Somewhere out there!

Short review of the Mini Mac at OS News: The Mac Mini Experience. Check the picture on the first page, I didn’t realise how mini the Mini actually was. Its not much bigger than the tape.

A Friend and I were discussing laptops, in particular Apple Powerbooks. He recently acquired a Powerbook from his work, plus he has an old G4 under his desk, used as a server. He usually has insightful comments, so we often have conversations about this and that new geek gadget. During the discussion we started talking about battery life and the best way to charge. I purchased a R30 for my brother two years ago with an additional Ultrabay battery. It still often gets 8+ hours of hard office-type use running WinXP. Every comment I’ve read and my experience has show that IBM hardware kit just works. This should be the inspiring goal for any laptop battery system. Although following the “Conservation of Greatness” rule, I’ve been told the IBM’s service often sucks. Luckily I’ve never had to deal with them.

Anyway we started discussing batteries, and how to best care for your battery. Based on a page I’d read several years ago I’d always been of the opinion with Lithium Ion batteries, that constant charging is a good thing to do. This page had stated that Li-Ion batteries have a finite number of ‘deep’ discharge cycles. Thus it was better to keep the battery charge to preventing the ‘deep’ discharge cycles occurring.

Richard’s opinion was the opposite of this:

“Nah I got into talking with a laptop guy on this one, and it’s the continuous connected to the mains stuff that destroys them. Doesn’t matter the battery type, if it’s continuously trickle charged it will die.”

I figured it was time to do some goggling.

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Short rant by a Mac user on The True Cost of Mac OS X.

Articulates one of the things that concerns me, at least about my use of OSX. In order to gets to the point were it “Just Work”, there is a modest outlay on these new applications. Not that this is a problem, but its something that has to be factored into the budget cost benefit analysis.

Plus the fact I’ve spent a large amount of time finding tools that work on Linux, that I enjoy using. Invest both time and money look at new applications is some thing I’m considering. That said, if I find one or two apps that really make life fun, I’ll probably swing. After all Fink and Darwin make it a breeze to install emacs or vim if I want too. 😉

Was at my brothers today showing him some prints from our new colour laser printer. (More about that in a later post). His wife has a G4 running OSX, we were trying to figure out how to connect to the two machines. The last time we tried was when the machine was running OS 9. Obviously it did not work, a wasted effort. However, OSX now has the wonders of Samba and BSD to draw on. Connecting to a file share on the WinXP boxs, was simple as saying cheese. Very slick I must admit.

Our second problem was trying to get it to connect to a print share. The Epson C70 inkjet they have is not strong as our old C800, after 18 odd months of moderate use the USB plug has broken off. No good for the Mac! Anyway its not an easy process, certain not some thing Apple talk about in their help file. So its Google to the rescue, moments later and a sure fire method is discovered: How to Use a Printer Attached to a Windows XP Computer in Mac OS X.

I’m quite glad this happen today, reminded me that I have a machine that is accessible so I can do some experiments to see if OSX is good enough for me to want to change from x86/KDE. Especially Liquid Ledgers. I like the look of the unlimited undoes. Seems like a simple but complete package that will be perfect for my mother to look after her finances. I’m interested in see how much better than Gnucash (for myself) or Money (for my family) it is.

A Terse first look review by NewsForge about Base the OpenOffice.org database application. Note its worth also considering Kexi which seems like it is maturing rapidly.

FireHOL is a Linux iptables packet filtering firewall builder for humans.

Has a nice looking rule set, looks almost as good a pf. Has a straight-forward tutorial for a home network situation.

I never really had much luck with Dans Guardian and its Clamav module, performance was really crappy. I probably should go back and have a look at it again. However, I saw this link in the openbsd-misc mailing list today: SquidClamAV Redirector. Looks interesting.

Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 review.

When I was witting my dissertation I used to use M-q all the time. I’d forgotten about it until I saw this page: AUC TeX – Advanced Editing Features.

I need to move back to working on laptops as I’ll be doing a bit of travel. Been thinking about switching to a Powerbook, this seems like a good place to start: The Tao of Mac – HOWTO/Switch To The Mac.

Lack of an OSX Openoffice port, it probably the main thing that is holding me back. We use OO in our business, so it would be a pain to be without it. Especially the upcoming 2.0 release. I could of course run Debian/PPC, but that somewhat defeats the purpose. Then there is the NX option from my colo box. I’m not sure if there is a native NX client for OSX. Something to explore.