My brand spanking new MacBook just arrived and I’m a-jumpin! Unfortunately (or fortunately) I’m at the office and I can’t hook it up to the Internet until I get home. So all I’ve done so far is turn it on. So what should I do wit it in between work assignments?
Play with Photo Booth - take silly photos, then use them in Comic Life to create an exciting adventure story. Enjoy!
Is this your first Mac?
If you have a music CD on hand, pop it in the drive and import it into your Itunes library.
Enter your family’s birthday’s into iCal, the calendar program! Can you stand the excitement?
Hit F11, F12 or F13 right now.
If this is your first mac, see if you can beat that blasted chess game they have. I’m not a complete moron and I still get smoked every time.
Heck, I’ve cheated and lost. I used the hint thing for every move and I still lost.
New Mac, eh? I’ve had mine for four months.
Is it running OS X 10.5 or 10.4? If 10.4, did you get an upgrade disc for 10.5 in the box?
If you make the dock hide, icons on it will bounce up and down into visibility when they want attention, like someone just below the edge of the screen jumping up and down and going, "Pick me! Pick me!
I discovered something a couple of days ago: the Mac responds to spoken commands. Enable voice input in the system prefs. See whether you can get it to speak a knock-knock joke. It can understand your responses. (I did this a couple of days ago, but I found the how-to on a website and I don’t remember how anymore.)
Open a terminal window (look in Applications/Utilities for the terminal app) and type the command “emacs -batch -l dunnet”. The terminal will start a cool little text adventure, along the lines of Zork.
Well, what did you expect? The hints are being provided by the same computer that’s trying to beat you!
When starting it up, I of course had to click “my computer does not connect to the Internet.” When I get it home, what will I have to do to get it hooked up to my wireless connection?
It’s not my first Mac. I had a PowerBook 520 back in the mid-1990s. And then a first-generation iMac in the late-1990s, an then an iBook that I broke in 2003. Since then, I haven’t really had a working computer of my own at home, although the iMac still works, although it’s not hooked to the Internet.
Oh, and I did use the voice commands on my iMac and iBook.
It should be simple. Click on the AirPort icon (the little wireless icon up in the taskbar) and it should give you a listing of all wireless routers it can detect. Select yours. Of course, if you put a password (and maybe hid the server as well), you’ll have to type that stuff in.
What firewall should I be installing?
I believe there’s a firewall already in Mac OS X. Apparently, in version 10.5 of the OS, it has more explicit and easier-to-find settings than in 10.4 which I am using. I’ll have to check later.
Personalize that fucker. It drives me nuts when I see someone’s old beat up G3 still with the default desktop background & Dock icons and everything saved on the desktop.
Misread the thread title - thought this must be a new release of Mac OS - OSX Camel
Well, the old name of a camel was “camelopard”, wasn’t it?
No, that was a giraffe. Hey, maybe there’s a market for a giraffe-o-meter desktop widget.
I’m gonna get Leopard tomorrow. Then I’ll go looking for a picture of a camel to use for my wallpaper and rename my HD “Giraffe” and see if anyone gets the joke.
Get VLC, the last video player you will ever need. Ditch quick time.
I used to be able to link up my iBook and my iMac, so I could access the hard drives of each from the other. But it’s been four years since my iBook broke, and I’ve forgotten how to do it. Plus everything’s different in OS X. So, any ideas?
Do they both have wireless? Just go into system prefs, sharing, and enable personal file sharing. Then on the desktop pull down Go: Connect to server, and plug in the other computer’s IP address and have the login and password in your head, and it should mount to the desktop.
<witnessing>and then get a copy of Quicksilver and wonder how you lived so long without it </w>
No, my old iMac is not wireless.
I think that the Ethernet port on the MB Pro can auto-configure itself to be a crossover port, so you can plug the other Mac directly into it and make an ad-hoc network, but I could be wrong. I have only one Mac, so I can’t test this.
In other news, Leopard went in well on my MB Pro. 
By the way, the first thing that I love about this thing is the magnetic power cord. On my old iBook, the cord would always slip out and the battery would drain away without my ever noticing.