A tale of technology
Wherein our intrepid protagonist purchases a portable computing device.
I finally took the plunge and bought myself a laptop this weekend. Some readers may be somewhat surprised that the laptop in question is a second hand G4 iBook. My reasoning went as follows:
1. Someone was selling a G4 iBook for R3k.
2. Apple tends to make decent hardware.
3. It's hard to find decent hardware for that price.
4. I could afford to spend R3k on a laptop.
So I now own a mac. At some point I shall set it up to dual-boot ubuntu, but that means finding someone who has the PPC version and/or downloading it.
What the mac is like so far:
Leopard (and, by extension, OS X in general) is a bit too mouse-intensive for me. Fortunately, Spotlight makes launching stuff easy. cmd-space brings up a little window thing and I just type the first few letters of the app I want to start. The keyboard shortcuts are pretty decent, although the keyboard has option (which doubles as alt) and ctrl in awkward places. On the other hand, it's trivial to remap capslock into another ctrl key.
The Terminal app seems to be a fairly standard terminal. I had to do some fiddling to make some of the keys operate as expected and I'm still not entirely sure how to make home/end/pgup/pgdn work but it's perfectly usable.
I struggled to make Mail see my mailserver, but that was all my fault. I'd forgotten that the mailserver wanted my email address as a username, not just 'jerith'.
After a brief glance at iChat, I was told by a bunch of people that I should install Adium instead. They were right. The only issue I have with Adium is that I have the same gtalk contact in both my gtalk and jabber accounts. When I click on it, it allows me to choose the source account, but still defaults to gtalk.
I'm not a huge fan of Safari. It's a web browser, nothing special. Then again, it hasn't really given me any real problems either. I had a look at Camino, recommended by someone on IRC, and I don't like it much. I think I'll grab Firefox.
Aquamacs looks pretty and it's emacs. Can't go wrong there.
I have been told I should install QuickSilver, which allows one to set all sorts of hotkeys for various things. I did (because I want a button to launch a new terminal) but I haven't yet figured out how to make it do what I want yet.
I need to install pkgsrc and set up the whole open source thing. This is proving a little more tricky than expected, but that's mostly because the mac doesn't seem to like ftp much.
In general, I like Leopard more than I thought I would, but still not as much as I like fluxbox and my normal setup. I shall reserve final judgment until such time as I am more familiar with it, though.
I finally took the plunge and bought myself a laptop this weekend. Some readers may be somewhat surprised that the laptop in question is a second hand G4 iBook. My reasoning went as follows:
1. Someone was selling a G4 iBook for R3k.
2. Apple tends to make decent hardware.
3. It's hard to find decent hardware for that price.
4. I could afford to spend R3k on a laptop.
So I now own a mac. At some point I shall set it up to dual-boot ubuntu, but that means finding someone who has the PPC version and/or downloading it.
What the mac is like so far:
Leopard (and, by extension, OS X in general) is a bit too mouse-intensive for me. Fortunately, Spotlight makes launching stuff easy. cmd-space brings up a little window thing and I just type the first few letters of the app I want to start. The keyboard shortcuts are pretty decent, although the keyboard has option (which doubles as alt) and ctrl in awkward places. On the other hand, it's trivial to remap capslock into another ctrl key.
The Terminal app seems to be a fairly standard terminal. I had to do some fiddling to make some of the keys operate as expected and I'm still not entirely sure how to make home/end/pgup/pgdn work but it's perfectly usable.
I struggled to make Mail see my mailserver, but that was all my fault. I'd forgotten that the mailserver wanted my email address as a username, not just 'jerith'.
After a brief glance at iChat, I was told by a bunch of people that I should install Adium instead. They were right. The only issue I have with Adium is that I have the same gtalk contact in both my gtalk and jabber accounts. When I click on it, it allows me to choose the source account, but still defaults to gtalk.
I'm not a huge fan of Safari. It's a web browser, nothing special. Then again, it hasn't really given me any real problems either. I had a look at Camino, recommended by someone on IRC, and I don't like it much. I think I'll grab Firefox.
Aquamacs looks pretty and it's emacs. Can't go wrong there.
I have been told I should install QuickSilver, which allows one to set all sorts of hotkeys for various things. I did (because I want a button to launch a new terminal) but I haven't yet figured out how to make it do what I want yet.
I need to install pkgsrc and set up the whole open source thing. This is proving a little more tricky than expected, but that's mostly because the mac doesn't seem to like ftp much.
In general, I like Leopard more than I thought I would, but still not as much as I like fluxbox and my normal setup. I shall reserve final judgment until such time as I am more familiar with it, though.