A tale of operating systems & stubbornness, with one too many relationship analogies.

Part 1 | Part 2 (sooner) | Part 3 (soon)

The permanent desktop.

First, two disclaimers:

1) Yes, I am a walking contradiction… 2) This is not a review of Linux Mint.

So, I just obliterated my Windows 7 installation and installed Linux Mint. No dual booting, no safety nets…How did this happen to an Apple fanboy-turned-Windows 7 fanboy? (Subquestion: Did it have something to do with my third Xbox 360 dying? You’re goddamn right it did!)

After being seduced (the perfect word for their marketing) by Apple’s Macbook Pro in 2007 and succumbing to the ear-shattering buzz of the 1st generation iPhone, I was later disenchanted with constant hardware failures and a steady feeling of “well, Mr. Jobs, this isn’t just working.” After stubbornly defending all products coming out of Cupertino, I think it was the fact that it took Apple 2 freaking years to put a copy and paste function on this ‘groundbreaking’ smart phone.

Know what else? I recently traded that 2007 Macbook Pro for an HP Pavillion dv6000 series laptop.  Straight across. Yep, that happened. And my once amazing iPhone has been relegated to a $300 skype phone with 1 hour of talk time per charge.

(I also came to realize I had essentially paid $2000 for Garageband. But these are different stories.)

The one that sealed the deal.

Before the love affair with Apple, around 2005, I flirted with Linux because it appealed to my then-developing inner power user. I read Distrowatch religiously, reading at least 3 reviews each for flavors of linux like Redhat, Fedora, Debian, and SuSE, and then simply deciding to try them all. I would spend hours upon hours well into the early dawn setting up my hardware, tweaking the look and feel of the desktop, learning the installation routines until I could do them in my sleep. At the time, Linux felt like a just-out-of-reach paradise whose requirement for entry was a ton of frustration.

Let’s flash forward to October 2009. I got myself a taste of Windows 7, and realized Microsoft had finally delivered a proper sequel to XP. Still a bit bloated, but damn light on its feet. It booted fast, it understood my hardware, it was sexy. Except, remember that laptop I acquired? The HP DV6208nr? It slowed to a crawl with Aero activated. It protested my furious multitasking. The cooling fans threatened to spin right out of the case at the mere hint of audio editing.

Then the 360 crashed yesterday. All things Microsoft were about to get kicked to the curb on principle (and somewhat literally.)

Tomorrow:

• The surprisingly easy installation of Linux Mint. Everything just worked. Out of the box. Srsly!
• How all of this ties into Indie Arcade & Insomnia Radio. And my next podcast idea…
• How exactly Mint blows away Windows 7, in very non-technical terms.
• Why after being afraid to fall in love with Linux, I’m finally ready to commit.

“Mommy, why would Santa deliver a present that’s broken?”

What you’re looking at are incoming search queries hitting Games Are Evil on Christmas Day 2008, courtesy of our Woopra stat tracking software. (Woopra is incredible by the way, and blows away Analytics.)

These search queries tell me that someone failed miserably in Activision’s quality control department. Granted, I’ve been aware of this problem since late October. But the article on our site snagging all of those searches has been the most read post for a week straight…

Let me fill in the shadowy details:

We live in an on-demand, short-attention-span, instant gratification world, and the console game industry has taken a page from it’s bitter rival, the PC, and since the arrival of the Xbox has been pushing incomplete & buggy games on our laps. Now, it’s being extended to hardware and peripherals.

Consumers have, as of this writing, had to endure abysmal failure rates from Microsoft’s Xbox 360 – and now the equally disastrous “Red Ring of Zune.” Microsoft: Was your Entertainment & Devices Division all stoned in 2005 and 2006?

Video Game publishers consistently ship titles that are knowingly broken or buggy, with promised patches just a few days out from the release date. Too bad the folks without internet connections are screwed. (I work for Gamestop – and believe me that’s a large number of consumers.)

And on October 28th, 2008, rumblings started rising from the depths of Guitar Hero’s community forums, hinting that ALL of “Guitar Hero World Tour’s” drumkits were broken. The specific problem with this $189 purchase was that the red snare was not sensitive enough to detect each hit, resulting in massive fail. The developers quickly addressed the issue and released software to fix the problem…

Except, that software required a PC…to which you connected your fake plastic drumkit…with a USB Midi cable. Because everyone has a USB Midi cable lying around, right?

So, flash forward to Christmas Day 2008. I peered into our Woopra stats, seeing the ridiculous amount of Guitar Hero related searches (cool that we’re almost the #1 Google result, not cool that we even had to write the article), and imagined 100’s of 1000’s of children AND adults wondering why Santa had delivered a broken present!

See, for the average consumer (if you’re reading this, you’re likely not one of them) who isn’t glued to RSS feeds and gaming blogs, it’s preposterous to be expected to jump through so many hoops to fix a product that NEVER should have shipped in it’s current condition. I’m looking at you Guitar Hero, 360, Zune, select Macbook products, numerous laptop batteries and even dozens of car models over the past 4 decades.

When casual gamers and everyday consumers have to go googling to find out why their $200 toy doesn’t work, it’s time to consider the fact that the game MAKERS and publishers are the ones who are broken.

Will I be buying a Zune? Or another Guitar Hero product? Or even recommend a used Xbox 360 to anyone who isn’t comfortable with a soldering iron? No way. And neither should you.

-Jason Evangelho is familiar with the phrase “implied warranty,” and he’s not afraid to use it…

Hopefully lost geek souls like me will stumble onto this post in the future and smile. I’m posting this because it took me two hours of Googling to find the answer, with very limited results. And Apple’s official support pages are worthless on this topic.

Here was my situation: I have a MacBook Pro with a busted SuperDrive, and needed to install Windows via Boot Camp. As you may or may not know, this is not possible using an image file (like it IS with Parallels), so I set off in search of a way to share my Dell Desktop DVD Drive with my trusty MacBook.

(At the time of this writing, you needed a superdrive – internal or external – to install Windows to a Bootcamp partition. But I’m writing a tutorial to get around that!)

Since the release of the MacBook Air, this has been made possible by an installable Control Panel applet in Windows, and by simply checking the CD/DVD Sharing box in your OS X System Preferences. Well, halfway possible.

One would assume that this would work automagically as most Apple software does, even if you own a regular MacBook or MacBook Pro, and not an AIR. After all, it’s an option in my System Preferences, right? So much for assumptions.

It simply DOES NOT work on the MacBook side. Yes, believe it or not, the Windows client is working just fine this time around :-)

So, here’s how to do this from start to finish, step by step.

NOTE: If you’ve already got the software installed on both machines, and are baffled like I was, skip down past the steps and look for the Terminal code….

1. The software to make this all work is on the Macbook Air OS X disc. But if you’re like me and want to make this work with a regular ole “my superdrive took a dump” MacBook, download the separate Windows installer here: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/application_updates/dvdorcdsharingupdate10forwindows.html
2. Once installed, go to your Windows Control panel and click the “CD DVD Sharing” button and activate the checkbox.
3. Enabling this feature on your MacBook is as simple as running Software Update. But you can also go here: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/application_updates/dvdorcdsharingsetupupdateformac.html and grab it directly.
4. Go into your Mac System Prefs, click the Sharing button, and check “CD/DVD Sharing.”

Now, you’re all setup, right? The software works alongside Windows’ firewall, and even promises to work as long as both machines are connected to the same Wireless network. Soooo, why can’t you see that disc you just inserted into your Windows machine, via your Finder?

The missing link comes courtesy of this Macrumors Forum post.

1. Open Terminal (it’s in Utilities, or just type ‘Terminal’ into Spotlight)
2. Type this code:

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool true
defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool true

Reboot, and you’re done. Now, any disc you insert into your Windows machine will show up in your Finder under “Remote Disc.”

Now, I’m not the tutorial type, so if this post is missing information, please don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments. Cheers gang!

RELATED RAMBLINGS

• The Linux Saga, Part 1: The Leap Home?

Technology has once again caused me to change my shorts. And the timing couldn’t be more ideal, with my renewed hunger for blogging and all things geek.

A mobile version of Wordpress has been released to the App store for iPhone / iTouch users. It’s free, surprisingly easy to use, supports photos, and I’m posting from it right now. Geekout!

This could mean many things for you, dear readers:

1: an influx of smog-ridden photos from Fresno coupled with on the spot rants.

2: hmmm.

3: more mental doodles. That’s good, yah?

Posted below are some screenshots. Mobile blogging types with their i-toy of choice can pick up Wordpress in the App store.

iPods, iWeb, iPhoto, iLife, iMac. We get it, pretty much every new service, hardware device, or mainstream consumer software Apple designs is going to get a lower case “i” stuck in front of it. We’ve all come to terms with this and it hasn’t really been abused (much) by Apple – until now.

I was browsing over to Apple’s MobileMe (.mac R.I.P.) support site to investigate why my email was locked in purgatory tonight, when i noticed this:

Really? A basic Apple account password retrieval form is now officially called “iForgot?” Ohhhhboy. I’m not really sure why this irks me to the core of my being – after all I’m a fairly diehard Apple fanboy – but it does. Immensely. It’s over the top, but not in a polished way. In a “let’s poll the 3rd graders for a clever name” way.

Has Apple done something minor like this that just pisses you off? Let me know in the comments.