Irfan's New Mac

Since last year, the boys had been asking for their own computers. Irfan especially had been nagging me. He wanted an iMac, similar to mine. But mine was already four years-old. We had to get a brand-new one then.

Idlan would have to wait until later as we didn’t have space for two desktops. I must say that the new iMac were some slick machine. I would have to save for my Mac Pro as the shop only carry the first editions, and they were having some memory module issues with that batch. Not many shops in town had them in stock yet.

As usual, taking the computer out from the packaging was a ritual in itself. No other company paid this much attention to the packaging. Even though it looked complicated, one just had to follow the instructions, and before you knew it, walla ….

And I would have to do the dirty work ...Idlan would be using my old iMac, and they and their classmate had already planned a Minecraft party this weekend. Online of course. And Irfan already had Skype set up in his computer. Idlan had already had his for quite some time …

Looked like they would be staying in this weekend. The internet seemed to be the issue though as it was slow. I may have to bring the iMac to the apartment for updates at some stage.

The New iPad on the Block

After much resistance, I finally relented. With a lot of my productivity app were dependent on the iPad - blogging and link surfing, to name a few, I decided to own one. I was tired of having to share with the boys. Even though they have one each, prying off them were becoming a challenge. And with the school holidays coming up, I might just forget about it.

I decided against buying the 3G version. A wifi unit was just enough for me as both my home and workplace were covered by signals. The one at the office was especially fast. With the new iCloud service and iMessage, synching the units and the Mac at home were made much easier.

The main app I was using is iAnnotate as it allowed me to annotate the PDF files as I was doing a lot of review for the Malaysian Journal of Medicine at the moment. I could just read the files on the fly on the iPad rather than having to open them out on the Mac Air or iMac.

The transfer

Before I went to bed tonight, I decided to transfer all the digital photos I took since 2003 into my FireWire Raid drive for safe keeping. Little that I realise that there were more than 30000 of them and it would occupy a handsome 200 GB worth of disc space. Those not counting the ones I deleted prior.

All my children's photographs were archive both here and on another hard drive as well as in the cloud, on my SmugMug account. Precious they are. According to my Mac, it would take around 2 hours for the files to be transferred. So, good night!

iMac. Therefore I am.

I know. It has been a couple of days since I updated the blog. I have been busy. Busy configuring the new iMac. Finally had to buy one since the 6 year-old iMac G5 gone kaput last month. Managed to salvage some of the data out but updating all the new apps into the new unit took me quite a while.

Then came the iOS 4.3 update for the iPhone. I finished upgrading the iPhone just now. Next will be the iPad. But first things first. I had to take Anita for some errands tonight, getting ready for the School Sports Day tomorrow. I will be taking the 7D along and shooting videos with it since I have enough firepower to do some HD editing using the new iMac. Looking forward to that. Might be uploading some to YouTube. The account has been kind of lonely of late .....

P1 Day 1, and the new iMac news!

091021.1, originally uploaded by Haris Abdul Rahman.

It has clearly passed the test and even Anita was impressed. With my Mac, I can watch YouTube in HD without a hitch. Also heard today that Apple just announced the release of the new iMac line. The flagship model now support 27 inch display with resolution of 2560x1440 in 16:9 ratio! That is just insane. But that not just it. It ships with i7 Nahalem chip, but my personal favourite, wireless keyboard and mouse ... and the mouse has multitouch technology a la iPhone! M jaw just dropped!

When I bought my iMac back in 2005, the choices were between 15 and 17 inch models. How time have moved! They also released a new MacBook line and from the great vine, I heard that they might be replacing the MacBook Pro line in time for Christmas as well. Well, my MacBook Pro is only 2 years old, and my iMac 4. We know which one needs an upgrade!