Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

This is my first blog entry from my new laptop. It's pictured above. That's New Hotness on the left and Old Yellow on the right. Don't worry, I didn't take Old Yellow out behind the shed to end his misery. He's resting on the floor beside me and through the wonder of Remote Desktop technology he's has been repurposed as a music jukebox and general file storage.

I was lucky to have a couple of friends who helped me pick the right laptop. Adrian pointed out that Apple laptops were not as expensive as I thought and I had lots of IM'ing with Anders about differences between Dell, Acer and Apple models. In the end I chose the macbook because it was lighter, smaller and cheaper than the Acer model Anders had made me fall in love with.

After two days of setting up and working I'm digging the way you can set up Exposé to work. So when I move the mouse to the bottom left corner of the screen all open windows will move aside so I can see and work on the desktop. When I move it to the bottom right the dashboard with some essential widgets (like a Pong game) will show up. And when I click the middle mouse button Exposé will kick in and show me all open windows. That's awesome. I'm also really getting into Spotlight — it looks like it will be a real timesaver.

I'm not digging all the silly little differences that mostly feel like differeces who's only purpose is to be differences. For example: I'm navigating folders in the Finder using my keyboard. I find a folder I want to open or a file I want to execute. So I click on the Return key. Any sane person would expect this to open the folder, but not on the mac. On a mac the Return key defaults to a rename action. Because I want to rename files all the time. If that wasn't bad enough the macbook keyboard actually has both a Return key and an Enter key leaving me with two keys dedicated for renaming files. I have tried (in vain, comments welcome) to change this outright stupid behaviour. You would have thought a company priding itself on User Experience would have fixed this behaviour in the 1980s, but maybe hardcore Apple-users sit around and rename files all freaking day. Also the Apple-c and Apple-v for Copy and Paste are a bit hard to hit with one hand. The Control key is just placed better. Apple-W and Apple-Q on the other hand are much easier to hit than Alt-F4.

Apart from a couple of small things like the ones above, I really like my new computer. It's much much much faster than my old computer and overall Mac OS X is a great operating system. Programs actually open when I click their icon, and that's one hell of a difference.

One really annoying thing with using digital still cameras for videoblogging is that Windows Movie Maker can't open the source footage. Most cameras record in MPEG-4 format (an .MP4 or .MOV file) and Movie Maker can only work with files that Windows Media Player can open. My solution has been to use Quicktime Pro for my basic editing. If I needed more I have been using Quicktime Pro to convert my source footage to uncompressed AVI that I could open in my editing software. This took up a lot of space on my computer and it took forever to convert the video clips back and forth.

The solution is called mp4cam2avi (thanks, Jon!). This program will convert MPEG-4 files to AVI files that Movie Maker can open. It can do batch operations and it doesn't re-encode the videos — I just used it to convert a dozen or so short videos in less than 30 seconds. Now I can run the videos from my Kodak Easyshare camera through mp4cam2avi and start editing in Movie Maker right away. It is an absolute life saver.