Mod_Geek

I recently bought a new Mac Mini and had the following issues with it. This is, in part, me venting, but it also serves as a list of things for me to find the “Mac Way” for.  I plan to own and use this thing for a year before I truly judge it.

What is up with the Home and End keys? They don’t do anything like I’d expect.  I’m trying to figure out what the equivalent of windows/linux home/end functionality is on MacOS.

Magic mouse detects up scroll when I had no intention of such.  (Update: sold it.  Too annoying.)

Hard disk is a pain to upgrade. (Did the SSD thing.)  No really.  I have built, at least 50 PCs in my day. (Ok, so ~30 of them were entirely the same) but have never found a computer that was so hard to take apart or put together as this one.

iTunes can’t really watch a folder.  Don’t even get me started on the “work-arounds”.  They all suck.

Some things are in the apple menu, other things are in the hard disk. Yet more is in the dock. Much more confusing than the Start Menu.

I was impressed with how simple it was to set up the print functions of my new Epson Stylus NX625 in Ubuntu 10.10 over the network!

I followed the steps found here: http://avasys.jp/eng/linux_driver/download/lsb/epson-inkjet/escp/

A huge number of Epson printers are listed.  I used the AMD-64 .deb file.  It took a while to install and once the driver was loaded I needed to add the printer in CUPS. CUPS was able to discover the printer on the network and install it with just a few clicks.  Had the driver been provided with the printer this would have been simpler than setting up the NX625 in my Windows 7 machine.

I’ll go into greater specifics later or if interest is expressed.

When you copy files and there is already a file of the same name in the folder Windows will kindly ask you what to do with it.  If you choose to keep both files it will add a (2) or (3) to the end of the filename of the file being copied in.

After a large copy it can be very difficult to find these potential duplicates because the Windows 7 search is poor.  Finding parenthesis is a real pain in the neck.

After some searching I was able to find the answer I was looking for here: http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/…

Quite simply use the following in the search field:

name:~"*(2)*"

I plan to elaborate as to what the means to windows, but clearly windows needs more than just quotes to make a literal string.