As planned, I upgraded my Macbook to Snow Leopard on Friday evening without any issue. However, I like things clean, and in the past year, I have dumped so many rubbish into it, and so I thought it’s a good time to do some house cleaning.

Saturday morning, I backed up everything I have, erased my disk, and install Snow Leopard fresh. 30 minutes later, I have Snow Leopard clean-installed, and few hours later, I have all my usual apps installed as well. Restoring backup took a few more hours, as I have ~70GB of videos and ~115GB of photos.

So far, I am impressed, everything ran fast. Launching Safari is something like a second, shutting down a mere 3 seconds, not more than four.

I did a checkpoint half-way through this year back in May, and up to that point, I’ve already spent S$2,500. Move forward to end of year today, that number has ballooned up to S$4,167. Singaporean says *jialat liao*

Looking back, I’m not sure I could have spent much less than what was needed. I’ll run through them from the most expensive ones, and you tell me if I’ve bought more than I should?

Apple Macbook (white)
Committed at S$1,400 for 30 months installment, I’ve paid 9 months of S$46.67 each for a total of S$420 this year. Twenty-one more months to go. So far, this laptop was the one that made me switched to Mac, and it has been a useful laptop as I travelled around the globe this year. Along the months, I have upgraded the RAM from 1GB to 4GB for about S$55, “accidentally” upgraded the HDD from 120GB to 320GB for S$95, and bought Applecare for S$200 (from S$446 retail price) to extend its warranty cover until 2011.

Compaq Presario V3638
Bought this for my mum. The original price was S$999, but after adding RAM upgrade, minus GST claim, etc., I ended up with S$1,108.95.

Canon Digital IXUS 860IS
In need of a digital camera for my USA trip in September, I bought this one for S$519, complete with all goodies I need. I added $70 for an extra original Canon battery.

Apple iPod Nano 4G – 8GB
Apple store in Singapore is selling this for S$248, but Apple store in New York was selling for US$149. With USD-SGD exchange rate as low as 1.40 back then, it was cheaper to buy in New York.

Western Digital My Passport 320GB
As my Macbook 120GB storage wouldn’t be enough to store and backup photos and videos taken during USA trip, this external hard drive is the cheapest and easiest way to have more storage on the road. Got it for S$149.

Logitech v470 Bluetooth mouse
This excellent mouse retails for S$85 and after all these months, the last time I checked last week, some shops are still selling it for S$89. I got two of these from eBay for a total of S$85, so you’d consider I got 50% discount. I uses one, and my mum is using the other one. The pair of battery I put in since August are still working as of today. Amazing battery life.

Starhub re-contract
This time, I decided not to change my phone during re-contract. Instead, I simply recontract, and sold the new phone off for a S$362 profit. Pretty good.

Miscellaneous
There are other sub-$50 stuffs like web-cam for my mum, USB hub, earphone, etc.

What do you think? Could I have spent any less this year? How?

For the unplanned one, it came about when my brother-in-law asked me to buy for him an external portable hard drive for his sales staff. I promptly went to Simlim to get 320GB 2.5” Hitachi HDD and external casing for S$108. After I reached home, I was looking at my Mac and saw the 15GB free space in it. Not much, I thought.

Then, came the idea, why don’t I swap it out? That was exactly what I did for the next couple of hours. I ensured Time Machine has backed up everything I have, turned off my Macbook, pull some screws out, and finally the 120GB hard drive built-in. Within 5 minutes, I have put in a brand-new 320GB harddrive into my Macbook, and boot-up using Mac OS X Leopard DVD. In the installation menu, there was the option to restore system from Time Machine Backup, so I did. There were options to choose backups from the latest to the oldest, somewhere in October 2008, should I choose to. I chose the latest backup of course.

About 45 minutes later, my Macbook system was well restored, and everything ran perfectly as it was before I swapped the hard drive, except now I have over 200GB free space, no installation needed, no configuration needed, nothing. I would say this is simplicity at its best.

The second “upgrade” that I have been planning so far was to get the Applecare warranty extension for the Macbook. Retail price at Apple Store is S$446, very expensive. As I was browsing Hardwarezone forum, I saw this guy who was selling Applecare for S$200, so in the end I decided to transfer him S$200. Minutes later, he sent me the Applecare code, I registered it, and now my Macbook is well covered by warranty well into 2011.

Surprisingly, it turned out to be simple. Very simple in fact. Here are ten detailed step-by-steps.

1. Download and install Nokia iSync support for your phone.

2. Connect Mac to Nokia phone via Bluetooth. Click on Bluetooth icon, then select Setup Bluetooth Device.

3. Bluetooth Setup Assistant should appear. Click Continue.

4. Select Mobile Phone, click Continue. Turn on Bluetooth on your phone, make it Discoverable.

5. Mac should be able to find your phone. If no, make sure that Bluetooth on your phone has been turned on and it’s Discoverable.

6. Select your phone and click Continue. Wait for your Mac to gather information about your phone.

7. With Nokia E90, the following options appear. Tick both, then click Continue.

8. Bluetooth Setup Assistant will ask you more details on your connection. For me, since I uses Starhub, I only need to put in APN value shwap, left username and password empty, and clicked Continue. This is potentially the most difficult step of all as it need you to find out what is the APN name for your mobile phone data connection.

9. When everything goes well, you’ll be congratulated Click Quit.

10. Go to System Preferences -> Network. Select Bluetooth and click on Connect. Voila, that’s it !! Your Macbook should now be able to connect to Internet using your mobile phone data plan. To be sure, I turned off my Airport, launched Firefox, and browsed to Google. It works !!

If you go to Connection Manager in your phone, you should see an active connection established.

http://home.singtel.com/iphone/

How to access Slide Master feature in PowerPoint 2007

To access this feature in PowerPoint 2007, go to View and then click on Slide Master. A new Ribbon tab will be displayed on the left of Home tab, appropriately called Slide Master. Here you can adjust the slide master as you wish, and when you close the Master View, the adjustment you’ve made will be applied to all the slides using that Master. You can have multiple Master in one PowerPoint slide (caveat: Only PowerPoint 2002 and above). Consider that as having multiple templates in a slide.

Now, let me bring you can a few days back in time on how I found out this “new” feature. I needed to create a PowerPoint slide a couple of days back, and since I was using my Mac at that time, I decided to try out Apple’s latest iWork ’08. You can download their 30-days trial for free. It came with Pages (similar to Word), Numbers (you guess it, similar to Excel), and Keynote (similar to PowerPoint). The download was blazing over 600KB/sec, so it took me less than 15 minutes for that 470 MB package. After I installed them, I nose dived into Keynote to create my presentation. Now the fun begins. As I was still figuring out how to use Keynote, I had no choice but to randomly click on anything that looks like a button that I can click that has a label resembles what I am trying to do. Hey, that’s what you do when you have no idea of a new piece of software, no? This is when I was introduced to this new concept of Masters.

Masters in Keynote

Obviously, when I am back to Windows to refine my presentation (after all, this presentation will be run using a Windows machine, so I have to make sure that it runs fine in Windows. Luckily I did, as many of the fonts I used in Mac was not available in Windows, and my presentation looks awful at best), I looked out for a button that has the word “Master” in it. It was easy to guess, it’s a view, so I headed to View tab, and there you go, big button called Slide Master. If only I had known this feature long time ago, it would have saved me countless hours refining my presentation manually, and I hope that you don’t have to suffer similar fate if you need to create some presentation in the future

So, I read a couple of “switching-to-Mac” guide on the Internet, 10 Things Every New Mac Owner Should Know, From Windows to OS X, Useful Keyboard Shortcuts in OS X, A Guide to OS X Software for Switchers, and The Tao of Mac. As there are many software I usually use in Windows are Windows-only, I have to find its Mac OS X-equivalent that can do the same tasks. The software guide to OS X really helps me going, from there I knew about Flip4Mac (to play WMV files in QuickTime), Adium (a wonderful and cute instant messaging application, supports popular MSN, Yahoo, GTalk until never-heard-before of Gadu-Gadu and QQ), and some other applications that I have installed.

Speaking about installation, it’s a no-brainer in OS X. A guide I read said Windows users like to complicate things, searching for installers and uninstallers, kinda true. There’s no such thing per-se in OS X. Just drag the downloaded application into Applications folder, and good you go. To remove the application, just drag the application into Trash, and it’s gone. It’s so simple I was skeptical at first, hehe…. Maybe the guide was right, Windows users like to complicate things :p How to take screenshots? I clicked on Print-Screen, then looked for Microsoft Paint equivalent. It’s not available. Now what? Later on I found out, by Cmd+Shift+3, it’ll take whole-screen-shot, and automatically save the resulting PNG onto desktop. Weird combination, but much less steps than in Windows for sure.

My Mac OS X desktop now, still quite bare.

Keyboard shortcuts are different and takes time to get used to. Instead of Ctrl, Alt, and Shift, it has , , , and Shift. Home and End are Ctrl+left-arrow and Ctrl+right-arrow respectively. To move files, instead of Shift+drag files, it’s Command+drag files. Instead of Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X, and Ctrl+V for Copy, Cut, and Paste, it’s Cmd+C, Cmd+X, and Cmd+V respectively. Different, but not that hard to get used to.

Mac OS X System Preferences Search. Note how it tries to “spotlight” the potential icon you are looking for based on your search terms

Also note how wonderful application like Adium uses the Dock to its maximum potential, showing you who messaged, how many unread messages, and that duck icon is quite animated, depending on your status, very cute indeed. Download manager shows the current download speed (200+KB/sec in the screenshot considered quite slow. At one point, I managed to hit 670KB/sec ) All in all, it has been a positive experience the last few days with Mac OS X, and am looking forward to using it more for my computing usage. I know I’ll still need to boot to Windows Vista once in a while to use applications that are not available for Mac OS X, notably Microsoft Money 2007 Deluxe. We’ll see how it goes