So Bwana asked me to document my descent into Macness. "Abandon all right-clicks, ye who enter here." The Powerbook and I spent some quality time together over the weekend, and I'm starting to get a bit more comfortable with it. So what's good, what's bad, and what's ugly? Compared to the mess required to get a new XP install up - it's cake. There were a few patches that needed downloading, but it was easy to do. I DID have to install, reboot, check again, install and reboot but it was pretty straightforward. The most nagging thing is that Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V aren't cut and paste - it's Apple-C and Apple-V. Not at all used to that yet. At work (where my desk is really entirely too high) I have a problem where I move the mouse cursor while I'm typing (my palm brushes the touchpad). That can be pretty crazy since there is a corner that activates Expose and suddenly all my windows move. There is an option to disable the trackpad if you plug in an external mouse, which I usually have at work - I haven't decided if I want to turn that on or not. Expose just rocks the casbah. I used to hate the Mac plethora of Windows, and the difficulty of finding a particular app, but Expose makes that like buttah! Out of the box, the function keys all do "laptoppy" things like volume controls, or contrast or whatever. There's a modifier key to make them be normal, which was annoying. I finally got annoyed to figure out how to swap that behavior yesterday - and apparently the option to switch it wasn't provided until Panther. I had it three days before I *needed* a terminal window to get something done - and I think that was just because I stuck a Unix app (OpenOffice) on it. Good power user tip - the root account isn't enabled by default. OpenOffice put a folder on my drive that was owned by root, and not writeable by admin users. I wanted to change it, and had to sudo over to root to get it done. If you're coming to Mac from Linux - google it, I forget the exact process. Basically the root account is marked as not being login-able or having a valid password. :-) It's gorgeous. It's hard to quantify but just messing with it is FUN, in a way that Windows never has been. Out of the box it was set up to sleep after a timeout, even on AC power. When it sleeps it signs out of iChat everything. It keep screwing up downloads until I figured that out and changed it. Right now I'm running 7 apps, several with multiple windows open, and it seems very natural to navigate. The Dock is sweet - it's out of the way, and the Start menu is long gone. If you think about the whole list of apps at the botton of the screen - that's a very awkward UI. And the actual MENU itself? Utter crap. I have to manage my Start Menu every few weeks - or it gets longer than my screen is tall.

I am in fact posting this entry from Kool-Aid. I'd be hard pressed to say I'm comfortable yet, but I like it so far. I'll try to get some pictures up soonish. I'll give Apple credit - we ordered this at 10:30 on Monday morning, via the web. We received it Wednesday evening, and had it online pretty much 15 minutes after opening the box. That's FAST! (mmmm - Cherry flavor!) I haven't figured out how to change the startup sound yet, but I do have this image as my wallpaper- tiled.

"I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle." - Arthur Dent So my Xbox is dying. Specifically the hard drive appears to be corrupting game saves. In the last couple of weeks I've lost both my Vice City and my Riddick saves. Since a new Xbox is only $150 I severely doubt it's worth trying to get it fixed. Although . . . I wonder if I can get a new HD and install it myself. Only tricky bit is finding a tool to format it. Anyway, between that and the Vaio croaking, I'm feeling a bit leery about technology these days. On the plus side - it turns out that 2.5" IDE drives use a fairly standard connector. You need an adapter cable to plug one into a desktop, but I found a place to mail order them from. So I anticipate being able to plug the Vaio's drive into my desktop and grabbing all my files before shipping it off for repairs.

OK, so my Sony laptop croaked yesterday. Grrr. I think the power supply is on the fritz. But I've got to mail it San Diego, and god only knows how long it will be out of commission. Unacceptable. So I drank the metaphorical Kool-Aid, and whipped up an order for 17 inch Powerbook. I had been planning on buying one this fall - this just kicked up the timeline by two months or so. Speczilla: 17-inch TFT Display, 1440x900 resolution, 1.5GHz PowerPC G4, 1 Gig of DDR RAM, 80Gig 5400 RPM drive, ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 w/ 128 Meg of RAM, AirPort Extreme built-in, DVI & S-Video out Hopefully I'll have it by the weekend, but maybe not until next week sometime. I will name the machine Kool-Aid, and I will have "Hey Hey Kool-Aid" as my startup sound. This is my promise to you, the HiddenJester consumer.

Bwana asked about my network configuration, and I figure it's complicated enough to warrant a post instead of cramming into a comment. There's an argument that I'm revealing some security info here - but I doubt it matters. There are basically 6 PC's about the house at the moment, at various levels of use - 3 desktop machines that hook up to a monitor/keyboard/mouse switch, Karin's old PC laptop, my laptop, and Karin's Mac Powerbook that she got from school. Karin's Mac runs OS X (10.3). One of those three desktop machines is my "main" PC - it runs Windows XP and is used for game playing, web surfing, coding, etc. The second machine is running Linux. At the moment it runs Red Hat 7.3 - it would be running Fedora Core 2 by now if the CD-ROM drive had worked properly. This machine is my primary file server, and also runs the services that look like "hiddenjester.com" to the outside world. This baby runs the web server, the mail agent, etc. In an ideal world I'd probably separate the public service functions from the file server functions - next hand-me-down computer will serve that role. It runs Samba - so it can create Windows Networking shares. Karin's Mac sees it as a Windows box and loads the file shares that way. The third "desktop" is my router PC. It's running Fedora Core 2, and it has two network adapters - one talks to my DSL modem, and and the other talks to my LAN. It uses linux's built-in in iptables to do the routing functions. It also is my DHCP server for the LAN and has a caching DNS server. The main reason for the DNS server is that internally the hiddenjester.com addresses route differently. (If you look up an ip address for www.hiddenjester.com you'll actually get the IP address of my DSL modem. Internally it has to translate to PC2 listed above. So for instance my laptop accesses mail from "mail.hiddenjester.com" - but that's a different address inside my LAN from outside. Karin uses the Windows box for Windowzy things and sometimes for email and web stuff - bigger screens than the Mac. Karin's old PC laptop isn't really used for much - it's a bit old and creaky. It's primary function these days is that I found some software to turn a networked PC into a monitor. So my Windows PC has three monitors - the big 20" (run through the KVM switch), my old 17" monitor on the 2nd head of the graphics card, and the old laptop running the Maxivista software. I usually run iTunes on this screen, and then I can use the main monitor for Magic or SlickEdit, and the alternate monitor for web browsers.