Ancient and modern

May 10th, 2009

Some pics from this afternoon’s walk around Isleham.

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The cat is a few years old. The priory behind, about a millennium.

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Flutter by.

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Wall-eyed.

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This used to be a railway cutting, but no longer. Cars can’t go there either. But pedestrians can find a way…

(These are on Flickr – you can click them for different sizes and for others in the set. As with most of my photos recently, they’re geotagged, so Flickr can show you where they are on a map if you should happen to be curious!)

Mac Mini 9

May 6th, 2009

My Mac Book Pro has a new baby brother. It’s a Dell Mini 9 on which, thanks to the instructions here, I was able to install Mac OS X.

I already had a properly-licensed copy of the OS, in so far as any operation like this could be properly-licensed. I ordered the Dell with 2G RAM, an improved webcam, a larger (16GB) SSD and a bluetooth module. Total cost: £277. Including VAT. And shipping. Oh, and a nice carrying case.

As soon as you pick the device up, you can tell from the construction that it’s not an Apple. But my first solid-state ‘Mac’ runs the OS really quite nicely. I had a vague idea that Apple software was only licensed to run on Apple-badged products, so I fixed that too:

However, there was one downside to the bargain special price I got from Dell. After ordering, I discovered that some varieties of this machine, such as those purchased from PCWorld or from Vodafone, have a 3G modem and a slot for a SIM. This doesn’t have it, and it would have been really quite nice. But then I might not have got some of the other upgrades, and since everything else, including a 3G connection via Bluetooth to my phone, seems to work fine, I’m really very happy.