Macbook Pro with External LCD Monitor

Got myself a Samsung SyncMaster 2333 23'' LCD Monitor. I have to say I am impressed!

For a person that hardly used an external monitor (always been with LCD screen that is attached to laptop), I have to say this is a very big step-up.

This article explains a few tips that I stumble upon.



How to make external monitor the primary one

By default, once you connect the external monitor to Macbook, the external monitor will display as secondary - i.e. without the dock at the bottom and menu bar at the top.

In order to make the external monitor the primary one, go to System Preferences -> Displays.

Select Arrangement. You will see two rectangles - each representing a monitor (internal & external).

You will also notice there is a small white bar at the top of the smaller rectangle. Drag the bar to the bigger rectangle (indicating that you want to make the external monitor the primary one).

The screen should looks like:


How to use only the external monitor but switch off the laptop screen

This is quite a common request once you have an external monitor. By default, both screens are available and you can utilise both screens for different purposes - I found it quite useful for cross-reference.

However, sometimes we would like to use only the external monitor as our primary workspace and want to switch off the laptop screen.

After googling for a while, here are two options that I could find:

• Reduce the brightness of your laptop screen to minimum: Go to System Preferences and ensure you set the brightness of the laptop screen to minimum. I found this approach is a workaround and can be quite annoying if you switch between monitors because you need to switch the brightness back again if you want to use the laptop screen. Not recommend.
• Sleep and awake approach: A lot of peoples have confirmed that this works and I tried it with success. Once you have setup your external monitor, shut the lid of your Macbook Pro, just enough so that the laptop goes to sleep. Note that this will switch off your external monitor as well. Then if you are using external keyboard (like mine), just tap any key to bring the laptop out from the sleep (without opening the lid), your external monitor will switch on after a second, then open the laptop lid, the Macbook Pro screen is not switch on anymore. This approach seems to work until I found another better approach - wonder if Snow Leopard has this functionality. Note that if you don't have external keyboard, some articles said you can use external usb drive to trigger the wake up, or slide your finger through the gap between the lid and laptop keyboard to trigger the wake up.

Review of Parallels Desktop 3 and VMWare Fusion 2

The first Mac software that I bought since I owned my first MacBook Pro is Parallels Desktop 3.0, and that is 1 year ago. I have been using Parallels since then, upgrading to their latest build every now and then, until I try out VMWare Fusion 2 last week.

I have to say I am very impressed by VMWare Fusion 2 so far!

Here is my personal review between Parallels Desktop 3 and VMWare Fusion 2.

Parallels Desktop 3

* This review is based on Parallels Desktop 3. Parallels Desktop version 4 is out and some of the issues that I have with version 3 might have already been fixed.

Thumbs Up

• Supports wide variety of popular OS and quite easy to create VMs and install OS.
• Include the Parallels Transporter that allows you to import VMs created by other products into Parallels compatible VMs - note that this does not always work. I tried to import a VMWare image that contains multiple files but failed. However, a single VMWare image with Windows 2000 works.
• Constant release/build cycle - You will receive update every now and then. Makes me feel like the $ is well spend.

Thumbs Down

• Slow, slow and slow. I have a VM with Windows XP installed but it takes ages to start up. During startup, it makes my Macbook Pro freeze occasionally (not even switching between different applications). The response is quite sluggish.
  
• Network between the VM and the host (MacBook Pro) seems to be problematic. I can access the internet from VM but when it has problem accessing the LAN machines.
• Printer setting in the VM also problematic. Because of the problem of accessing LAN machines, the VM cannot see the network printer and hence I have to convert to PDF and copy to my Mac and print it from there - how tedious.
• Coherence mode have the annoying windows start bar at the bottom.
  

VMWare Fusion 2

Thumbs Up

• Speed - Starting up a VM is just like starting real OS on the actual machine. The speed is amazing. I have imported the Parallels VM (Windows XP) into VMWare Fusion and the startup time probably around 10 times faster than Paralles. How amazing! This might be something to do with VMWare Fusion can utilise the 2 CPUs on the Mac. Also when starting the VM, the Mac is not frozen (by the way, I have only 2GB of RAM).
• Seamless network and printer support - The same VM imported from Parallels and run with VMWare Fusion. The network and printer settings do not work in Parallels but magically just work in VMWare Fusion.
• Unity mode (Coherence mode in Paralles) seems to work much better. The windows just look like normal Mac window (although the icons might be Windows specific).
• Convert to full screen and back seems pretty quick and snappy.
• Haven't try it myself - but apparently you can also play most of the 3D games in Windows (with DirectX support).
  
• (I can go on and on with the good things....)
  

Thumbs Down

• Nothing major so far - besides the price of VMWare Fusion is a bit pricey

Having use both VM tools, I strongly recommend VMWare Fusion for Mac because it just works! With my blog's philosophy, tools that we used should make our life simpler...

How to charge and eject your iPod in Linux

This might be uncommon but I found that most of the time, I cannot wait until my iPod is fully charged before switching off/hibernate my MacBook Pro.

I have a Linux server (Fedora Core 8) that runs 24x7. So how about utilising my server to do the work instead?

Here are the steps to charge your iPod under Linux:



1) Sync my iPod with all the songs from my MacBook Pro.
2) Eject iPod from my MacBook.
3) Connect the USB cable to my Linux server.
4) Determine the drive that iPod is using under Linux. Normally it should be an alphabet greater than all existing mounted drive. Execute the following command:

> mount


It should shows something similar to:

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 on / type ext3 (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol03 on /data type ext3 (rw)
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02 on /home type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sda2 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
/dev/sdb on /mnt/media type xfs (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
sunrpc on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)


In this case, /dev/sdb seems to be the last of mounted hard disk. So if I tried:


> mount /dev/sdc /mnt/ipod


Once this is successful, you should be able to perform listing on this directory.


> ls /mnt/ipod



5) You might want to umount the ipod to left it charging (we don't need to mount it for it to be charged because we are not syncing the songs).


> umount /mnt/ipod (if mounted before)


6) In order to fully eject the ipod, we need to execute one more command:

> eject /dev/sdc (or the drive that your ipod is connected to).


7) Next enjoy! Once fully charged, just unplugged from the machine.

Weird Dark Border around Leopard Desktop

Since yesterday a dark border kept appearing in my Leopard desktop. I am currently using six spaces and this dark border only appears in space 2, which I used the spaces for Safari and internet browsing.

The screen looks like:

Posted my problem to Whirlpool, some suggested that it could be the Expose that is doing the trick. I am still don't know what is the purpose of having the dark border around the screen. I did not change Expose configuration.

After a machine restart, it seems alright where the dark border disappear in all spaces. Weird.

Wonder if this is a problem with Leopard? Or somehow I did something that trigger this dark border to appear?

Screenshots Snapshot in Leopard

Today I encountered a situation where I want to take a screenshot of webpages. Being a new Mac user, I am not sure if I could do what is equivalent to "Alt/Ctrl + PrintScreen" in Windows. 

Quick google search reveals this very helpful site. There are quite number of different options to take a screenshot and I was amazed by shortcut keys and varieties. It makes screenshooting a fun activity!