About 1 week ago Apple released the it’s new operating system Snow Leopard.  It was basically a improved version of Leopard with a few new features but not a lot.  It was priced very reasonably at $29 for a single user license upgrade.
There’s been a lot of people talking about how it isn’t much different and breaks some compatibility with some old applications, so some have not upgraded and some have rolled back to Leopard.
Myself I have upgraded all of my Macs and I find that it is much faster and responsive.  The sleep and wake function now works really fast and as I’ve been using it for the past week, I have slowly started to notice new features that weren’t on the previous OS Leopard.  Some of these updates like when you click on the WiFi icon you can now see the signal strength of all the wireless networks detected which can make choosing one easier.  Also expose is much better now and can now show what’s been minimized in the dock.
Overall I think Apple was going for stability and not so much for new features as that is what they mentioned in the last WWDC.  One feature that works now for the address book that didn’t before and left my address book unable to work was adding a smart group that shows all the contacts that are not in a group.  That use to make my address book hang and I would have to reset some settings to get it to function again, but now it works fine.
Also a big change was the ability to run in 64 bit native mode which only some macs can do.  You can hold 6 + 4 during boot to force the OS to boot into the 64it kernel which makes the OS all 64bit but you may find compatibility issues if you do so.
I think most of the new features will be more apparent once developers utilize the new programming features like grand central dispatch and Open CL.
You can find out more about Snow Leopard here – http://www.apple.com/macosx/
Tomorrow September 9th Apple is holding a event in San Francisco which rumor has it they will be showing off their latest new iPods.  Stay tuned for a post tomorrow on whats new tomorrow.

You can download Safari 4 Beta and find more information here.

Apple just released the new iPhone 2.2 Firmware.
Some of the new features include:

Well Google finally released a Video client.  They have had the chat client for a while, but now you can video chat also.  This is good like Skype for cross platform communication, because other services like MSN video chat require you to run Windows to video chat with users, so if you have a Mac, you can’t video chat with MSN users unless you run Bootcamp or the like.
You can download it over here – http://mail.google.com/videochat

These are the new nanos and the colors they come in.  Very bright colors that can stop traffic in case you are listening to your iPod too loud and stumble into oncoming traffic.
They include a accelerometer like the iPhone and iPod Touch and have games based off it also.
It has a new shake to shuffle feature which is sure to make a few Nanos fly across the living room.

The new iPod Touch with 2.1.1 software.  I have held and tested one of these and it is really thin now.  It has a built in speaker and volume control buttons now.  Something that the first one really should of included.  The speaker isn’t as loud and clear as the iPhone 3G’s but still good enough to hear what’s going on in a general enviroment.
What is also interesting is they include a built in Nike+ sensor that works with a Nike+ shoe insert that can track your running workout.

The new iPhone 2.1 Software Update.  Update includes:

Edit 9/10/08:
After using the browser for a bit, here is my takes on the new Chrome browser.
It is definitely faster than any of the other browsers at rendering.
Some Java applications on pages did not function correctly however.  For example I could not print PayPal shipping labels to my label printer.  Also from what I heard, it has many security issues also.
The tear off tabs feature is cool, you can pull tabs out of the window to form there own separate windows or combine separate windows to form tabs.
So far there are no plug ins that I know of like Firefox has.
Since it’s beta, they definitely will address some of these issues and then maybe it can and will be used instead of the default browsers that come with Windows or OSX.

Installing.

• First I installed rEFIt a boot loader which enables the mac to boot to more volumes than just holding down alt/option.  It has a cool graphical menu selection screen where you can choose the OS you want to start.  It is free and can be downloaded.

• Next I partitioned the Macs hard drive to add two more partitions.  I ran terminal commands to complete this:
  diskutil list
  diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 123.6G “Journaled HFS+” “Linux” 10G “MS-DOS FAT32″ “Windows” 15G
  The list command will show the partition and total size of partition 2.  You want to split it up so they add up to this size.
• Reboot and hold down alt/option when the boot sound comes and choose to boot to the Windows install CD.
• After agreeing to the user agreement choose to install Windows on the 4th partition you created that is labeled FAT32.  When it asks you to format it, choose NTFS or FAT32 and quick if you don’t want to wait a long time to check the disk for errors.  (FAT32 does not support file sizes greater than 4GB)
• After it copies files and asks you to restart, choose the Windows partition to boot in rEFIt and finish installing XP and do the same again after it saves all the final setttings so you can boot into XP and install the Bootcamp Mac drivers.
• Reboot and hold down alt/option and press eject if you need to change CDs and ut the Ubuntu disk in and choose to boot to the Ubuntu install CD. (It will say Windows CD)
• Choose English, Mac keyboard, and install and follow the usual install up until the partitioning selection.
• At the partition choice, press FN+CTRL+ALT (OPTION)+F2 to backup the MBR to a temp location.  At the terminal run: sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/sda.mbr bs=512 count=1 . Then press FN+CTRL+ALT (OPTION)+F7″ to exit back to the installation.
• Choose Manual and the SDA3 choose EXT3 filesystem and format checkbox and mount point / then click ok then foward.  It will warn you about SWAP space, but ignore that click continue because with 2GB or more ram, you shouldn’t need a swap file for ram.
• Enter your name and password and I just skipped the migrate doc and settings part.
• At the READY TO INSTALL part, click ADVANCED and choose SDA3 to place the boot loader.  You can review the settings where at the bottom it should say the following partitions are going to be formatted and it should list sda partition #3 as ext3. Click install.
• When it says the install is complete you need to restore the Windows MBR.  Press FN+CTRL+ALT (OPTION)+F2.  At the terminal enter: sudo dd if=/tmp/sda.mbr of=/dev/sda .  Then press FN+CTRL+ALT (OPTION)+F7″ to exit back to the installation and reboot.

Hopefully you should have a triple boot going now and a bootloader to choose which OS you want at boot time.

Windows information.
After installing bootcamp drivers and everything, I still had a device in device manager with a exclamation on it.  I went to intel.com and downloaded the inf chipset file for the 960 chipsets and it reinstalled the chipset drivers and it seemed to take care of that.

Ubuntu options. Some of these I got from – https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro
To show the temps in the top panel:

sudo apt-get install hddtemp

add this to /etc/rc.local :
modprobe coretemp
sensors -s

sudo apt-get install lm-sensors sensors-applet

Now you can right click the panel and add the sensor options.

Function Keys on Keyboard.

Pommed is a daemon to support extra keys on apple computers. These include the brightness, eject, volume and others. Releases of Pommed 1.8 or up fully support the MacBook and MacBook Pro keyboards. It can be installed with this command:

sudo apt-get install pommed

You can check your pommed version number with this command:

pommed -v

The default behavior on Apple keyboards is to have the top row keys primarily function as media keys (brightness, volume, etc), and have the expected function keys (F1, F2, etc) accessible with using the fn keys.

To reverse this behavior, edit the pommed configuration file with this command:

sudo gedit /etc/pommed.confChange the value of fnmode to “2″, and save. At any time, you can change this value back to “1″ to return to the default behavior.

Touchpad Fixes.

Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and replace :

Sections “InputDevice“

• Identifiers “Synaptics Touchpad”
• ..
• ..

EndSection

With :

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Synaptics Touchpad"
        Driver          "synaptics"
        Option          "SendCoreEvents"        "true"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/psaux"
        Option          "Protocol"              "auto-dev"
        Option          "LeftEdge"              "10"
        Option          "RightEdge"             "1200"
        Option          "TopEdge"               "10"
        Option          "BottomEdge"            "370"
        Option          "FingerLow"             "10"
        Option          "FingerHigh"            "20"
        Option          "MaxTapTime"            "180"
        Option          "MaxTapMove"            "220"
        Option          "SingleTapTimeout"      "100"
        Option          "MaxDoubleTapTime"      "180"
        Option          "LockedDrags"           "off"
        Option          "MinSpeed"              "1.10"
        Option          "MaxSpeed"              "1.30"
        Option          "AccelFactor"           "0.08"
        Option          "TapButton1"            "1"
        Option          "TapButton2"            "3"
        Option          "TapButton3"            "2"
        Option          "RTCornerButton"        "0"
        Option          "RBCornerButton"        "0"
        Option          "LTCornerButton"        "0"
        Option          "LBCornerButton"        "0"
        Option          "VertScrollDelta"       "20"
        Option          "HorizScrollDelta"      "50"
        Option          "HorizEdgeScroll"       "0"
        Option          "VertEdgeScroll"        "0"
        Option          "VertTwoFingerScroll"   "1"
        Option          "HorizTwoFingerScroll"  "1"
        Option          "SHMConfig"             "on"
EndSection

Edit the Font to match OSX more.

By default, Ubuntu uses a style of font rendering different than that used on Mac OS X. You may prefer fonts similar to those on Mac OS X, and you can have these on Ubuntu by doing the following:

1. Open the Appearance preference panel (System-Preferences-Appearance)

2. Click Fonts, and click on Details…, on Hinting select the “Slight” option.

Wireless Network Card:

Installed WICD to control network.

Bluetooth Mouse or Keyboard:

If having issues with connecting using the icon in panel.
Open terminal and type:
sudo hidd –search
It should scan for the mouse of keyboard then you can see the mac address of the device.  Next type:
sudo hidd –connect aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff
Where aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff is the mac address of the mouse or keyboard.
The mouse or keyboard should now be connected.  On the next reboot it will probably ask if you want to pair and connect on future reboots.

Printing to a Airport or Brother wireless printer.

Printing to a Apple Airport device is simple.
You just click add printer and choose AppSocket and put the IP of the Airport which is default 10.0.0.1 and port 9100 is default.  Choose the printer driver and it should work.

For my Brother Wireless MFC-665cw I went into Synaptics package manager and searched for MFC-665cw and it found two packages with drivers.  Installed those and then added the printer via socket like the Apple Airport.  Choose the correct driver and it should work also.

As I find more stuff I add, I will post it here as reference.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them below.