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!

Bye bye monies!

Yesterday I spoiled myself with some new techie stuff.. I bought a sleeve for my MacBook, a new keyboard and a mouse. The sleeve was well needed, I’ve used a pillow case until now! Not very flashy for a geek and Mac nerd :P

The keyboard and mouse are both Logitech, I really like them. Spent some more on the mouse and got a pretty good gaming mouse, but I was cheaper on the keyboard. I still got the silver/black low profile keyboard I wanted, but it wasn’t that expensive. Woo!

The keys are a bit harder to push, they’re not as responsive as my old keyboard, so it will take a while and a lot of typos to get used to. But that doesn’t matter ^^

New keyboard New mouse

Summer is around the corner

Most of the snow is gone now, and the green grass is growing. I can see the birch leaf buds on the trees on my way to uni. It’s a wonderful time, really. You can feel the power of nature at this time of the year, everything happens so fast :)

I’m looking forward to this summer. I don’t have much plans really, but the few I have are awesome and the lack of planning also feels nice. I’m going to relax and spend time with my family to prepare for the scary last year at uni. It will be a busy, exhausting, fun and awesome year, I’m sure. It’s scary to stop studying, something I’ve done for over half of my life, but I definitely look forward to start working. It’s another kind of pressure :)

I’ve also decided to buy myself a Macbook as a reward for finally getting my degree, so I’m going to start saving now. I asked myself, “Do I really need three computers?”. And yes, I do. :D