Today I was looking around on my work Windows XP machine, and was disappointed to find there is no “invert mouse” option.

So I found this - www.howtogeek.com/57542/how-to-get-the-worst-os-x-lion-feature-in-windows-reverse-scrolling/

Setting Up Reverse Scrolling in Windows

To make this work, you’re going to need to make sure that you’ve got AutoHotkey installed, or else the script won’t work. Don’t worry, it’s really lightweight.

Once you’ve got that installed, you can either paste this into a new AutoHotkey script (a *.ahk file), or put it into your existing script. Or you could just download the script we’ve got linked below.

WheelUp::
Send {WheelDown}
Return

WheelDown::
Send {WheelUp}
Return

Save it, double-click the file to run it, and you’ve now got reverse scrolling. Or, you know, just download it.

It runs great on my now, old and continually ageing MacBook Pro – until I upgraded to OS X Lion.

So why recommend the upgrade? Well… there’s lot’s of cool stuff, of course, some 250 new features according to Apple.

But the slowness will go away.

I’ve noted that the first time you boot the upgraded OS, Spotlight re-indexes your hard drive. There does not appear to be a stop option anywhere, and despite reading other people’s suggestions to run “mdutil -i off” to disable indexing, it’s still indexing. That’s an overnight job!

Next on the list, the new version of Mail requires an update to your existing mailboxes. I have some 8GB of IMAP stores (Gmail etc), so this took a little while – around about 45-60 mins.

So, the sooner you upgrade, the sooner you get it over and done with. Sorry for getting you worried

So Office 2011, at first glance, excites me. The ribbon has come across to the Mac, hooray!

I’m a bit behind in the times here, seems it was announced back around February of this year, but now Office 2011 for Mac is actually available on the shelf. Will I rush out to buy it? No… But I want it.

Microsoft’s Office for Mac page lists some of the new features, including my favorites:

• the ribbon (insert happy face)
• Visual Basic (insert bigger happy face)
• Outlook Integration
• coauthoring

Visual Basic is a massive add here. Excel on Windows really is the ducks nuts because of Visual Basic, being able to program complex macros and what not. Now I can write my macros on my Mac!

Unfortunately, Office for Mac, is still missing Access and Visio…

A massive plus, however, is the change from Entourage, to Outlook. Along with this, comes the ability, to finally, import PST files. No longer do I have to use my Windows virtual machine to read old emails! Thank you Microsoft

Okay, no, I lied.

But it appears, after Steve Jobs keynote yesterday (or last night Australian time), that Mac OS X Lion is going to be very iPad-esque.

From the “sneak peak” posted on Apple’s website (here - www.apple.com/macosx/lion/), all I can say is wow!

I think this is really exciting. I’ve been a Mac-supporter for about a year and a half now, and rave to anyone I can about the increase in productivity (or atleast, the perception of) of using a Mac. Apple have got one thing down pat, simple interface and navigation design. And it’s one hell of a winner.

The new features, atleast from the sneak peak and the keynote, include:

• App Store, for Mac – bringing the success of the iDevice App Store to the Mac itself, could be interesting, and I wonder how many $1.99 apps I’ll waste my money on, like with my iPhone 4…
• Launchpad – attempting to bring the home screen interface from iPhone and iPad to the Mac, this could be interesting. I like how you are able to organise apps in folders etc also, just like the iPhone…
• Full screen apps – I don’t quite understand the need for this one on a Mac, except for their opinion that it’s less distracting, true that.
• Mission Control – I like it, similar to Windows 7 (I think even Vista had similar functionality?). Makes it easier switching between programs, especially if you have heaps open, ALT+TAB (or Command for the Mac users) can be a bit annoying when you have alot open.
• Facetime – alot of people (read: iPhone haters) have alot to say about how stupid it is to have video calling on an iPhone, that only works with, well, the iPhone… And only whilst connected to a wireless network. Perhaps some more attention to the iPhone side of things might help here, as well as Windows clients for Facetime. Standards based video calling built in to the iPhone would also be nice, so atleast you could have inferior quality video calling with your inferior friends (who are only inferior because they don’t use an iPhone, of course)

One thing I’d really be interested in seeing, is the ability to run iPad and iPhone apps natively in OS X… Having a desktop version of the Facebook application, for instance, could reduce the amount of time I actually sit on Facebook. Angry Birds, however, could be dangerous as a desktop app…

Well, recently I started using a Logitech bluetooth mouse, and the problem popped up again. This time, it wasn’t so easy to fix by just installing Logitech’s software.

So the answer is this – thanks to osxdaily.com/2010/06/02/kill-os-x-mouse-acceleration-from-the-command-line/

In your terminal:
macpro:~ user$ curl -O ktwit.net/code/killmouseaccel
macpro:~ user$ chmod +x killmouseaccel
macpro:~ user$ ./killmouseaccel mouse

This turned out to be quite entertaining.

Pay close attention to the small, tiny, colored text on the left hand side, and you will see there’s a Mac Screensaver you can download, which replicates the web page display as a screensaver. Install and set it, and wait for your screensaver to pop up… This could be quite anti-productive, whilst I sit here waiting for the screensaver timeout to pop up my screensaver to save me from boredom!!

Author: Amy Hoy & Thomas Fuchs
Website: twistori.com
(Because I’m Awesome) Stars: 4.5/5

Cue, gfxCardStatus. I stumbled across this app yesterday which promises to let me change the GPU “on the fly”, without logging off!

Installed the app, and it shows an icon in the “system tray” (or whatever you call it in Mac land). When you click the icon, you have the menu option “switch GPUs”. After a few seconds, and the rotatey rainbow ball thingo, it allegedly changes the GPU.

In my case, I haven’t been able to verify this actually works. However, it does offer a menu option to show which GPU is currently in use, and the system tray icon will also change from an “n” to an “i” and vice versa, depending which GPU you are using.

I read on Cody’s blog that this was originally developed for newer MacBook Pro’s with the nVidia GT330 GPU, and it works perfectly in that realm. I own the older, late 2008 MacBook Pro with the nVidia GeForce 9600M GT and 9400M GPU’s.

Author: Cody Krieger
Website: codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus/
(Because I’m awesome) Stars: 3.5/5 – only because it doesn’t seem to work on my older MacBook Pro

EDIT: Waiiiiittt. It’s working now! 4.5 stars

Firstly, my MacBook’s Superdrive (aka DVD burner), decided to fry the laser assembly at some point in the past few weeks… Ouch… So took it down to Nextbyte and they (very promptly, I must say), sorted it out. In one day, out the next, I was impressed.

Having gotten my MacBook back, and receiving my Momentus XT a day late, I had to find the Mac OS X Snow Leopard install disk, which I haven’t seen for like a year… After turning my room upside down, I found it in the garage (of all places)…

Okay, all that done, I whacked in the CD, booted up and started the Snow Leopard installer. Now, as a certified Microsoft guy, there’s this little thing we call “Windows time”, that is, when the computer says “5 minutes remaining”, in Windows, it’s almost always twice that… Today I witnessed “Mac time” first hand… The progress bar seemed to move a fair way, but from the start of the install, to about 10 minutes later, the time remaining went from 30 minutes, to 29 minutes… Eventually, the installer finished with 10 minutes remaining.

Okay, so create my username, do the Apple registration hoo har jump through hoops and sacrifice your first child.

Updates, yeahhhh I’d better run those too…

While it’s doing that, I did the same old `dd` trick…

Low and behold….
Ashley-Knowles-MacBook-Pro:~ aknowles$ dd if=/dev/zero of=gigabyte.file bs=1024 count=1000000
1000000+0 records in
1000000+0 records out
1024000000 bytes transferred in 10.884781 secs (94076306 bytes/sec)
Ashley-Knowles-MacBook-Pro:~ aknowles$

Yep… 90MB/sec, or thereabouts…

I’d call that a massive improvement over the stocko 55MB/sec…

Oh and these speeds are write speeds also, I’m yet to test the read speed, but I expect it will be equally as impressive.

So, thanks Seagate, here’s your free plug, please re-imburse me for my time and money spent purchasing the amazing Momentus XT hard drive. Okay, thanks!

EDIT:So it looks like what it does is, caches the file in the SSD chip after being accessed… Or something like that… As seen below:

Ashley-Knowles-MacBook-Pro:~ aknowles$ dd if=gigabyte.test of=/dev/null
1953125+0 records in
1953125+0 records out
1000000000 bytes transferred in 11.895218 secs (84067395 bytes/sec)
Ashley-Knowles-MacBook-Pro:~ aknowles$ dd if=gigabyte.test of=/dev/null
1953125+0 records in
1953125+0 records out
1000000000 bytes transferred in 4.437224 secs (225366122 bytes/sec)

I’ve since had numerous issues with space, I’m a huge consumer of (legitimate) television shows and my iTunes library is pretty big. My installed applications also take up some 50GB of space, including the OS footprint.

Suffice to say, I’m well over running out of space. I have a 640GB external Seagate USB HDD which does the job of housing stuff which isn’t 100% required on my MacBook all the time, but copying data on/off this all the time is a bit of a pain in the bum.

So the other day, I found a new (well, new to me) product from Seagate, the Momentus XT hybrid hard drive, which harnesses the power of SSD technology by embedding a 4GB chip on the board of the hard drive. How it works is beyond me, but I had a quick look around, and the price and reviews on the drive just couldn’t stop me from ordering one!

Umart, the “go to” cheap PC shop here in Brisbane, had these at a low $165 for a 500GB drive. I noticed a few posts saying that you *need* to purchase the version which leaves out the G-sensor, which stops the head on the disk from moving when a shock is detected. The G-sensor model actually costs the same, and only has a 16MB cache, compared to the non-G-sensor’s 32MB cache. Oh, and the reason is, the MacBook Pro has a built in G-sensor which does the same thing, running the G-sensor model apparently causes the HDD and the MacBook’s G-sensors to conflict with each other, and the head doesn’t lock…

That said, I ran some benchmarking… It’s pretty rudimentary, but this is the “before”:

aknowles-mac:~ aknowles$ dd if=/dev/zero of=gigabyte.file bs=1024 count=1000000
1000000+0 records in
1000000+0 records out
1024000000 bytes transferred in 17.505867 secs (58494675 bytes/sec)

250GB SATA HDD with 7200RPM spindle speed… ~55MB/s write speed…

Admittedly, it was alot slower when I substituted /dev/zero for /dev/urandom, at a paltry 9MB/s write speed…

Watch this space…