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Today we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the release of the Macintosh family of computers. You’ve come a long way baby - here’s to the next 25 years!
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If you frequently repeat a computing task or series of tasks, consider automation.

I’ve just realised that, come May 2009, my Apple Power Mac G5 will be four years old. This is the longest amount of time I’ve ever gone without buying a new computer. For the previous twenty years (yes really) I’ve been chasing the performance ceiling: upgrading where necessary, but usually buying the newest, fastest, greatest machine that I could (and frequently couldn’t) afford.

Indeed the same was true when I bought the G5 back in 2005. I bought the most powerful variant available at the time. Equipped it with half a terabyte of hard disk and populated all the memory slots. Then I bought the biggest, most-badass display that I could (and installed the high-end graphics card that was needed to drive it).
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In which Windows Vista is faster running in a virtual machine on a Macintosh than it is running natively on a high-end Lenova laptop.

On June 21st 2008 my sister, Rachael, married her husband, Darren — and I was given the great honour of photographing their wedding. Today, following months of getting to grips with Apple’s Aperture 2 and Adobe’s Photoshop CS3, I am delighted to present a selection of my favourite photographs from that day.

All photos were taken with my Nikon D80 DSLR camera. The lenses used were the Nikon 50mm f/1.8 D and the Nikon 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5 AF-S DX. I also used the Nikon Speedlight SB-600 flash unit both on-camera and as a remote slave. I shot exclusively in RAW and post-processed all photos with Aperture on my Apple Power Mac G5. A handful of photos were further processed in Photoshop for various effects. Click any photograph to view an enlargement.

We begin with the obligatory portrait of Rachael taken once the hairdresser had finished doing her thing. Doesn’t she look gorgeous?
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Restoring the Dogcow to the OS X Page Setup dialogue.

This simple Terminal hack will create a custom Stack on the Dock that will show your recently opened applications. I’ve been waiting for this to appear for ages. Hooray!

I want to remodel my rather drab and cold computer workspace¹ but I’m not quite sure what I want to do with the small amount of space my Macintosh lives in. And so I’ve spent a few hours browsing through workspace photos on Flickr for inspiration and, adopting ideas from a variety of home and office photographs, I think I’ll be able to create the perfect workspace for myself.

What follows is a gallery of those workspaces I found most appealing, with a concise commentary on what qualities appealed to me.

1. I love the simplicity and warmth of this workspace. The lighting here looks absolutely perfect for long hours in front of the computer. I think the desk lamps are gorgeous² and the lack of visible cabling is very appealing.

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