What I miss about Mac...

Okay, so, I sold my PowerBook. It was a bit long in the tooth, and I have some other things I could use the money for. Incidentally, I decommissioned my Airport Extreme which is a fabulous router, minus the proprietary configuration interface. Then, I fried the router I replaced it with... an old wired-only Linksys.

It is a bit funny, because I grabbed it out of a drawer, and grabbed the power adapter to my spare DSL modem, rather than the power adapter to the router. A few minutes later, while fishing wires from under the table, I hear a hiss, then a pop, and see smoke. Oh well, that router was crap anyway. Unfortunately, the death was a bit untimely. I don't have anything to replace it with. I guess with my airport, it always seemed obvious which power adapter went with what. Apple saves you from being dumb.

Windows Vista's default Aero interface is relatively ugly. I'm sure you can hack it into a more pleasing aesthetic, and then there's that whole "eye of the beholder" thing with beauty, but, meh... I think I actually like my usual Gnome desktop better. Actually, all I miss is the compiz bling that got copied from Mac OS X, namely expose and the dock... The dock recently got patented, so maybe I'll have to actually use a Mac to get it now. LOL.

I sold my PowerBook

I sold my PowerBook G4. Get this. I met the guy in front of the Apple Store. Heh. So, the really funny part is... now that I am "mac-less" I don't want to use the Apple Airport Extreme. There's not much reason for me to feel this way, since I can still use it.

However, there is one fundamental flaw witht the device, which is otherwise great. I can't configure it with a web browser. I actually have to use a utility that comes with every Mac, and can be installed on Windows (thank goodness).

The device rocks, other than not having a gigabit hub built in. So, I'm torn. I love having a print server, and wireless access point, and router, and dhcp server in one device. But, I hate that I have to attach a hub to get more than one wired connection. This is fundamentally how I feel about apple devices, I love the simplicity, but I hate that I can't tinker. I guess I could just buy a gigabit hub and stop whining...

What if the revolution comes, and all my machines are running Linux? I can even use the print server in Linux, but I can't configure the router... and then there's that whole I-can't-turn-off-dhcp-without-some-hackish-trick thing. Yeah, it is silly...

I guess there's one thing keeping me on it for now. I have a Linksys wired router with a 10/100 switch built-in, but no wireless. I need wireless so that the Media Center box can access the Internet for scheduling info. I do have a wireless-B device that can be an access point or wireless adapter or bridge. It can even do DHCP as well. Hmm... I could just use that... Oh, and I have a couple of USB print servers that I could attatch too.

Clearly, the Aiport should stay, rather than hooking up three devices to replace it... or... I could just use ClarkConnect, get the print server and wireless working on it, and not be so anal. Or, I could just buy a wireless router, and then run Amahi on a spare box. Again... this is a silly choice. It works now, I shouldn't even be thinking about this.

All because I sold my PowerBook. Nice.

T-Mobile Shadow Update

Today, at work, I'm going to work on making my T-Mobile Shadow experience better. In between tasks, and generally filling time as I can, while doing work, of course. So, it is going slow. (I'm starting this post at about 10:00 AM. I've been at it off and on for an hour, inbetween reading training material, reviewing trouble tickets, dodging funny pictures sent to me by my colleagues and such.

For those of you, like my Aunt Staci, who says that I make "boring" posts. This one will probably be boring. Fair warning and all that...

So, music... I've purchased a set of Motorola S9 stereo bluetooth headphones. They're great, and I was going to use them with my Apple PowerBook, but I need Leopard for stereo sound, rather than the simple headset/microphone profile. I'm selling my PowerBook anyway... not specifically for that reason, Mostly because I don't want to pay for the battery upgrade, memory upgrade, and Leopard upgrade, but I digress... The bluetooth headphones work great with the phone, and I'd like to use them when I work out in the mornings before work.

I loaded a few songs from my PowerBook onto the phone, using a memory card that we've bought. They were encoded in AAC (.m4a, like on iTunes/iPod/iPhone) and they worked fine in the Windows Media Player. I haven't ripped all of my CDs, but I wanted to make sure that if for some reason, I go nuts and use Apple as my primary system, that I could use my ripped tracks on the phone. Seems to be fine.

Incidentally, I'm probably going to stick with Windows Media Center and just deal with the OTA subchannel nonsense or maybe go with Media Portal or some other free replacement on our DVR box. It's working very well, and syncing playlists and such seems like it will be great with our phones. Sigh... I've given up freedom for convenience, so I guess I deserve neither. I'll learn my lesson and come crawling later, I'm sure.

I'm also going to try to get my phone updated, and I guess I need to call in to customer service and grab those spare extra capacity batteries that are supposed to be free, but couldn't be sent to customers subscribed for less than thirty days... Sigh.

I'm also going to try to install moBlog, and see if I can try to use my camera phone and post directly to my blog, making some of those life moments more publically available. Maybe then I can justify having this fancy toy, rather than simply saying my wife needs to keep a schedule with her, and I just got one too.

We'll see how it all goes. Good luck to me.

Okay... went to lunch, came back... lunch was just awful, food-wise. My PC is getting re-imaged at 1:30, and I've got training to finish up. moBlog just didn't work right for me. I couldn't get it to work, and I gave up. I do wonder why Wordpress.com has a mobile client for iPhone, and not for Windows Mobile, but there's no real guesswork. Announcing a client on iPhone is bigger news...

I did manage to get the T-Mobile update installed. Avril Lavigne and Dave Matthews Band now emenate from my phone... very nice indeed. There's some better text input stuff too.

I think it is just time to sit down this evening and rip discs on the big box... WMA or MP3?

More time in the day, please... kthxbye.

Ugh... I've had a recent event that I won't discuss much further, but I basically didn't have time to do something that was necessary. Not a "sort of nice" thing, but something I really needed to do. I missed out.

Anwyay, my life will continue, so don't worry. This weekend was a little slower. Friday, we hit the grocery store, and I paid some bills and the baby-sitters. I also got a new "big" flat-panel monitor and sold a 19-inch CRT monitor to someone who needed it way more than me.

Saturday, I made sausage and eggs for the kids, and we kind of lazed about. Some laundry, which is a standard Saturday activity for me, and a little bit of tinkering. I've still got a stack of paperwork to go through that I intended to complete this weekend.

Sunday, we went to church at CHURCH52. A friend of mine from high-school is the Music Pastor there. My wife and I both grew up going to chruch, but we've really faded out on it. However, she, I and my mom have kind of been nagging each other to get back into it. I know our kids need it. LOL. We enjoyed it. I'd like to go back. I think my wife has a few issues with all the singing. I don't really have issues with it, but we definitely both grew up worshiping in a more "reserved" manner. Pray for me and my family as we come to terms with it all.

I didn't get around to actually installing Amahi, ClarkConnect, or Windows HomeServer. Maybe one night this week, but I honestly think it'll have to wait until the weekend. I did do a bit of research though, and in the back half of the weekend, I realized Amahi came out with new stuff based on Fedora 9. I'm really excited about what they're doing with it, but ClarkConnect has a proven track record with me, and a seemingly more "mature" web site.

Lunch time Monday progress report... that's what this feels like. Blogging is too hard again. I just don't do anything I want to blog about on a daily basis... I guess I can change what I do, or how I feel about it. That way, my Aunt Staci won't say my blog posts are "boring".

I guess I could get those pictures of my kids uploaded...

Amahi

So, I made a post about my backup solution/dilemma and mentioned Time Capsule, ClarkConnect, and other various solutions. I got a comment about trying Amahi.

I was skeptical, since I had passed over it before. However, I decided to go ahead and try out the beta. I haven't installed it on hardware yet, but some of the stuff looks really cool. One thing I'm really excited about is the installation procedure. Basically, you configure it by going through an online wizard, then you just run it on top of a base installation of Fedora. Hmm.. it looks like someone took a novel approach to what I've been thinking about doing for a long time... "Fedora Home Server" so to speak.

ClarkConnect runs on top of RHEL and for some reason, that makes me feel better. However, setting up stuff that isn't in the web-admin interface requires more time and effort than I'm willing to put in. having stuff like a firefly media server, PXE boot, and maybe a torrent box or something would definitely put this solution over the top, if it has some ready-made modules. If I were running a business, CC would be an easy choice. But I'm at home, with a limited time budget, and CC does the job, and I've used it, but I might be ready to entertain something a bit easier and flexible, even if it is in beta.

Heck... maybe I could "contribute" and help with the documentation or something. I'll blog about how it goes.

Evolution on Windows / openSUSE

Jeez, I go back to bed. Wake up, do stuff... show up at work and casually read some blogs... come across the planet SUSE feed, and see this:

Srinivasa Ragavan: Evolution 2.24 & Windows port

Just after I raved about how much I actually *like* Evolution. LOL. Nice. Maybe I'll give it a try. The weekend is coming. Oh, and openSUSE 11 did work on with my S3 unichrome setup. I used the KDE 4 live CD and installed, but then decided that KDE was pretty much equivalent to a face palm for me. However, if I don't solve my Fedora 9 issues, I might just roll over to GNOME on openSUSE.

Unichrome... Fedora... FAIL

Anyone remember this whole Fedora thing? It used to rock, because it was the leading edge stuff from RedHat. Now it just makes my eyes bleed. I get an old socket 478 P4 chip and grab a motherboard that has PCI express and DDR 2. Awesome.

Then I install Fedora 9 from optical media... the screen goes all wonky, and locks up.

Best I can figure, from rolling back to Fedora 8, and then searching with Google, is that the version of Xorg in Fedora 9, and almost all recent distros, has a crappy VESA driver that doesn't work on unichrome video chipsets Bleh. At least Fedora 8 worked...

So, now what do I do. I can use "linux vesa" to get Fedora 9 installed, but then X fails on restart. I can get to runlevel 3, but I tried changing "vesa" to "openchrome" and that didn't work. I read something about "unichrome" but honestly, I'm too angry that I wasted my time with this at all. I might as well go back to my Mac... sigh.

The thing is, and I really should blog about this later, I now *love* Evolution for mail. Why? because I can use LDAP with my TuffMail account. Read and Write. Address completion, web mail addressbook is the same as my desktop client, save addresses to my address book on my desktop client... blah bah mwah ahahah.

So, I'm really excited about using Linux again. Then this... Sigh. Is it really worth all this, just to stay away from being trapped by Apple?

I'm going back to sleep.