BloGTK, Fedora 9, Mac OS X and an iPod.

Hello. Posting from BloGTK on Fedora 9... How did I end up here... long story, but this is my blog, so I guess I have time:

I got a broken update on Fedora 9, and I kind of gave up. I tried openSUSE, and liked KDE 4, but still missed a few things being on Linux in general, I also read awful things about KDE 4 missing critical functionality...

So, I tried KDE 4 on Fedora, and then futzed around and killed my GUI with an update. I got tired of living on the bleeding edge and unstable distros and not having what I wanted, and went back to...

Mac OS X. A friend of mine had a 1.25 GHz G4 Powerbook he had long been wanting to get rid of. I couldn't justify the cost, but I did come into some hardware he wanted by way of trade, and was able to get the PowerBook from him. It has a gig of RAM and OS X 10.4 Tiger, and it was everything I remembered. I like OS X, and I'd like to upgrade the machine to Leopard and 2 GB. However, I'm really living on the low end of the Mac experience.

I've got too many other priorites to get that MacBook Pro or Mac Pro that I really want, and I've also got all my PC hardware and my Windows Gaming habits to think about. I have a quad-core box that runs Windows quite well. I think I may just have to live heterogenously for a while.

We started working out at a gym, so I've got to figure out how to come up with an extra $80.00 a month. And, I'd really like an iPod. I can rip my CDs for the Powerbook and take that to work, but I can't really carry the laptop from machine to machine at the gym. There's the iPod Touch, and then the whole iPhone dilemma... ugh... my buddy has an old PowerMac and an iPhone that I could get from him, but I don't really want an iPhone. I'm *not* going back to AT&T, and I'm content to keep my phone and media player seperate.

Ripping CDs on a G4 Powerbook is too slow. One drive, a single-core processor... I installed Windows, and iTunes on my big box with 4 cores and 4 drives, and put in 4 CDs... thinking, I'll just put the PowerBook in FireWire Target mode after I mow through these CDs, and plop the tunes on there from my big box. However, iTunes wants to rip one CD at a time, even though I've got the whole 4x4x4 setup going... grrr... Windows Media Player might do it, but I want to rip to AAC, not MP3 or WMA... or do I really want a Zune? Focus... focus... iTunes ecosystem... Mac experience... okay.

So, I whip out a Fedora 9 install, and go with Banshee, which has treated me well in my short series of experiements on ripping CDs. Why didn't I just go back to openSUSE, since the lead developer of Banshee works for Novell? I don't know. Why did I use Fedora 9, when I know I'll have to use the bad/ugly plugins from livna to do AAC? I don't know. Why didn't I just settle for .mp3 files? I really don't know. I know Banshee won't work with an iPod Touch, so perhaps I really just haven't thought this through.

Oh well, I did the $10 upgrade at the wordpress.com site, so now http://blog.mvpittman.com is official. I guess I should e-mail a few people and let them know what's up.