You got your new sexy Mac and it’s just all so perfect, it’s got style, speed, stability, simplicity, it just works and oh those great sounding speakers. Did I say great sounding speakers? All right, the built in speakers in an iMac may do the job for some but MacBook and MacBook Pro speakers are just way too small to do much more than play message alerts and Youtube videos. Isn’t the Mac supposed to be all about your digital lifestyle, your digital content is going to need great sound to go along with the the amazing graphics Macs are known for.

audioengine
Along comes audioengine, a US based company that produces quality hand-built speakers at factory direct pricing. audioengine’s background is in producing professional powered studio monitors and this shows in the sound that comes out of their two current speaker designs, the audioengine 2 and audioengine 5.

I’m going to talk about the audioengine 2’s because that’s what I have sitting in front of me right now. My first exposure to audioengine was when my friend Paul Garay from Inside Home Recording took me into his studio and showed off his audioengine 5’s. I own a pair of studio monitors at home and prefer the “truer sound” from a set of studio monitors so when I heard the auidoengine 5’s I just loved them and the fact that they shared similar design attributes with many Apple products made me think about all the times people had asked my advice about what speakers they should get for their new Mac. Now the audioengine 5’s may be a bit of overkill for some people, this may be the reasoning behind the design of the audioengine 2’s. Same great audioengine 5 “true” sound, just not as much of it!
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Not many of you may be aware of this but I’m actually a student right now attending the BCIT BEST Entrepreneurial program. Part of this course requires me to accumulate Survey information that will help develop my business plan model.

You may ask, what does this have to do with Switching to Mac? The business I’m starting is directly related to what I do here at Switching to Mac. I will be doing Mac Consulting and Training for Switchers and new people to the Mac.

So if you have a few minutes, I would really appreciate your input…

I have three “short” Surveys you can choose from:

• (Intro to Mac) Survey
• (Mac Consulting - Training) Survey
• (Retail Business) Survey

Of course you can do them all if you like and if you know someone who just loves doing Surveys for free Pass on the link!!

Thanks - Mike

It didn’t take long, my 80GB Hard Drive only had a a few Gigabytes left on it and there was just nothing else I could delete or move to my external drive. The time had come to replace it with a higher capacity Hard Drive!

My first step was to find a compatible drive and of course a much larger drive, my goal was to get a 160GB Hard Drive so I could double the size of my existing internal Hard Drive. One thing to keep in mind is MacBook Pros and MacBooks both come standard with 2.5 inch 5400 RPM Serial ATA Internal Drives so make sure to get the right type.

I figured the best thing to do was get a drive that came in an external enclosure, this would enable me to transfer my existing information to it easily and make a great new home for my 80GB Drive once it was removed, perfect as a backup drive.

A bit of research and I came up with a nice affordable drive, the Western Digital 160 GB USB 2.0 Passport 2.5″ External Hard Drive. I found some comments on it stating that it was easy to take apart being a snap together enclosure.
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OK first Off this only applies to Canadians but if you like Little Guy vs Big Guy stories then read on…

Today the Canadian Dollar made it back on par with the American dollar so you would think an identical product on either side of the boarder would be at least close to the same price… Right… Nope - Wrong!

I found this out Today when I noticed my Dot-Mac (.Mac) supscription was expiring and so began the process of finding the best deal for a copy or should I say “Activation Code”.

My first step was to check the local stores and see if anyone had a promotion but no luck and here in Canada that means $139 big ones! OK, maybe I could take advantage of the fact that I have a student number (I’m attending a course at BCIT) and mosey over to the Online Apple Canada Student Store. What a deal, Apple was generously offering Dot-Mac (.Mac) to starving students for $139, that’s right, absolutely $0 saved.

What to do: Dot-Mac (.Mac) subscription running out at midnight tonight and no deals in sight! Guess I was going to have to caugh up the $139 or dump my Dot-Mac (.Mac) account
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When I was in Art School, (and yes, I did go to “Art School”), I kept a sketchbook with me all the time. Everywhere I went, the sketchbook went too. I would put a date on the first page of every book, and inevitably three months later I would be at the last page, and putting a finished date on it. For years I did this, the sketchbook was my repository for everything that I did, needed to do, thought about doing, or should do. I started this habit when I was in High School, and perfected it during college. For several years afterward, I continued to use a sketchbook for all of my crap, although, I no longer carried it everywhere I went.

In College, of course, it was indispensable. Class notes, sketches of ideas for class projects, poems, ideas. Drawings of girls from the campus ‘quad’. (I met one or two that way, I’d be bored, so I pick some girl sitting on a bench or something and sketch her. Eventually, she’d notice my eyes darting from the sketchbook to her and back. Always curious, they’d walk over too see why I was staring at them. Nothing is so flattering as to be the subject of someone’s art!) Anyway, the books would get filled up with all that stuff, the notes from class, pieces of magazine clippings or pictures I’d scotch tape in… I still have all of them, and they’re cool to go back through once in a while to remember what I was up to, and what I was thinking when I was young!

Of course, with all things we do when we have the time, they lose importance over the years and become less and less important as time goes by. I eventually stopped keeping a sketchbook altogether, it’s one more thing to carry when you have a kid.

More time has since gone by, my daughter is now five years old, and she just started in Kindergarten last Monday. I now have a little more time to spend on stuff that I am interested in, to create some artwork once in while. Maybe write, and as some of you know I’ve become interested in animation. I’ve got a lot of ideas kicking around in my head, and they are really scattered about. I’m an organized person, but not so much that I don’t have stacks of papers and magazines, parts of computers, and little sketches and notes strewn about my office, my car and the rest of my house. I also collect ideas and pictures from the web, I’m sure we all do. Mac’s ability to make quick text clippings without having to copy/cut, paste into a text document is a great thing that I use all the time. I get a lot of little clipping icons all over my Mac desktop when I’m searching something. The computer has become the center of my informational life. Most of us have some sort of computer with us now, where ever we go, just like that old sketchbook of mine. A MacBook, or an iPhone, or PDA something. We make our notes, jot down our phone numbers to remember, take pictures with our phones, make voice reminders into these devices. Then we bring them home (or to the office) and sync them with our Macs.
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I used to be a Microsoft Fan - a really, really big and obnoxious one too. Whenever someone even brought up the topic of a Mac I would go on about how PC’s were “clearly superior” and “control the market for obvious reasons.” In fact, my friends who use Macs as well remind me that I used to lecture them for ten minutes straight about the supposed advantages of the Windows Platform. Using cliché arguments like “Windows’ Wealth of Software” to defend my views, I convinced myself not to get a Mac last December and so I bought a brand-new Acer PC.

Now because this was December and Windows Vista wasn’t out yet, I had to sign up for the anything-but “Express” Upgrade Program. I thought the deal was good, though: Pay $20 and get what would normally be a $300 operating system. And all through January and February I was wound up in frustration as my new PC slowed down and started presenting me with a vast multitude of Problems I did not expect, from Wireless Networking Woes to starting up in a (very) untimely fashion.

Vista arrived in the first week of March. I installed it with high expectations and was engulfed by excitement when I first saw my windows surrounded in Aqua – I mean Aero, glass. But then my problems worsened. My peripherals didn’t work. The little flash card reader to the side always gave me error messages when I tried to load my photos. My great video card couldn’t take advantage of half its features. And that wasn’t the least of it. Tons of other things didn’t work properly and my PC began behaving erratically.
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I didn’t want an Apple TV but I did it anyways, I went and bought an Apple TV fighting myself all the way to the store and back. You have probably all heard about all the reasons why not to buy an Apple TV.

Here are the two biggies that I was struggling with.

• The Apple TV only works with a select few file formats not including WMA, AVI, DivX, Xvid to name a few.
• Why get an Apple TV when you can get a Mac mini for just a bit more and have a full fledged OS X machine with an optical drive and easier to upgrade the components…

So why did I go against my better judgment?
My XBMC (Xbox Media Center) up and died on me and this was my only real means of streaming all my time delayed (Downloaded Internet Video) TV programing for viewing on my TV. I figured this was my opportunity to give the Apple TV a fair try and see what I could do with it.

Here was my original plan.
Buy the base 40GB Apple TV and install a hacked OS X on an external USB hard drive so I could run OS X from the USB hard drive to play all my Apple TV non-supported media and or use the OS X USB hard drive to patch the actual Apple TV with plugins to support the missing media codecs. few!
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Before you click the Buy-Now link from one of the iPhone Unlocking sites selling iPhone unlocking solutions for $50 and up… Go to freeiphoneunlock.com and unlocked your iPhone for free. Thtas’s right - FREE!

There are a few options available out right now to Unlock your iPhone for free, I haven’t tried any myself since I don’t have an iPhone, but with the latest iPhone unlocking news I might just have to go down and get one…

Here are some Free iPhone unlocking Links:

• www.freeiphoneunlock.com
• iphone.unlock.no
• johnbiehler.com/2007/09/11/full-iphone-software-unlock-released-for-free