Wayne Priestley

I’d like to invite you all to a Tweetup (meet up of Twitter users) that’s been arranged for 19th December 09.

If your interested or just want to know a little more about it check out LiverpoolTweetup.co.uk for all the details and a list of people who are coming along.

A few of us are making it a all day event so we’re staying over for the night, there is a link to local hotels in the area on the Tweetup site so check it out if you’d like to join us.

Thank you and I hope to see you there…

I would suggest reading the post below this one-first to familiarise yourself with the story so far.

As I was saying, I had decided to get myself a new MBP and give my Son the one I have now.

I was happy with this decision until I saw a few tweets from @Gazmaz about his predicament, he considering a iMac buy then started considering the idea of a Mac mini and a 24″ Apple display.

So this got me thinking once more, shall i get the cheaper 15″ MBP and a 24″ Apple display to give me way more real estate along with duel monitor set-up…

Then along came @DonMcAllister with his explanation of how he went from deciding to buy a Mac mini and ended up ordering a Mac pro…

So, so far I’ve gone from a Mac Mini to a iMac for my son.

Then to a new 17″ MBP for me, and giving my Son my old 17″ MBP.

Then to a new 15″ MBP and an Apple 24″ LED display.

But it didn’t stop there however, I use my MBP to make home movies with Final Cut Express, and organise my pictures with Aperture 2, and I’m starting to use pixelmator and a few other apps more often that require some serious hardware to get the best out of them.

So getting the 17″ MBP with 4GB of Ram as standard would be the way to go as it gives me the option to upgrade to 8GB and put in a SSD in the future.



Now this along with the 24″ display, Apple keyboard and AppleCare is going to cost a little more than I have available at present to invest.

So my plan is that in a few more months, I shall take another look at the 17″ MBP along with the 24″ Display and see how the finances are….

You can be sure that I’ll be posting my final decision once the time comes

My decision was simple.

Wait until the Mac Mini was updated by Apple and buy one for my Son who is using an old desktop PC with windows XP Pro installed.

The PC is about 5 years old and over the last 12 months it’s started to show signs of its age, and as I want to eventually switch all the family over to using Mac’s I don’t see any point in spending money upgrading the PC.

So when Apple finally updated the Mac Mini I was all ready to buy, until that is I had reason to visit the Apple Store in Liverpool to have a repair done on my daughters Macbook.



I took the chance to get a good look at all the new Apple hardware on display and have a bit of a play.

I was immediately impressed with the 24″ Apple LED displays.
With the LED backlight the images on the screen seemed to pop out at you, and the size…. Well, a bit overwhelming after sitting in front of the 17″ display on my Macbook Pro.

Even though the spec’s of the Mac Mini were given a serious rev, I still wasn’t sure how long my Son would get full use out of it as he likes his games on the PC, and for this reason XP will be getting installed on his Mac.

Because of the price increase in the Mac mini I started the think that after a few upgrades to the basic Mini, that the iMac was starting to look a pretty good deal.
And this is how the whole process started to get out of control, but more on that later.

I was so impressed by the service I received from the guys at the Apple store, even though the Macbook was out of warranty, I left the store and made my way home feeling quite good.

It was on the drive home when I started thinking about my options and how best to address the need of my Son and his new Mac.

At present I have a 2007 MBP with a 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 3GB of RAM installed.

It’s an extremely powerful machine and way out performs his current desktop PC as you could imagine.

So that got me thinking.
Why not get myself one of those new MBP’s and pass my current MBP along to my Son.

Good idea, I decided I would do this.

To be continued……….

A few weeks ago I received my copy of iLife 09, included in the iLife suite is the movie editing application iMovie.


After first using iMovie HD in 2007, then moving on to iMovie 08 which in my opinion Apple made a bit of a mess of, I decided to move to Final Cut Express because of the advanced editing features.

I was quite happy with FCE, despite it being slightly overkill for what I needed if truth be told.

After installing iMovie 09 I decided to edit some footage just to see hoe it compared to iMovie HD and FCE.

After turning on the advanced editing features and setting the preferences to how I wanted them I started editing away for all I was worth…

The improvements over iMovie 08 were immediately obvious from the start, everything I wanted to do could be found in iMovie 09, better editing, transitions and effects were easy to find, add and manipulate.

The easy of use over FCE was also apparent from the beginning, which I did expect. One thing to think about if you are considering FCE is that it’s not an application you can open every few months and get straight back into, less than regular use will result in you having to go through a bit of a learning curve whenever it’s re-opened.

I did however still spend about 6 hours making my iMovie 09 project.

I added a picture slide show in at the beginning, then some video along with many transitions and effects to get it to look just how I wanted.

After exporting and watching the final movie on my Plasma screen I was more than happy with what I had achieved on my first attempt.

Obviously I could have done a little more advanced editing with FCE, but after recently opening it up to do some work I found myself wanting to be back in iMovie 09.

So I’ve decided that I’ll be switching back to iMovie 09 for the time being, or at least until what I need a movie editor for changes from simple home movies to something a little more professional looking.

I’m sure that when I get a little time to go back to FCE and learn what I’ve forgotten I may decide to switch back.

Two books I’ve been waiting for have arrived from Amazon today.
Dot robot written by Jason Bradbury and The Cult of Mac by Leander Kahney.

Dot.com billionaire Devlin Lear, founder of the top-secret defence force Mex, has been watching Jackson Farley. He knows he has found a digital genius.
Along with three other brilliant gamers from different corners of the world, Lear wants Jackson to join him and stop the criminal heist of the century using the most highly advanced state-of-the-art-robots ever invented.

The Macintosh is more than a computer it’s a way of life…
This book is about what it is to be a Macintosh person.
It gives insight into the greatest love and loyalties of any product of our era.

The Dot Robot is a book for my 10 year old Son, but I admit I’ll be reading it myself after he’s done reading it.

The Cult of Mac is without question for me. I’ve been waiting for the movie to appear on iTunes here in the UK but so far without any Luck.

I will be posting an update when I’ve read them and let you know what I thought.

This is a repost of a blog I wrote when I first changed to WordPress but unfortunately it was deleted when I experienced my Siteground problems.

I decided to switch to WordPress after talking to David Allen on an interview I had with him on his podcast Mac20q.

A little while after that I was a regular reader of FruitBytes a blog from a Goerdie lass with a passion for Mac’s.

I was a RapidWeaver user from the start, when I first switched to the Mac it was the application I used for my blogging and website creation.

Nothing bad to say about RapidWeaver but I feel like a change and as WordPress is free it seems like a no brainer not to jump in and have a go.

I’ve had some major issues the last few days with Wordpress and Siteground.

Here’s where it starts…

On Tuesday 24th I installed a RSS plugin on my Site, all was going fine until I tried to transfer some files via FTP using Transmit and noticed that it couldn’t make the connection.

Just a glitch I thought.
Then after closing Safari and going off to do a few other things on my Mac I tried to log back into my WordPress admin account and the page would not load.

After a few attempts I thought that Siteground must have a problem with the server hosting my site and that it would all be sorted out later that night. It was getting late so I thought I would just leave it and all would be well the next day.

Unfortunately all was not well the next day and I still had the same problem of the page not responding when I tried to access the cPanel on Siteground.

It was time to raise a ticket, so off I went to raise a ticket when I noticed that I had an Un-read ticket waiting for me.

I was shocked to read the message from Siteground telling me that because my website was consuming high server resources my account was to be SUSPENDED if the issue was not sorted within seven days.

After several tickets to and from Siteground explaining what I thought the problem was, and how I could resolve it I decided I would simply log into my admin page and start to Un-install plugins starting with the last one I installed until the problem was solved.

It was here that I ran into problem number two.

I was unable to get access to my admin page on WordPress so I couldn’t remove any plugins.

After another ticket raised I was given alternate links to access my cPane, bit still had no luck.

Eventually I requested that Siteground remove the WordPress installation for me so that I could start again from scratch. I didn’t see this as a problem because I had only made a few posts and if I lost some data it wouldn’t be a problem.
This however didn’t resolve the issue of accessing my cPanel. One ticket later on Thursday 26th I had a response from Siteground telling me that the problem with access was due to my IP address being banned from the siteground servers……

So all is sorted now, I have a clean install of WordPress and I’m in the process of restoring my posts and settings etc.

I do seem to have lost my first post somewhere but it’s not a problem.

What I can say is that Siteground throughout this whole thing have been excellent in terms of support, I don’t think I’ve ever had to wait more than a few minutes for a response after raising a ticket. Fantastic support!

Thanks….

I’ll be spending the next few days putting my Tech Page back together and getting it posted by the weekend hopefully.

It’s a list of the Tech I have bought over the past couple of years that some of you may like to see.

There’s also a page of Wallpapers I’ve collected that I’ll post for anyone to download, thats going to take a little longer to code so I’ll probably get it started over the coming weekend.