lars backlund | blog of lasseman

Started my 3 week vacation yesterday. First me and Linda went down to Waynes coffee, which is a sad excuse for a Starbucks, and ordered an Iced Chai Latte. Here in sweden it’s appearantly a mystery as to how to make good coffe drinks, first of it was too sweet, luke warm (ie, not even close to enough ice) and.. well.. it just wasn’t as good as Starbucks.. But me pouring extra ice into it made it better.

After that we went and watched Die Hard 4, man what a ride. Non stop action for 2 hours, absolutley awesome action movie – the kind of movies they hardly do any more. It’s seriously right up there with Die Hard & Die Hard 2.. I liked it better than the third one.

Today it’s time for some relaxed bbq back home in Stöde. Man it’s going to be nice to get off work for 3 weeks.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/rFCV5DeMxeQ" height="350" width="425" /]

Above is a picture from Flickr, like the only one I have public right now. We actually bought a pro account just a few days ago to get unlimited uploads (it’s like 25 bucks/year) on Flickr (you already get unlimited storage for the free account, but you can only upload 100mb/month). I uploaded about 4 gigs of photos (like 1300) without a hitch from Iphoto using FlickrExport which I also bought for like 160 SEK. Flickr rocks.

Have been looking for a soloution to my problem with switching the MacBook screen off while having my external screen on. There doesn’t seem to be any good soloutions yet. Really freaking annoying. As it is now I have to almost-close the laptop lid which makes the Mac go into sleep mode (also putting the external screen into sleep mode).. then while the lid is closed I tap the button of my USB mouse which wakes the Mac up and for a moment puts both screens on but it quickly notices the laptop screen is still down so it powers it off. I can then raise my laptop screen, which is now off while my external monitor is on, and it will stay turned off until my next reboot (or the entire system goes to sleep because of me not using it).

Reaaaallly freaking annoying and I find it hard to muster that Apple has not made this easy. At all. I want to save energy and my laptop screen but it’s not like I’m supposed to. Moronic.

Tags: macbook, turn display off, external display, mac turn main display off, macbook turn main display off, macbook external display

So I have made the switch and it is a somewhat curious experience. While I do like the Mac in oh so many ways more than my PC there are some annoyances like maximizing windows and the curious love for the mouse contra keyboard shortcuts that I do not agree with. Hopefully some of these things will be adressed in Leopard however.

Switching does make me forgo some of my favorite applications for Mac OS X counterparts, for instance there is no UTorrent which has forced me to use Transmission, which I do like but it is not as good as UTorrent. I am currently downloading FTP software and me liking open source have turned my attention to Cyberduck which I will now test out.
I hate the fact that I am forced to use Firefox even though Safari has so much potential, being able to add extensions would do so much for the browser. Also..what is with the hard coded keyboard shortcuts, Command+Option+F for Google Search box access? Come on..give me a break.
Also WordPress and it’s icons when writing a post isn’t working so that also doesn’t help.

I love the dashboard and the dock, the easy uninstall of software, the gpu accelerated everything, the lack of two mouse buttons (call me crazy).. Iphoto, etc.

Yesterday we rented a car (a Kia Optima, cheap) and started driving down to Monterey here in California. When we got down we checked into our Inn and then went looking around at the shopping center and after that went down towards the downtown area where we had dinner. I ate a nice 16 ounze New York steak.

Anyway, we’re now leaving for breakfast, all amercian style at a place called “Katys place”, according to Google Maps and other sites, a nice place to get a pancake breakfast.

Cheers

Went in to SF today and had some really good food and just walked around. Also bought the new 15″ Macbook Pro (Santa Rosa baby). It was a wee bit expensive but..oh well..now I have a really nice computer and my god I’m really loving the whole Mac thingy.

Anyway it’s late, going to try to post some photos tomorrow.

Back after two years and man it feels great:) last night we arrived at 7pm and went for starbucks, some awesome sushi and some beer and brought it back to the appt. Me and li stayed up until just about 4am just chilling. Today we are going to go into the city, hit the apple store and eat out tonight.

Linda trying out the amenities.. We left Sundsvall at around 23.30, arrived here in Stockholm Arlanda at arount 03:40. Everything was closed down so we waited around for a bit and finally ended up at these websurfing stations they have here to kill time. All the couches and seats of arlanda was already taken but as soon as a spot opened up Linda went to one of them. Personally I can’t relax enough to sleep at an airport with luggage right beside me (and the luggage lockers seemed sort of full) so I’m still surfing the net. Fortunaly good old McDonalds opens up at 6 so…only 40 minutes to go to some sweet food and drink.

We thought the night train would have some sort of drinks/food available but that wasn’t the case so we’re both kind of starved.