfect, they are a suitable alternative to the Windows Start Menu. To finish off the look throw in your Yahoo Widgets for some desktop enhancements and find some good icon replacements.
Last, but not least, you MUST have a launcher. Try Launchy!
And voilà! There you have it, Mac on Windows.
P.S. If you change your Wife’s computer without telling her with the software listed above, she will get angry!
Check out the new WeilOnline page and post any suggestions to the forum. Now that we’ve got a static site up the next step will be uploading some more content to the current galleries/forums, and changing to a more robust implementation (probably Ruby) so we don’t have to maintain it as much.
So lately I’ve been having some issues with my internet connection at home. For the most part it works completely fine but, now and then, during what I would consider peak hours (~6-10pm) we’ll have trouble keeping a connection. Our symptoms are slow/sluggish connection when directly connecting the modem to a Windows machine, and little to no connectivity when connected to a router. If we connect to the router we will be able to access the internet for around 2-5 minutes and then disconnect. Renewing the DHCP will get us connected again…..for another 2-5 minutes.
I tell you that so I can tell you this: the majority of cable company customer service departments I’ve ever dealt with stink….bad. After the trouble with the internet we call our provider and talk them through what we’ve done (resetting routers, modems, making sure firmware is up to date, etc)……and then proceed to spend the next 2 hours on the phone with L1 support going through the same things again and again. Now I understand that for the most part, folks calling for help do not work on computers for a living so reading from a script may be appropriate. However, there is no recognition of when it is inappropriate. A coworker of mine suggested customers be able to take a test that would then elevate them to a different level of support and I would have to say I agree. Kind of an “online certification” that says “I know to reboot my modem first, no need to have me do it 5 more times.”
For quite some time now I’ve been a fan of *nix and BSD based systems. However, at home, I’ve always used a Windows machine. I never made a full switch partly because of having to share the machine with other members of the family (the wife is not too fond of having to figure out something new on Windows let alone a whole new operating system altogether) and partly because of the compatibility with hardware and applications supported.
This week the wife and I decided it was time to promote the ole laptop (1.7ghz/1.5gb ram) to the official kids computer and get us something new. From the start I said I was getting a Mac, period. I thought I had her convinced that it was the right way to go for her new machine as well but when it came down to making the purchase it was too daunting. She couldn’t pass up the familiarity of Windows (even with Vista installed) and the fact that she could pay about $600 less and get more than double the storage, ram, and about the same processor speed.
So now we are a diverse OS household. I still got my Mac (the 20″ iMAC), we are running OS X, Vista, XP, and a little Ubuntu now and then all in harmony. How long will this Brave New World last? I dunno but I’m enjoying it so far and don’t plan on going back.
If you are considering switching from Windows to Mac or a *nix system I encourage you to try it out, see if it is for you, and then make the switch. To help out a little with the *nix based systems try this out (you could, of course, just use a live distro if you wanted):