Perverse thought of the day

Any sufficiently advanced exercise equipment is indistinguishable from bondage gear.

-- Giza (with apologies to Arthur C. Clarke!)

It's update time!

Wow, it's been awhile since I talked about my life, and so much has happened.

• First, I finally got my Powerbook! I've been having a REAL blast with it. First thing that happened when I plugged it in is that it DHCPed an address from my router and said, "Hey, there's some security updates!" As I was downloading them, I portscanned the machine from my Linux box, and there was not a SINGLE open port. Contrast this with Windows XP that has what, *5* open ports on a default install?

• The trackpad on my Powerbook is actually easy to use. Out of all of the laptops I've used, I have had the least problems with the Powerbook's trackpad.

• I've been having some fun with my Powerbook. I haven't yet set up any open source apps on it, but I did get Xcode installed for development. I also started testing out Little Snitch to see what applications were "phoning home", and I am impressed with the interface thusfar.

• I organized a bunch of my mewsic in iTunes. Looks like I've got a total of about 5 Gigs. And with all of the artist, album, and genre fields filled in, I can easily navigate through my mewsic now.

• I burned my first DVD the other night. It was like, totally painless! I just dropped the DVD-R disk into my drive, copied my MP3s to it, rightclicked on it and chose "burn", and had a burnt (and verified!) DVD 30 minutes later!

• I bought the O'Reilly book Mac OS X For UNIX Geeks. It's written for OS X 10.2, but still does a great job of explaining the internals of Mac OS X and how UNIX-based everything really is. I even booted the system in single user mode the other night and played around. Totally rockin'!

• I got a digital camera just yesterday. It's a Sony Cybershot that can do pictures up to 4 Megapixels in size. And the camera has a little speaker that makes silly shutter clicking noises whenever you take a picture! Anyway, the camera is nice, and when I plug it into my Powerbook's serial port, it just... works. The iPhoto software that comes with the Mac is also very nice, as I can download pictures from the camera and organize them into photo albums.

• The first thing I did with the camera was RTFM then use it to take pictures of my apartment and some of my computer gear. If anyone would like to see the pics, drop me a line via e-mail or IM. Soon to come will be pictures of my town and pictures taken on my morning commute to work. (heheheh)

• I got a printer with my Powerbook. I have yet to actually set it up, though. I should like, do that tonight so I can make sure it works.

• Other items on my plate for the near future with my Powerbook include installing Fink and trying out some open source apps, and also installing some of the Gentoo tools and trying them out. Eventually I will set up Mutt and fetchmail and move my e-mail over to the Powerbook. (I don't think Mail.app will have all the functionality that I want, sadly)

  I also need to see about making a copy of my OS X installation DVD, or at least the hardware testing partition of it, so I can put the original in a safe place and keep the hardware testing disk near my machine in case I ever need it.

That's all for now, folks!