Returning to the fold

[davidlevine]

To celebrate the completion of my novel, I am planning to buy myself a brand new iBook. This would be my first Macintosh since I emigrated to Windows in 1996, so I would appreciate some advice. Specifically, I would like recommendations for websites, newsletters, and books about "how to get the most out of your new Macintosh."

I'm a professional software engineer and user interface designer with a couple decades' experience using Windows and UNIX, so I'm not looking for "the gentle introduction to the Mac for newbies." But I will have some newbie questions, like "how do I add a printer?" and "how do I determine my adapter's MAC address?" and "what freeware is must-have?" I am particularly interested in information on integrating the Mac into a Windows-based Wi-Fi network.

What I'm really hoping to find is something like Woody's Office for Mere Mortals... a weekly e-newsletter full of information (and some opinions) that I could use to "trickle charge" my brain. I can't keep up with the volume on Slashdot or most email lists. But I also need a couple of good reference web sites... places to start when I have a question.

Thanks in the proverbial advance.

Comments

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Let us also celebrate the appearance of an entry about (with all due respect) something other than your novel.

I like Dealmac for shopping and Low End Mac as a general Mac nexus. But neither is what you're asking for.

The best thing you could do is probably to get hold of a copy of David Pogue's Mac OS X: The Missing Manual.

[davidlevine]

Thanks for the pointers!

My LJ until now has mostly been an echo of my novel journal. Now that the novel is finished I will probably be posting more about non-writing-related stuff.

[damienw]

MAC address: select apple menu>>about this mac>>more info>>network. Or play with Applications>>Utilities>>System Profiler.
Adding a printer: plug in, in my experience. Possibly more convoluted if you need to add it via SMB or something, if it's plugged in to a different machine, but not really hard (my printer hangs off another, much older mac IIci which is running bridging software to get ethernet<->localtalk happening. I boot the IIci, then plug the ethernet cable into my laptop. It would be quicker I guess if I put a wireless card in the IIci.)
Mostly integrating with a Windows wireless network is a matter of having a wireless card, but I don't know the specifics of SMB, and the unix premissions model doesn't quite map to the windows model.
Too many mac-focused websites, and none of them I think are really good, except maybe Tog's site and Daring Fireball. Check the LJ communities, I guess.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Macintouch (http://www.macintouch.com/) is still around and one of the best places to go for early trouble reports and workaround suggestions. It's particularly good reading around the time a major new system upgrade comes out.

Mac OS X Hints (http://www.macosxhints.com/) is what it says.

Most of the other Mac sites I visit are more rumor/news sites, not so practically useful.

[davidlevine]

Thanks for the suggestions!

[davidlevine]

Thanks! And they both have RSS feeds!

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, but first you have to figure out: what's a good RSS client for the Mac?

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Net News Wire. And Net News Wire Light is free.

I, however, have a ghastly confession; although I own NNW, the RSS client I actually use, multiple times a day, is my LJ friends list.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

I'm hearing good things about the new version of Safari. Of course, that means switching to Tiger. Of course, if you're getting a new laptop, it may come with Tiger or be eligible for Apple's (almost-)free upgrade program.

[annafdd.livejournal.com]

Safari RSS. Which you're getting with Tiger anyway. Works wonderfully.

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

I always recommend Mac people try out the xjournal client for LJ.

While Safari has built in syndication feed aggregation, spring for a copy of Net News Wire (http://ranchero.com/). You can tell Safari to use it as your default aggregator.

BBEdit continues to be my favorite editor, but you can get a free copy of Text Wrangler from http://web.barebones.com/.

Forwarding Address: OS X (http://saladwithsteve.com/osx/) is a great blog for current and returning users with some sophistication.

[davidlevine]

Thanks for the suggestions!

I currently use the vi editor and ljclive command-line client to maintain my LJ and the blog on my home page, and I use bloglines as my aggregator because it remembers what I've read no matter where I go.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Oh.

I asked what's called a "next transparency" question.

[davidlevine]

Do you still use the term "transparency" at Fermi?

I noticed the other day that all the overhead projectors in the building were piled up by the loading dock, heading out to who knows where. I couldn't recall ever seeing one in use in the entire three years I've worked here. It's all PowerPoint these days.

When I started at Intel we called them "foils."

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Transparency talks are getting scarce, to be sure, but one still sees them now and then. We don't yet have a computer projector in every conference room.

A decade or more ago, I was attending astronautics conferences, for fun, in my spare time. One day I realized how they were different from the physics talks I usually attended: The rocket people had overheads neatly printed, prepared by the Graphics Department, with the corporate logo in the corner of every "foil."

The physics people usually wrote every slide by hand. I realized that this gave me an unconscious, but reassuring, feeling that the speaker had carefully thought through everything written there.

(Some were experimenting with the Macintosh to make fancy-looking slides, but it was tricky to get math to display correctly...)

Without Mike Turner's slides, for instance, cosmology would be a lot less fun. Here's a recent example.

[davidlevine]

Those are amazing. And with all the diagrams and math I can see that hand-written foils would continue to be simpler.

I despise PowerPoint, myself, but there's no avoiding it in the business world.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

OS X has brought Macs into the world of open-source Unix software without too much pain (especially now that they actually ship with a tolerable X11 implementation). So some of the best things are probably familiar names; you can get GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/macintosh/) and such. GIMP actually works pretty well as a complement to iPhoto; you can set iPhoto to open pictures in an external editor on double-click, and GIMP provides as much photo editor as most people who are not in the graphic-arts industry probably need.

[ckd]

Second the recommendation for Pogue's Missing Manual. It won't yet be updated for 10.4 ("Tiger") but he's been quick to catch up in the past. (Also, there are pages describing the changes, though they're less useful if you don't know what the old way was.)

Most of the system tweaky stuff is in the System Preferences application (like Windows' Control Panels, or Classic Mac OS's for that matter). Print & Fax sets up what you'd expect. Network sets up your TCP/IP and so on, and will also show the MAC address of each appropriate adapter.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Everyone's mentioned the Missing Manual as a good example of a book that solves the newbie questions and also has some geekier stuff. Pogue has written a specific version of this for switchers (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/switchmacmm/).

Unless your printer is most obscure, your Mac will find it and have a driver for it; it takes a little while to discover it the first time (a minute or two maybe) and then you can print. This is brilliant when you're using other people's networks.

Panther made Windows networking work much better (don't have tiger yet) -- but I would say that my PCs now have XP and that seems to have helped quite a lot too. Prior to that my main cause of reboots was losing the Windows network.

My blog started as a switching blog -- 3 years ago! But you can still read all the old entries at Macadamia (http://www.kittywompus.com/macadamia/).

Apple has various switching advice (http://www.apple.com/switch).

Integrating macs into Windows-based WiFi -- you turn the Airport card on, wait for it to find the network, type in the WEP key if you have one, and tell it it's a trusted network and you want to be able to join it in the future.

I've never found a particularly good reference site for switchers; the place I start when I have a question is Google.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

I have just realised that my website doesn't actually have a direct link to the switching part of my blog anymore (which wasn't in Movable Type). Which is probably a mistake; I must sort out my blog. You can read the first entry here (http://www.kittywompus.com/macadamia/2002/03/09.html) and then follow on through the calendar.

[lindaatzarquon.livejournal.com]

And if all else fails, bring up a terminal window, and do it in unix. OS X is, after based on FreeBSD.

[davidlevine]

That's one of the main attractions of the Mac to me, actually.

[malwen.livejournal.com]

As bohemiancoast says, Google is your friend if you have a specific question. What the web is less good for is tips and tricks (although most of them are out there somewhere). And while you might want info in book form anyway, I'd advise against buying until the Tiger crop comes out. Expect more than half the Panther tweaks to be redundant, with the same functionality transparently built in to Tiger. Also, some tweaks will be broken by it.

[davidlevine]

Thanks for the advice.

What the heck is that in your userpic? It's throbbing...

[malwen.livejournal.com]

It's a wobble gif of an ornamental snail,(malwen is Welsh for snail). The throbbing is an irritating side effect of this particular way of creating a 3D effect. bohemiancoast and I have always been interested in 3D, and really caught the bug visiting Morris Keesan and Lori Meltzer. Wobble gifs are an interesting way of generating 3D perception by alternating sides from a stereo pair. Although they're a bit naff, they have the advantage of fitting into the space of the conventional image.

We first saw them on Burning Man (http://www.burningmanopera.org/2002/2002_stereo_wiggle2.html). Nowadays they are a standard way of saving 3D image pairs. bohemiancoast has made icons for a few LJers.

One of the curious things about wobble gifs is that they can be apprehended by some people who otherwise can't see three dimensionally, most notably people who have lost the sight in one eye, but also some who have lost their 3D 'wiring'.

[davidlevine]

Thanks for the info! I'm a bit of a 3D fan myself, and I've encountered wobble GIFs before, but some of them work better than others. This one doesn't have enough going on in the image to really make the 3D effect work, I think.

[soggyoptimist.livejournal.com]

I couldn't live without www.tidbits.com (http://www.tidbits.com), which arrives in my email weekly with news, reviews and side-by-side comparisons of software and hardware.

[davidlevine]

Thanks for the tip! I used to subscribe, back in the day. Glad to see it's still going.