Mac Geekery turns two years old today so I thought it fitting to talk about why this place exists in the first place.
Like a lot of other Mac sites, we started this site because we saw a void that needed filling and felt we could do our share to fill it (by we, I mean JC and myself). However, the void we wanted to fill wasn’t one of another Mac tips site, those exist in droves. The void we were attacking was the one where the site was willing to not care if people couldn’t follow the tip and actually just got to the meat of it and did some crazy stuff. This is an important distinction, because a good number of Mac users these days come from other platforms, many of them Unix-based, attracted to the Unixy goodness of Mac OS X, but without the ugly of X11. Having a ton of sites dumbed-down for the average Joe with the occasional insane bit is great for Joe, but not for me and those like me that really want to tear into the machine.
Back in ’04 I worked at Apple as a phone jock and existed online under a pure pseudonym because Apple has very archaic public statement policies that essentially prohibit putting your name and the company’s name in the same sentence anywhere at all outside of business use. You could say you worked for them, but once the cat was out of the bag you couldn’t talk tech anymore. It was an expected evil of a tech giant, surely, but a real pain in the ass for someone that loves to talk about technology.
However, just using the computer outside of work (I’ve used Macs for just over a decade) I ran into interesting things that I really couldn’t talk about because it was technical, Mac-related, and I was using my name. Sad. Of course, there was a solution: break a member of the equation. The goal of the rule was “don’t make statements that could be seen as being from the company” so it was reasonable to just entirely omit my name and stance and say things.
With that idea in hand I hit all the little tip sites and made submissions and … the audience was wrong for the level of tips I gave, or the solutions I offered. Tips on package modification and file replacement went over everyone’s head and I was inundated with requests for help. Not good, really. So I looked around for a tips site that allowed higher-end tips on a regular basis and came up dry, at least for the mainstream Mac users.
I mentioned this in passing to a fellow Apple slave and after some light discussion it was decided that we needed a site for just such geekery. A hunt for CMSes followed and we narrowed it down to XOOPS and Drupal. I started to setup the site with XOOPS, mainly because of the better installer and module management. After some time, I really, really started to hate it and gave Drupal a try. Within days I had everything done that I wanted to do, so that was it. We started writing some articles to get ready and put them in the site live because, well, who was reading it?
A few people, it turned out. Drupal was set to ping Ping-O-Matic and the RSS feed had landed in Feedster which the MacSurfer crew was using to find interesting Mac blog posts or articles. Well, one day I notice a lot of traffic hitting the site and go crazy because we weren’t up yet. Well, MacSurfer had linked to the Partitioning the iPod article before we were ready. By “before we were ready” I mean that we were still using the default theme and the URLs were numbered nodes instead of names. It was ungood.
In a mad fury of coding I made a basic theme and fixed the URLs to be cleaner and put that up as a stop-gap. Over the next few weeks I refined the look and feel to be a three-column version of my blog, codepoetry. It was bad, but functional.
We came up with some ideas, early on, to make the site more interactive. It would be safe to say that they mostly failed by this point. We’ve always had an open submission policy whereby anyone can submit tips of their own and get ‘em featured on the site and, to date, we’ve received and posted less than ten of those. It saddens us, but we deal with it and keep posting our own stuff. We thought about a contest to get people to submit tips but then the legalities of interstate contests hit us, hard, and we didn’t do it. We’re looking into how that would work, still, and have some plans there.
For a while we decided that tips were a little on the long side in developing, so we’d talk about current happenings as well and created two columns on the site to talk about various things in. This worked, but when JC trended towards talking about the Genius Bar more often than not we spun his rants off into ungenius. With that done, I felt the best place for my stuff was back on my blog as well and that ended that mess.
Well, almost. In early April, during my final few weeks at Apple, JC and I decided to have just a little bit of fun and release some fake announcements (some turned true on us) concerning a faux 30th anniversary event. We really didn’t expect the traffic we received that day from Digg and all of the Mac sites, many of whom didn’t really follow along with the idea of April Fool’s Day. Many believed some of the things we posted as if they were true, which was prophetic as two things did come true, almost to the letter.
The Wireless Mighty Mouse was an obvious item to call out since a lot of folks really wanted the rodent to show up and it was a fair guess that the people in Apple wanted the same. However, calling the Mac Pro down to the double Superdrives kind of shocked us when we realized how close we got.
| Spec |
Mac Octo |
Mac Pro |
| Processor |
Intel Core64 Duo |
Intel Core2 Duo (64-bit) |
| Core Count |
8 or 4 |
4 |
| RAM |
8 slots, up to 32GB |
8 slots, up to 16GB |
| Expansion |
6 slots, PCI-E |
4 slots, PCI-E |
| Optical |
Two SuperDrives |
Two SuperDrives |
| Hard Disk |
Four SATA |
Four SATA |
| Hardware RAID |
Yes |
No |
| External SATA |
Yes |
No |
| USB Ports |
Two |
Five |
| FireWire 400 |
Two |
Two |
| FireWire 800 |
Two |
Two |
| Audio |
Optical in/out |
Optical in/out |
| Wireless |
Standard AP/BT |
Standard AP/BT |
| Displays |
Up to eight |
Up to eight |
On. The. Nose. I couldn’t believe it. As JC said, we got the right call, but in the wrong month starting with A. We did a better job at rumor-mongering than any of the rumor sites, and we were honest about pulling it out of our asses. To make things even better, Anandtech got a hold of some quad-core chips and put two of those baddies in a Mac Pro giving us the … Mac Octo.
Around then we both left Apple to be our own bosses. JC left his Genius job at the Apple Retail Store to recover data and I left my phone job to code endlessly, mercilessly for BSS. This has done precisely two things: given us a lot more time since we left Apple, and filled it up with the business of working for oneself. So for a few brief months we wrote a lot of articles and then … dead air. Life catches up.
That said, we’re shuffling things around, making time, answering questions as they come in and trying to get articles out when we find the time. The site lives, and it will keep living, just at the same lethargic pace that it’s held for about a year.
So this is where you come in. As I stated before, attempts at user tips have pretty much fallen flat. We’re working our butts off in real life to make these ventures work and the site gets spurts of answers and tips when we get a chance to run them out. What we would love are some submissions. Ignore the level of your audience and show the world how to hack your Mac up. It can be Mac hardware running something vile or Mac software doing something crazy, it doesn’t matter. If you have a tip or tutorial at a higher level, use us get it out there.
Though, as I said, this place exists to serve our desire to get our tips out there, so even if you don’t, we’ll still be posting when we can, as we always intended to.
Historical Winners
As a moment to commemorate the two years of running this place, we collected what we feel were the best and/or coolest articles we’ve done to-date and put them below, as well as any special honors the articles have. It’s a nice summary of what we’ve done so far, and what we’re going to try to keep doing.
Post new comment