Anjasaurus

Update on the dual boot

Fail.

Since Boot Camp doesn’t officially support Windows 7, the app wouldn’t install in Windows 7 on my Mac. I’m sure it could have been solved by manual installation of drivers etc, but I just couldn’t be bothered. It felt like destroying my poor Mac :P

Also, the lack of a right mouse button was reaaaaally frustrating in Windows. It works without much problems in OS X, because it’s designed for it. But Windows definitely is not.

So my Mac is back to its single partition state with just OS X, but I do have a nice backup of it :) And I also learned a lot about file systems. I guess everything has something good in it!

OS X and Windows

My last project has been.. I’m not sure if I should call it complicated. It all started at home, with Mum and Dad and my sister. My sister played Anno, and I was jealous of her as I wasn’t able to play it on my Mac, it’s a Windows game.

So, naturally, I started thinking of dual booting my Mac, to be able to play games while I’m traveling too. My Mac is my baby, I mostly bring it when I go somewhere. And then it started to get complicated :P

Firstly, I would need to partition my Mac HDD, which means I need to back it up in case something goes wrong. Backing up should be easy, huh, I have Time Machine? Well, if my external drive hadn’t been NTFS it had been easy. OS X can’t write to NTFS without 3rd party tools, and Windows can’t even read from Apple’s file system. I discussed it a lot with friends, which way would be best (thank you for all your help!), and in the end I decided to partition my external drive and use two different file systems.

I moved all the files on my external drive to my PC, then I used OS X to partition the drive and format it. I made one Apple partition on 100 GB (HFS+?) and one FAT partition on 150 GB. If I left the 150 GB unformatted, my Windows machine wouldn’t find it at all, so I had to use FAT. And then move the drive to my PC and reformat the FAT partition to NTFS. Very clever.. But it all worked out eventually, and now my Winplutt ("Wintiny") partition houses my backup for W7, and the Macplutt ("Mactiny") is synced with Time Machine on OS X. Neat!

The Twilight Saga

I just realised I never wrote a review on Twilight! I got all four books for my birthday from my awesome friends, and I started reading the same night, as I had promised. Liz knew I would like them :)

I’ve always liked reading, but during the last 4-5 years I haven’t read as much, for different reasons. Therefore, it felt odd to get captured by a series like this again. I started reading the first book, Twilight, on my birthday. I finished the fourth book during the Christmas holidays, I think it was around 25-26 December. So in about two weeks, three at the most, I, who no longer read, finished four long books.

I don’t think I have to tell you I love this story? Yes, it has it’s flaws, and yes it is very much a teenage kind of series at times. But that does not stop it from being captivating and awesome. It’s about love, personal strength and personal development, and the way the vampire and werewolf myth is described makes it really interesting to read. Even though the story might not appeal to me at all times, I always wanted to know how the myths would evolve in the next chapter.

I hope you will give them a chance and not dismiss them because they are teenage girls’ love stories. They are more than that.

Anno 1404

My sister has been talking about this new game she loves, Anno 1404. I didn’t think much about it until I saw her playing when we were both home for Christmas. It looked a bit live Civ, but less strict and more fun.

I got to try it on her laptop, and I was hooked. It is so addictive! It’s not very innovative or anything, it’s just simple and fun. You build your own “empire” starting on a small island building resources and expanding as you need new resources and more space. There are two areas, the Occident and the Orient. The Occident is like Europe or North America, and this is where you start. Later you can expand into the Orient, and this is needed to develop your empire.

It was really cheap on CDON (Swedish web music/film/game shop) so I ordered and it arrived this Friday (8/1). I’ve been playing over 10 hours since then. Simply addictive!