Category: Mac

Well, that escalated quickly…

Ok, so not really. I’ve been thinking about this for a month or two now. I’ve replaced my 2016 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar with, well, a 2013 Mac Pro…and I’m not looking back.

“But John, you travel! How will you work while you’re on the road?” you may be asking. I can’t tell you how much I like my iPad Pro. That’ll be upgraded to a 10.5” shortly – I think that’ll be just right.

Here’s the thing. My job role is changing. Much of that is driven by me. I want to get off the road. I have a new house (and acreage to maintain – that takes time!). My wife and I are raising our grandson. I need to be home more.

Some of it is definitely being driven by the business, too. Education is working on some cool video-based products. And I have most of a studio set up already. It lines up nicely with what I want to be doing.

So if I’m not traveling so much, what am I doing? I’m creating. I’m actually hoping to make this a much more frequent destination for my time. I spent the two months after VMworld kicking out an NSX Micro-Segmentation course. Nothing fancy, but you should go check it out if you haven’t had any NSX training – I think it’s great! Right after we got the first delivery of that out of the way, I made a temporary move to our Curriculum Development team. We’re cranking out new NSX classes, and we’re trying to make ‘em awesome. So there’s a lot of work going into that.

But is that all? Of course not. VMware Learning Zone is a big thing for us right now. You should check that out, too. I’m recording content for that (when time allows). Nothing major right now, but definitely more in the pipeline.

And then, with all of this content creation work I’m doing, I got Scrivener back out, and actually started learning how to use it in earnest. This is one of the greatest things I think I’ve ever found. I can create content until I don’t want to create anymore, and I can do whatever I need to do with it. I think more importantly, it’s helped me start actually organizing thoughts into consumable snippets, and gives me a platform on which to build.

So this has driven me to a change in my daily driver. Earlier this year (once the hype chilled out a bit), I got my hands on a sweet MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. And I _love_ it. I’ve read lots of complaints about the Touch Bar, and whether it’s useful – I hope Apple will be launching a Magic Keyboard with Touch Bar soon. Seriously.

The MBP doesn’t quite fit what I need right now. I bought an OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock to go with it. Which is spectacular. I’ve got my old Thunderbolt Cinema Display rocking out a big screen, and I just picked up a Dell U3417W as a primary display. I do kinda miss the HiDPI joy of Retina displays, but the amount of real estate I have now is unreal, and I’m ok with the tradeoff.

The tradeoff I’m not cool with anymore is the lack of resources for portability. My MBP has 4 hyperthreaded CPU cores, and they’re fast. But they’re not enough for me. I also maxed this thing out at a whopping 16 GB of RAM. Still not enough. Storage, I bumped to a full terabyte, and that’s groovy, but I’ve also got my Synology hanging around in the background for more space if I need it.

With all of this content I’m working through (and the tooling and processes we use), I have a full-time Windows VM I have to run, and I want that to be responsive, so that’s chewing up more than half of my resources right now. And then there’s Camtasia, Logic Pro X, and any other editing tools I need when I’m doing audio or video. And Mail, and Scrivener, and more than one web browser, and whatever else I’m running.

So I took advatage of Other World Computing’s online store (and Black Friday/Cyber Monday), and found a heck of a deal on a trash can Mac Pro, adding another 2 Xeon cores and twice the RAM of the MacBook Pro. Sure, I’m getting what should be considered an old machine, but for what I want to be able to do, it makes a ton more sense. The current Pro certainly doesn’t fit everyone’s use case, but it works great for what I want and need it to do. And I can add memory. Holy crap I miss having that flexibility!

Will I be frustrated late in 2018 when a new Mac Pro is launched? Sure. Am I upset that I’m not waiting another few weeks to get my hands on an iMac Pro? Nah, but that’s an envy-inducing rig right there. I wonder if I can make a business case for my next machine refresh at work………..

Do you know what I’m gonna miss, at least a little bit? Of all things, USB-C. And the Touch Bar, but since I’ve been using the MBP essentially as a desktop, that’s been hidden away from me for a couple of months. But I’m really digging USB-C, for all it’s little gotchas. I like it. And I won’t have any more of it until I refresh this new (old) machine in a while. By then I’m sure we’ll be on a whole new USB spec. And Thunderbolt 4.

Anyway, I’m back to the desktop for a while. I can do everything I need to on the road with my trusty iPad Pro, Pencil, and Smart Keyboard (oh, don’t forget the Spotlight).

What’s out there looking forward? Content. Content on all things NSX. And whatever else I come up with. And I’m going to try to put some here. I’ll see you on the flip side!

More Lion Fun: TotalTerminal

So, a while ago I talked up a SIMBL plugin for Terminal.app called Visor.  I don’t use Visor any longer, as it’s been renamed and updated to a new app, TotalTerminal.  It’s still written and maintained by BinaryAge, and still works the same.   But they’ve dropped the SIMBL requirement and now ships with an installer (and auto-updating, as well!).

It’s still customizable, and works wonderfully.  Go check it out (and upgrade if you’re still using Visor!)

The Lion Sleeps Tonight

Well, not, really, but I couldn’t resist with the title.  I’m experiencing new things with Mac OS X Lion this weekend.  So here’s what’s going on.

I just bought a new iMac.  Sandy Bridge i7, 3.4GHz, loaded up with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD.  Oh, and I have a 1TB spindle installed as well.  27 diagonal inches of beautiful Apple display all built in as well.

I bought this machine for two reasons.  First, so I could clear off any personal stuff from my work-issued MacBook Pro.  Second, this thing has enough horsepower to run a sizable chunk of my home lab, along side my old, unsupported loaded-as-i-can-make-it Dell Precision 390.  So some of my infrastructure is running on an ESXi host, and some in Fusion VMs.  I’m still working out the final details.  And I’m actually contemplating buying a new Thunderbolt Cinema display so I can have a 2nd GigE interface on the iMac.  May just be a pipe dream, but the thought is there.

This configuration will suffice until next year (probably closer to 9 months, if I have my way) when I can pick up and populate a couple of ASUS barebones 1U boxes (assuming, of course, that they or their equivalents are still available).  I’ve got them all picked out now, and assuming everything works out, I’ll have 32 AMD cores and 128GB of RAM to work with.  That should keep me happy for a few years from a compute perspective.  I can only complain about my lab for so long before I put the wheels in motion to make it happen.  I’m still trying to figure out what i want to do for the storage, though.  I’m thinking a stack of ~100GB SSDs, since they’re relatively cheap and will do me well for running VMs without worrying about tons of contention.  I don’t need much for a lab, 200 or 300GB will actually probably be ok, especially with vSphere Thin Provisioning.  I’m sure I’ll keep some spindles around for overflow, since they’re real cheap.  But anyway, I digress from the point here (not that I’ve ever been known to do that)

What I really came to talk about was Lion’s new Recovery Partition and doing a fresh Lion install on a Mac.  I’m wiping the MacBook Pro clean, as I had (just earlier this morning) a Mercury Pro SSD from Other World Computing  (for the OS and VMs) and a 750GB Scorpio Black from WD installed for my Dropbox folder, and media.  About 30 minutes ago, I ripped out the spindle, so now the laptop simply has the SSD, and the optical drive has been reinstalled.

So, hardware work out of the way, I booted into Lion’s Recovery HD (hold the “option” key while you reboot, just in case you didn’t know how to get there), and there it was – what looked like, well, like an OS X installer.  I went ahead and erased the SSD partition, and then told the installer I wanted a fresh install of OS X.  After confirming my eligibility, confirming the disk to which I wanted to install, and requesting my Mac App Store credentials, it’s now “Downloading additional components.”  I have an hour and a half to go, the installer has been doing this for ~15-20 minutes as it stands.  It appears that it really _is_ downloading Lion from Apple’s servers somewhere.  I’m connected to a relatively fat pipe, and it’s still looking like 1.5 hours.  I’m glad I connected to the Time Capsule connected to the cable modem, rather than the DSL.  yikes!

So over the course of the weekend, I’ll be resetting things on the MacBook Pro, but it’ll be nice, as I’ll be able to keep work and play (mostly) separate now, between the iMac, iPad, and new Lion install on the MacBook Pro.  I’m a happy camper.  Oh, and while I’m waiting, I get to put up more drywall in the basement office.  Things are coming together!

Mac App: Visor

Admittedly, I spend less and less time at my Mac thanks to my newer iPad-based workflow. And I spend even less time in a terminal (well, until the past couple of days). And the last couple of days are what bring me to talk about this little app. Well, SIMBL plugin, really.

Visor was written by Antonin over at BinaryAge, and offers a simple, yet rather spectacular drop-down implementation of Terminal.app, very much akin to the command input window from Quake. This is triggered by a hotkey. Once the Visor window is in place, you have your Mac Terminal.app ready to go, and have the option to open new tabs as well, just like in a traditional Terminal.app window.

Visor is completely customizable, and can be made what you want, thought I have found the defaults to be pretty workable.

This all comes to light as I’m ramping up on the vCloud Director classes, and as such, I’m setting up vCloud Director (VCD) in my lab environment. VCD runs on Linux, and backends to an Oracle database (which I’m setting up on Linux), so I’m spending a fair amount of time SSH’d into my VMs to work toward getting things set up

Anyway, I have to recommend Visor if you spend any appreciable time in a terminal on your Mac. I love the elegance of something so simple, yet so functional!.


Miscellaneous Mac Mayhem

So, I’m a MacHead, I’ll admit. So I share things when I find them.

First off, MacHeist just launched their nanoBundle 2 – 7 apps for $19.95! Go check it out!!

Today, MacUpdate Promo is running Blogo (which I use to write this blog, BTW) for a budget-friendly $12.95!

And last, but not least, how often do you use the optical drive in your portable Mac? I can say that I don’t use mine all that much! I was thinking about this the other day, and asked my friend Google, as I thought I had seen something about replacing the Superdrive in a MacBook with a hard disk once upon a time. Lo and behold, MCE Technologies showed up, and for $99, you can get a Superdrive bay replacement to put a hard drive in. And for a little more, you can get a drive preinstalled in it!

I thought this was great because I’ve been thinking about dropping a SSD in this machine for the performance, but I was concerned about the lack of storage space. See, this machine is my primary system, and I really do use a lot of the space. I buy music, TV shows, and movies from iTunes, store all kinds of documents, and generally take up all kinds of space. So SSD is not cost effective in general. But now, I can, within reasonable financial boundaries, get the system performance of SSD, and still maintain the capacity I know and love 🙂

So there are my Mac tidbits for the day.

-jk