techiehenry

June 12, 2008 was my MacBook’s last day for free technical support. The following day would be its first year. Only then did I realize that I have to make a crucial choice: to get an extended warranty for it through AppleCare Protection Plan (ACPP), or just leave it without support and warranty for the rest of its life. This thing didn’t came to my mind since the past few weeks I was busy with more important things, but then I had to act fast if I decide to get ACPP.

As the image in the Apple Support site illustrates:

ACPP will extend the service and telephone support rendered for some Apple products.

After asking some co-employees who are Mac users, as well as those from PhilMUG, I decided on getting it. As to the reason why: I don’t think I would be able to spend as much money for gadgets in the following years as compared to now (my son would be going to school next year), so I better get ACPP to make sure that I won’t be paying later if something breaks down. So after work I immediately went to iStudio in Gateway Mall, Cubao and took the ACPP plunge.

People in iStudio were quite friendly. When they knew that the last day of my MacBook’s year-long support is on the same day that I would be applying for ACPP, they immediately called some Apple-certified techs to make sure that I could still use what I would be buying from them. All the while, my MacBook got cleaned, and its registration online was confirmed.

After making sure that everything would be okay, we went ahead and registered ACPP. In 5 minutes of less I could already see the confirmation message. That was it! My MacBook is protected for 2 more years!

Upon reaching home I checked the contents of the ACPP box. It has two booklets that contain the registration number and the ACPP Warranty information. It also came with a CD of TechTool Deluxe. Unfortunately the version included was outdated, so I just downloaded the latest from the Apple Support site.

It may indeed be expensive (at Php10,500) but it would be well worth it considering the peace of mind I get when I think about the service I will get in the following years.

(Part 1 of my Ubuntu installation series)

Almost three weeks ago the latest release of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, Hardy Heron, was made available for download from numerous servers across the internet. I went and downloaded the i386 ISO image directly from the servers overnight, only to find out that it timed out somewhere on the 500Mb mark. Luckily I was able to find a torrent link from Distrowatch, and by then my download went fast and problem-free. By friday night I had the ISO images for Ubuntu and its siblings Kubuntu and Xubuntu.

What is new in this distro? Read the release notes here.

The following days happen to be weekends, so I have all the time in the world on Saturday and Sunday to do a little experiment: to finally convert my MacBook into one that dual-boots Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. So, here’s how it all went out.
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Oh, what Mac users do with their beloved desktops.

If you have been roaming around looking for wallpapers in digital artist Vlad Gerasimov’s website, you may notice that aside from the wonderful desktop wallpapers being offered for download (for free or through paid membership), there are wallpaper clock files as well.

These files are loaded on your computer through utilities that support .WCZ files. There is one available for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

How does this work? Every minute, the wallpaper is updated to show the current time. It’s something similar to a slide show, but the slide show happens on your desktop, and the only item that changes is the information about the current time.

To see how it looks, I have downloaded the Wallpaper Clock utility for Mac OS X and got two wallpaper clocks, and see how they look:

If you want to try the utility as well, here’s the direct link to the Wallpaper Clock page.

How I wish I can do this on my MacBook.