Rubénerd :)

I haven’t featured a Whole Wheat Radio artist for a few weeks, so here’s my favourite for today! From their WWR artist page:

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I’ve been running Fedora 13 Goddard on my ThinkPad X40 for the last few days. Aside from some rendering and install issues, things are pretty smooth sailing.

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I don’t know how I ended up at this review site, but I was less surprised by the fact the unit they were discussing was so shamelessly ripping off the iPod (right down to the headphones), but rather the reviewer actually liked it. Were they wearing those beer glasses Bart Simpson tried on?

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Just saw the Singapore preview screening of James Cameron’s Avatar. Its now 1am (hence the timestamp of this post showing Thursday) and I have to get up early in the morning so I’ll be brief, but my initial impression can be summarised as: whoa.

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Given I do most of my blogging on my retro MacBook Pro, I decided to finally cave in and take advantage of the 30 day free trial of MarsEdit by Red Sweater software for Mac OS X. In an electronic nutshell, it didn’t meet my needs but I could see how it would be useful for most people.

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Remember a few days ago I finally caved into TWiT pressure and got an Audible account? Well I finished my first book already and just posted my first review! I think a new addiction may be brewing.

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Hehe Safari 4.0.4… I suppose if it doesn’t download properly you get a 404 error? HA!

Moving on, I just finished downloading the new Safari 4.0.4 release. Reviewed in one sentence: its one slick, fast browser. As I said on MacRumors though (and was promptly ignored) there’s still one huge reason why I can’t use it.

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When I finally got around to installing the new VMware Fusion 3.0 update I downloaded yesterday I expected to get a slight performance improvement for my FreeBSD guests, but not as much as I would have got had I been running a Windows guest. The VMware Mac team have made it clear in their advertising they consider Fusion to be a product to run Windows on your Mac, and while other operating systems such as FreeBSD and Linux are supported, they’re not a priority. I’m really pleased and relieved to say I was wrong!

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My premininary experience with Snow Leopard after getting around to installing has been amazing. It’s most probably also to do with the fact I did a clean install which always helps, but all the applications load instantly or with only one dock bounce even on this 2006 era first generation MacBook Pro! Obviously compiling huge projects or editing video won’t be much faster, but if the machine is feeling this much more responsive I might be able to keep using it for even longer which my wallet will love.

There are also lots of tiny little non-performance related things. When you click the hide toolbar button in the Finder it does a quick animation, and the toolbar itself is spaced out more neatly. When I have my external monitor attached the open windows on it are easier to resize to fit the full height without going over. When you open folders in the Finder using column view they show an open icon. The Homebrew theme in the Terminal uses blue as a selection colour. I’m sure I’ll find more such things.

So far the only bad things I’ve come across is hard drives aren’t shown by default on the Desktop but a quick visit to the Finder Preferences screen can fix that. Also, for some reason the fonts look dreadful and the Appearance preference pane no longer has a drop down menu to select the degree of font smoothing. A visit to the Terminal will fix this, but it’s weird they’d do that.

Now it’s time to put the Dock back on the side and install my applications. Speaking of which I need a cup of coffee. Why doesn’t Snow Leopard do THAT for me still I ask?

I’m typing this post as we speak on my second hand IBM ThinkPad X40 and I have to say I’m thrilled with it! While obviously larger in dimensions than a netbook, I just can’t get over how light it is. I put it in my bag I usually haul my 15 inch MacBook Pro in along with my folder of study papers and as I carried it to the Boatdeck for my morning cup of coffee the bag felt like there was only the folder in it!

The machine currently has Windows XP Professional installed and even has the genuine OEM licence sticker on it. Given I’m not sure how much Windows software I’ll need to run for my studies in the future I’ve decided to shrink the Windows partition and put FreeBSD on it with a boot menu.

The main thing I was worried about was the tiny 1.8″ ZIF PATA hard drive, I had read plenty of stories by people claiming the 4800RPM drive is noisy and has slow seek times but it booted XP pretty quickly and loading applications didn’t seem to take too long at all. Given this is a second hand machine I will be running SpinRite on the drive before I put any data onto it to triple check that it’s functioning properly.

Even if the internal drive turns out to be working flawlessly, once I’ve got a bit more money I will be looking into a replacement if only to protect myself against errors that I can’t see right now. 1.8″ ZIF PATA drives are uncommon but not too difficult to find, 60GB Samsung drives seem to be going for around $80. Another option is Amazon.com stocks 1.8″ ZIF PATA 16GB SLC drives for US$140 which is way too steep for my budget but could be something I get in the distant future if I still have this machine.

As for the other features, I’ve been using it lightly for half an hour and the bundled battery still reports a 90% charge which is pleasantly surprising! I was also able to connect to our WPA2 secured AirPort WiFi network at home without any problems, the next thing to test will be whether it can use my university’s VPN.

I don’t intend to spend much money on this machine but I did pick up a few replacement mouse stick caps for a couple of bucks, and a 12.1″ screen protector for another few bucks at the Mawson Lakes Apple shop of all places.

I got me a ThinkPad netbook! Boo yah!