I love the thought of working in the garden but have yet to come across a screen that lets me see it properly in sunlight. Even my Nokia N800 makes me squint at it. Itis marginally better when I take off my sun glasses but then I get a headache from the sun lol. How are Macs for this?

The much discussed glossy screens are actually very good. I was using a lowly MacBook in the shade, with brilliance and contrast turned to max. I wouldn’t want to do graphics work on it in the garden but watching TV and using Screen Sharing was fine. Late in the afternoon when the sunshine was less bright the screen was almost as good as when indoors.

My old Powerbook had a standard, non-glossy screen and was all-but useless in the sun.

I agree with Sharon, I find the modern laptop screens unviewable in direct Sun… however in shaded areas its okay I agree - personally I find the reflective screens a pain on my commute, so have a non-reflective screen currently - direct sun on a reflective screen is horrible!

I too use my laptop + Slingbox (a v.cool thing) to watch my Skybox over the wireless network - and have been known to sit in the shaded area of the garden, watching tv while barbequeing food… I also have used it in all over the house, TV while cooking in the kitchen is another useful activity as the laptop can be placed directly beside the cooker - so no head turning required.

Sadly, the only Slingbox we can connect to is located in Chicago, from which we get excellent reception. But US TV is dire so we only watch BBC’s international offerings and old movies.

It is tres kewl to watch TV direct from West Blackhawk Street to West Worthing, in the garden.

It’s been a very busy week in frozen Montreal… and so I didn’t read your latest post until today. A thousand apologies. I don’t have .Mac (it’s not available here in underdeveloped Montreal, but we’ve been promised electricity so it should be here soon), and that will probably be my Achilles heel, to borrow from another Mediterranean mythological lexicon.

Well, back to my Mac.

So much for ditching the F1 then!

Remote Administration is indeed one of the ancient wonders of the modern computer age.

I run a VNC client on my work desktop (Windows) which I can then log into from my home MacBook. From there I can then use a Remote Viewer within my Remote Viewer to control various (Windows) servers. It can get a bit confusing if you don’t pay attention to which machine you are actually controlling. Also - watch out for VNC ‘feedback’ when you connect a remote machine viewer to the local machine:

http://idisk.mac.com/tobytennent-Public/VNC_feedback_loop.jpg

having sorted out my time machinery [auto backup using superduper] and not needing all the rest of the 10.5 gubbins cause 10.4 works fine I can’t use back to my Mac.

but I can use logmein.com on any Mac running 10.2 or up [probably, certainly it works with 10.4] as can anyone with a humble pc.

I use it to sort out minor problems on my mate’s macbook 180 miles away.