A Mugging on Lake Street – Chicago magazine – September 2009 – Chicago

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

A Mugging on Lake Street
A veteran investigative reporter looks into his own beating and finds himself confronting harsh and lingering questions of race
BY JOHN CONROY
\’In my next conscious moment, I was dimly aware that I was facedown on the pavement. There was blood in my mouth.\’
 
I was ambushed on the West Side last year, an attack that on its face made no sense. I’d never seen my assailant before; he’d never seen me; no words were exchanged; nothing was taken. Like many crime victims, I wanted the incident, which changed my life for the worse, to have some meaning. I’m white, he is black, and in time it was hard not to wonder if race had something to do with it.
The attack came at about 4:15 on May 9th, a sunny Friday afternoon. I had ridden my bike to the Loop for a meeting…\”

(View the rest of the article – A Mugging on Lake Street)

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review – Ars Technica

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

With every release, John Siracusa dives in and gives us an in-depth technical review of Mac OS X…. And this time, with Snow Leopard, Ars Technica & John show us again, why they are a well respected site on the internet…
Dive in to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review.
Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard has landed. This time around, Apple goes light on the glitz in favor of some heavy work under the hood. John Siracusa dives deep into Apple\’s new OS offering to see what\’s new, what\’s still the same, and whether it\’s worth upgrading.

New Sound Input Controls

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

\"Screen
Typically with Mac OS X you have the volume control slider in the menu bar, and then if you want to make any other changes you would have to open System Preferences -> Sound and then make your changes….
I presume this is new in Snow Leopard, since I have not seen this documented previously, and I have never seen this before installing Snow Leopard….
\"Screen
If you option-Click on the Sound Volume control in the menu bar, an Output & Input Device menu will appear that will allow you to re-assign your active Output device & Input Devices.
A very welcome feature to those that will end up using it. Off the top of my head, anyone that needs to use headphones part of the time… Or podcasters, or….

VMWare v2.05 & Snow Leopard

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

I have scientifically studied this yet…  After all, I haven\’t even installed Bootcamp v3 drivers yet…  But it appears that VMWare boots my bootcamp partition significantly faster under Snow Leopard, then under Leopard…  We\’re talking a 2-4 times speed up…
It would normally take 3-7 minutes for VMWare to boot my bootcamp partition and return to a usable state..  (Sophos antivirus seems to hog the processor while checking for updates).  Now it was maybe 3 minutes total, and a good portion of that was waiting for Sophos to finish updating….
Has anyone else seen similar improvements with VMWare & Snow Leopard….?  Or just general Snow Leopard speed increases?

First glances of Snow Leopard

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

Folks,
For the last 4 months or so, I have been part of the Appleseed beta program for Snow Leopard, and overall I have to say that Apple has done a good job so far with Snow Leopard.
I just got the general release, and so far, I have run into no issues show stopping issues.  Of note, here\’s a few things to follow up on.

  • SwitchResX has a beta out for Snow Leopard.  I can now use (via SwitchResX) 1080P on my Vizio 22 LCD that I use on the computer.
  • MenuMeters claims that they will have a Snow Leopard version available soon…  I miss Menu Meters….
  • Flip4Mac only works with the QuickTime 7 framework currently, not with QuickTime X.
  • So far I have not heard of a Snow Leopard version of the Perian Quicktime plugin…
  • Time Machine is so much faster!  It\’s like 10.4\’s spotlight versus 10.5\’s Spotlight…