Ralf’s Blog

As a Windoze user I was used to putting my notebook into hibernation. This has the following advantages over shutting the machine down or putting it into sleep:

• Shutting the machine down means a long boot when I need it again, plus I have to open all apps and docs again which I was using when I shut it down.
• Sleep mode eats up your battery quickly, because he machine is still running at a reduced power level.

However, I couldn’t find a menu item to put my Mac into hibernation, so I googled a bit and came across this Wikipedia entry.

Altho I agree that the way the Mac does it seems quite nifty (in fact IBM notebooks had this feature aeons ago…), I still wanted to be able to immediately put my Mac into hibernation. So I googled again and came across this nifty lil’ Apple script.

The tool works very well, I recommend it.

Update: My buddy Jochen just pointed me to a blog article he wrote recently. He discussed a preferences panel that allows you to configure how the Mac sleeps and/or hibernates. This is a nifty tool, but still doesn’t exactly do  what I need. I want to be able to immediately force the Mac into hibernation, and SmartSleep unfortunately cannot do that for me.

One of the first things I did when I got my new Mac was install Mozilla Thunderbird, the invaluable EnigMail extension, which is a very easy-to-use frontend to GNU Privacy Guard (GPG), and of course GPG itself.

All went very smoothly, and to check whether the installation was fine I tried to opened an encrypted message which I had received some days ago. Unfortunetly GPG couldn’t decrypt the message. A quick look at EnigMail’s console window told me that the message was encrypted using IDEA, and that the version of GPG I had installed was lacking support of that encryption algorithm.

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I received a new work-horse for my job some days ago, a MacBook Pro. It’s very nicely equipped, featuring the following items:

• 2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
• 4GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM - 2×2GB RAM
• 200GB Serial ATA Drive @ 7200 rpm
• extra power supply
• AppleCare Protection Plan

The whole package cost almost EUR 2.900.

What I found strange is that the MacBook came preinstalled with 2 RAM sticks of 1G each, which I had to remove and replace with 2 sticks of 2G each, “Kingston” brand. I don’t know whether this is Apple’s official policy, or whether it was our local dealer who wanted to earn some extra bucks. Anyway, I now have two spare 1G sticks which I will put into the old Dell D810.

The MacBook already has the new multi-touch trackpad, but it hasn’t got the fastest CPU available today, which is the 2.6 GHz model. I don’t think it makes that big of a difference, tho.

I’ve already installed a lot of applications I need, and so far I like the Mac very much, altho I must admit that it’s quite different than a Windoze PC which I have been using for the last 20 years.