512 Pixels

I think there are bigger, more important things in the world to hope and pray about that a smaller Dock Connector or updated iPad, but maybe I’m just old and cranky.

Holy Brett Terpstra, Batman.

Lots of good options, considering the probe will be in its “Seven Minutes of Terror.”

NASA’s new Mars rover is pretty sweet. The car-sized, 1-ton robot is set to land on the Red Planet today.

Damn, son.

People suck.

I’ve spent my evenings and weekends over the last three weeks working with a friend who is an IT manager at a local charter school preparing over 900 MacBooks for the school year. We’ve repaired, imaged, tagged, re-arranged and inventoried more laptops than most people will see their entire lives.

Work like this is back-breaking. Cables are run, carts are moved, laptops are stacked and passwords have to be entered hundreds and hundreds of times. No matter how good imaging tools like DeployStudio or Casper get, there’s still a lot of things that still require a manual touch.

In a past life (between working at Apple and my current job), most of my work was with Apple and its education customers across Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee. I’m no stranger to schools using Macs in the classroom. In fact, this school was one of my first (and biggest) clients.

I — like most people with similar experience — wish Apple would spend more resources on making the Mac, OS X and OS X Server work better in the educational environment. Sadly, with Mountain Lion, OS X Server’s balls have been removed, leaving admins relying more and more on third-party solutions like the ones linked to above.

Late last night (or early this morning — it’s hard to tell), I was arranging MacBooks according to the school’s re-shuffled homerooms. As they change the rosters every year, this is a tedious task. As I was combing through the lists, finding the corresponding MacBooks, I started recognizing some of the names from when I first set up this school’s Workgroup Manager server four years ago.

These particular students are about to enter the tenth grade. I’ve written about my sophomore year before, and consider it the year that I fell in love with so many of the things that have defined my career and hobbies. These kids are now that age (Oh, God, I’m old) and I hope they have the same experience.

I like to think their heavy usage of the Macs provided by the charter school will pay off. These students have been learning skills that most kids (even in 2012) won’t learn in school.

Schools like this one are showing that technology can be a central aspect in the classroom, and that (when properly managed) are well worth the investment. And it’s been really neat to be behind the scenes for so long.

The following products are going to be marked vintage in the US and obsolete in other countries next month:

• AirPort Extreme 802.11n (1st Gen)
• iMac (17-inch Late 2006)
• iMac (20-inch Late 2006)
• iMac (24-inch)
• Mac mini (Late 2006)

This marks the first Intel desktop machines to be marked as vintage, which makes me feel old.

Thanks, Mr. Source!

I used to pimp the crap out of my PowerBook with this little app. Sad day.

Outlook.com is a new web email service from Microsoft. Built in the Metro style, the interface is clean — in fact, it makes Gmail look cluttered and iCloud look just silly.

I would love to see Microsoft grow this service. If it offered Exchange accounts to the public for free, it’d be a real game-changer, and would let the company take Gmail and iCloud on in a way that Microsoft can’t currently. Sadly, at this time all the service can offer is POP access, which is lamesauce.

Andrew Cunningham, at Ars, on Mountain Lion Server:

My fear in this brave new world is that OS X Server will suffer the same fate as Apple Remote Desktop, another enormously useful tool if you’re trying to manage a large number of Macs. Remote Desktop’s last major update, version 3.0, was introduced all the way back in 2006. Though it is still technically being maintained and sold in the Mac App Store—its current version is 3.6—most of those point updates have served only to add compatibility with new OS X versions and add incremental feature improvements like IPv6 support.

There’s still some good, low-hanging fruit that Apple could harvest to make OS X Server better for the kinds of users they’re gunning for—things like centralized FileVault management, the ability to patch iOS with the Software Update service, and local iOS device backups. If the software goes into maintenance mode, I worry that we’ll never see server features that keep pace with the features in the OS X client.

As someone who manages an Xserve, I have the same worry. 10.8 didn’t do anything to help.