A lesson in the power of having a network for those people who still snort when you mention Twitter (who are, I’m sure, the same people who still snort when you mention climate change).

About a year ago, I dropped my Macbook Pro – twice. Both times I was traveling and the shoulder bag I had it in slipped off of my shoulder while I was wheeling several suitcases around France. The result of the drops was pretty severe damage to the case of the Macbook. It still worked fine, it was just dinged up pretty badly. Until recently. A few weeks ago, I stopped being able to shut the case properly and then the piece of plastic that holds the screen in the lid cracked and broke.

I knew it was time for a new Macbook case.

So, I emailed photos to a couple of local Macbook repair places.

The folks at Next Byte were completely useless. All they could tell me was “you’ll have to bring it in for us to look at it”. If I had time to bring it in, I wouldnt have bothered sending photos, you useless morons.

The folks at The Mac Doctors in Annerley, were, as always, very polite, friendly and helpful. They emailed me back a quote – $2500 – and explained why it would cost so much (the screen comes with the case, no way around it) and suggested I’d probably be better off buying a new Macbook.

Instead, I posted a question on Twitter: “Does anyone have a dead Macbook Pro 17″ they’d be willing to sell me?”

Within an hour I had three “yes” replies. Adrian Lynch was the first and after a quick phone call, we’d negotiated a deal. I put the money in his account and had a courier pick up his dead machine (he’d drown his keyboard in wine).

Yesterday, when his dead unit turned up at my place, I took it into The Mac Doctors and today I picked up my perfectly good Macbook Pro – my drive and motherboard stuffed into Adrian’s old case and screen.

Total cost, including his unit, the courier and the hatchet job?

A little less than $500.

The power of Twitter.

I was looking for a sleeve for my 17″ Macbook Pro – something that isnt as bulky as a whole bag / backpack for when I go to meetings – and the folks at Haul sent me one of theirs. Haul are pretty cool – all of their sleeves and bags are made from recycled billboards! Mine is apparently an old AMEX billboard. They make other things as well from truck inner-tubes, number plates, printing blankets and aluminium cans.

And you can chat with them on Twitter.

Yep, gotta love that superior Apple engineering… it worked on a cold start.

Here’s another Macbook support question.

Sometimes when I open up my Macbook, it doesn’t come out of “sleep” mode. I try closing the lid and opening it again a few times but that doesn’t seem to help. I always end up shutting it completely down with my finger on the power button until it re-boots but I’d rather not do that for a number of reasons.

Have any of your Mac fanboyz/grlz experienced this before? What’s the story?

Before I move into the “making the world a better place” motif for Season 04 of G’Day World, I wanted to do a show about my recent experiences of migrating from Windows to a Mac.

Yes – hell has finally frozen over and I’ve bought a Mac.

As some of you (those who read my Twitter feed) will know, about two weeks ago the terrific folks at Global1Training sponsored a 17″ widescreen MacBook Pro for your humble host. Global1Training are the folks who run Dr John Demartini’s seminars around the world. If you haven’t listened to the interview I did with Dr John (G’Day World #276) then you really should. He’s got a lot of good tips for taking control of your life. If you’d like to attend the upcoming Demartini seminars, click on the Global1Training link above for a 2 For 1 discount on tickets.

So.. onto the Mac.

This show is going to detail my reasons for getting a Mac and my experience of the migration.

Is a Mac as easy to use as Mac aficionados claim?
What is a .dmg?
What does “eject from disk” mean?
What is the “Command” key?
Why doesn’t CTRL-C work?
Where is the “Backspace” key?
How do you drag to “Applications”?
Why doesn’t tapping the touchpad work?
Where is the right-click button?
Where is the “START” button?
Why won’t Safari or Firefox go full screen?
Do Macs “blue screen”?
Do you have to buy two versions of all of your favourite programs if you are still running a Windows machine and a Mac machine at the same time?
Which is the best 3G card – the Telstra NextG card or the Three NetConnect card.
What do I think of the Blue Snowball USB mic?

These were just some of the issues I faced after cracking the seal on the MacBook. Is the Mac truly superior to Vista? Listen to this show to find out.

Update: A good suggestion by Raf, here are the recommended apps that Jono from Xero and Duncan Riley sent me:

Jono’s list with his comments:

Twitterrific: Best twitter client, IMHO

Growl: Notification software – ties in with a whole bunch of Apps. So, new emails, downloads finishing, etc.

Delicious Library: Cataloguing software… Sounds nerdy, but it looks soooo good…

Sapiens: Mouse gesture launcher. Version 1, so doesn’t do much yet.

Transmission: Nice BitTorrent App, very clean interface.

xTorrent: More fully featured Bit Torrent & downloading App, has very good search feature.

Download these so quicktime player will play a lot more codecs:

Perian: This adds DivX playback, amongst others…

Flip4Mac: This adds WMV playback.

Any other movie files should work in either VLC or MPlayer…

And of course: Google Earth, Skype (features lag behind on the Mac unfortunately).

Use iPhoto, its awesome

Duncan’s list with his comments:

Twitteriffic: you’ll love it

Audio Hijack Pro for Podcasting: Hijacks any audio on your mac (ie Skype calls). easy to use but you do have to pay for it after a trial. If wasn’t expensive for memory. General podcasting support is built in via Garageband for non-sykpe calls.

Cyberduck for FTP: it free, there are paid clients out there but this does a pretty good job

Snapz Pro if you want to do screencasting, captures SL as well. Payware but fairly cheap after trial.

For running Vista
Parallels: if you’ve only got the upgrade Vista I can tell you how to install. Parallels allows you to run windows from the Mac desktop, and programs like they were native on your mac. Bootcamp from Apple is free but you cant run Windows and OSX at the same time.

I presume you’ll stick with Microsoft Office under win, but if you switch try Neo-office, its Open Office code but customized to be more Mac friendly. It’s a little slow in loading, but its cheaper than buying office itself. You’ll find Thunderbird for Mac cool as well.

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