Upgrading Hege's 17" iMac

The idea was to install Lion on her Leopard system, but during the initial backup and preinstall checkout I found her system had only 1 GB RAM! Would Lion run on that? Then there was her old 2004 copy of MS Office which was 'a must' - Lion wouldn't like that. Initial backup of her 34 GB used space took an hour or so, installation of Snow Leopard from DVD took getting on for an hour more..

During this time Hege went for a walk in the local woods, and took a wrong turn, so by the time she returned it was getting late, and we were both tired. This turned out to be a good thing, as it allowed my grey matter to work in the background. First thing next morning I swapped 1 GB RAM from my Old 20" iMac (same vintage as Hege's) with one of her 512 MB cards, and was blown out of the water by the difference this made! (BTW, Lion ran OK on my Old iMac with 1 GB RAM)

Then I bought a SuperDuper license, installed ClamXav, OpenOffice, & VLC, cleaned up her Desktop, updated Snow Leopard & iTunes, ran a Smart Copy of SuperDuper, and tested a few things before Hege came to see the great results :)

We decided to leave Lion for now..

Until now I was pretty happy with the speed of my 21.5" iMac, but running Ubuntu 12.10 Beta and Windows 8 Preview in VirtualBox proved to be frustratingly slow. On checking my RAM I found only 4 GB and two empty slots, so after checking which RAM I needed, I found 2x2 GB kits in the Apple Store for kr. 1640,- ($280). Hmmm! To cut a long story short I ended up buying 2x4 GB Crucial RAM for under $70... that should speed up VirtualBox ;)

2 weeks later

And I'm still hovering on the fence ref. ordering my first iPad 3. gen. - came extremely close today!

I'm a little concerned the 16 GB version would be too small, having heard iPad apps may be 3 times the size for the 'resolutionary' screen. My iPhone 4 apps take just over 5 GB after pruning those I seldom use, so I need a clear answer to this matter, before making my decision. The 32 GB Wifi model costs close to $1000 incl. VAT here in Norway..

Wondering about the name

'My AIR Journal' began after the arrival of my first gen. Macbook AIR, the idea being to complement my paper journals, but things changed again after I bought an iPhone 4 to join my Nexus One, (since replaced by a Galaxy S2).

I found a great 'journal' app called Momento for iOS, and more importantly, discovered that a spare Apple wifi keyboard (with Norwegian characters) could be used to input data to the phone. This helped me maintain a daily personal record, which gets backed up to the iMac.

Paper mindmaps are to a great extent taken care of by the Mindnode Touch app, which is much simpler to use than the iMindmap solution. Mindmaps made on the iPhone can be copied to Dropbox and edited on my iMacs. Perfect..

Finally, I have passed my AIR on to an eager granddaughter, and don't expect to have it returned any time soon :) Perhaps I'll just hang onto the name for now.

New ipad or not ?

A week ago I had pretty much decided to buy one of the new iPads, but I am back on the fence again. Reports of overheating, home button trouble, et al, make me pause ..

MWC Eyecatchers

Two things caught my eye. One I plan to buy as soon as it becomes available here in Norway.. the Nokia 808 PureView running the latest Nokia Belle OS. The technology interests me, and first shots taken with early versions of the product are phenomenal.. it will be interesting to see if any other camera/phones turn up with a similar optics system in the not too distant.

The other item which strikes a chord with my current thinking is the ASUS Padfone, though what I really am waiting for are some smooth ways to connect my Galaxy S2 to simple HDMI devices with sound. I don't need a tablet, I just need a screen to have in my lap..

Will we see more in 2012? I hope so!

It has rebooted again

Last time was on 9th January, so what has changed ?

One thing! I installed a Caffeine app today. It has been run only twice, but I will keep an eye on it now and remove it if further reboots occur in the coming days.

All quiet on the Nærsnes front..

This was the CES month with lots of reports of Android tablets, phones, TVs, and Ultrabooks.

The Asus Transformer Prime caught my eye, but I'm still concerned about readability, having had poor experience with the Asus T91MT Windows readability. Galaxy Tabs with their phenomenal screen quality are also still on my list, as is the Apple iPad 3 shortly to be announced I believe.

No mad rush from my point of view. All I really want now is the ICS update for my GS2!