ETA: 6/12
Soon to arrive at Schloß TB:
A brand spanking new 15″ MacBook Pro!
Side benefit #1: It’s coming with a free 4gb iPod Nano (silver, natch…)
Side benefit #2: Schloß TB will now officially be an all-Mac shop, as the orneriness & age of the last Windows box prompted this upgrade.
I’m giddy with excitement…
-ghp
And After A 15 Year Hiatus…
22 years after I first wanted one (but settled for a IIc instead)…
18 years after I first got one (an SE)…
15 years after I went over to the PC/Intel/DOS/Windows side…
I’m finally going back.
Back to the Mac!
Yup, a nice, shiny, new 17″ 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo iMac is making its way to my grubby little hands.
And I can hardly wait!
I’ve gotten to the point that I’m tired, more or less, of building my own computers, as well as dealing with the vagaries of Windows. I respectfully tolerate Windows, and the world of XP (and Vista if/when it ever arrives) is certainly better than than either the DOS/Win or Mac worlds were back 15 years ago. But I’m tired of dealing with the constant state of care, feeding, and vigilance that Windows imposes on a responsible computer user.
Building/assembling my own systems just doesn’t hold the hobbyist allure that it once did — I’m at a point where I’d rather spend my time using the computer (surfing, blogging, writing, etc…) as a tool than as an end in & of itself (tinkering, tweaking, etc…). I want my main system to be one that is rock solid, easily updatable & maintainable, powerful, and cool — both in hardware and software. And Apple is currently the only provider of such an integrated solution. OS X 10.4.5 is the best marriage of UNIX & GUI out there, and the new Intel-based Macs are incredibly advanced, powerful, and cool.
Apple’s OS X 10.4.5 (Tiger) is, quite simply, the best operating system currently out there. Linux is a rapidly developing up & comer, but it requires too much time & effort, and I’ve found that I get overwhelmingly consumed by it when I try to run it. I’ll dabble with it in the future. And I don’t really hold out that much hope for Windows, as I’m not sure that Windows can be salvaged without a total scrap-and-rebuild effort — the kind of thing that Microsoft has never been willing to do, but that Apple has done 4 times (Apple II to Mac, Mac 68k to Mac PPC, Mac OS “Classic” to OS X, and PPC to Intel). Sometimes, the installed base simply must be told that they’ve got to change to move ahead, backwards compatibility be damned…
I’ll never suffer the radical platform-bigots/zealots gladly, because I’ve long believed & said that there are pluses/minuses & valid uses for all the major platforms. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Mac, and I’m really fired up about being able to drink the kool-aid again! 
Anyway, as long as I’ve got kids who like to play Disney’s ToonTown Online, I’ll have to keep a decent Windows box around! 
-ghp
I Want This…
I want a Mac Mini!
This is a seriously cool, not to mention strategically solid (& possibly brilliant), thing that Apple has done. I dare say that this could be more significant in the long run than any Mac since the original. Which is saying something, given the impact that the iMac had a while back. It’s a killer design (but, then, Apple’s always had great industrial design…), and a great marketing concept. Allowing industry standard peripherals (USB keyboards/mice, DVI & VGA monitors, wired & wireless networking, etc…) to be used with a Mac in a seamless plug-&-play fashion, and all at a low cost point — well, that’s the kind of marketing & strategic savvy that Apple should’ve had, but never did! It gets the Mac about as close to a licensed “commodity” computer as Steve Jobs will ever get — and that might be good enough to (if Apple doesn’t screw it up) cause a gigantic stir in the industry.
Apple has become of late a company largely defined by iTunes & the iPod. The strategic significance of the Mac Mini is that Apple is leveraging the impact & cachet of the iPod/iTunes buzz, and using it to help the Mac. The iPod has shown that Apple’s industrial & interface design does appeal to the masses. OS X is THE BEST OS out there, in terms of putting a beautiful & easily usable interface on top of a rock-solidly stable & powerful modern operating system.
I’m running Linux (the Debian-based Xandros 3.0) on my main desktop at home, and that probably won’t change in the short term, as I like tinkering & playing around with Linux. However, I would like nothing more than to be able to replace the Windows XP based PC that is the family computer with a Mac Mini at the earliest opportunity. Getting rid of Microsoft OSes would be such a nice thing to be able to do. Windows works, but I’ve never really trusted it. Neither have I ever developed the affection for Windows that I have for the Mac or for Linux.
-ghp
Back in Business!
Ok, I’m back.
The delay was caused by equal parts server wonkiness and wishy-washiness on my part.
About two weeks ago, my server (specs in the first posting below) kept locking up randomly, which caused me to start trying to troubleshoot the problem. Which is almost never a good thing. I upgraded it from OS X Jaguar (10.2.8) to Panther (10.3.5) in the hopes that it would help fix things, as well as to allow me to run a better version of PHP (i.e., compiled with more modules available), and Apache 2.0. This, sadly, did not fix the random freezes (I think something might be wrong on the motherboard, but I’m still working on tracking that down…).
At the same time, I was able to pick up a used Dell G1 P3-450 w/128MB RAM & 6GB HD for $15. So, I figured I’d turn that into a dedicated server running some flavor of Linux. As I researched which distro, I then thought it might be fun to also have it be my gateway/router, as well as my server, so that it could be the single point of public presence for me, thus giving me a little more flexibility & security in running my main Linux box (now running Ubuntu Linux 4.10 — highly recommended!) without having to worry about messing it up and/or taking it down, along with affording me a bit of flexibility in tracking down the problems on/in my G4.
So, I tracked down a great gateway/router/server distro — ClarkConnect 2.2 Home Edition — which was free, and very user-friendly/easy to manage. I also decided to register my own domain (gpiper.org) so that I could have some stability & predictability in the name of my server & blog. A nice thing about ClarkConnect is that it has dynamic DNS updating built-in, so I now don’t have to worry about running any other apps to do that housekeeping. For domain registration, I found GoDaddy.com to be very good — reasonably priced & very easy to work with. For DNS I first went with DNSMadeEasy.com (great price & great service), but then switched over to ClarkConnect/PointClark, in spite of the added cost, just because it integrated so easily with my gateway/router setup.
Then, it was almost predictable that I got the bug to check out another CMS/Blog software solution — you’ll now note that I’m still running this blog on WordPress, the same as I was back when I started it… I gave serious thought to b2evolution, which (along with WordPress) is a fork off of the b2/cafelog project. b2evo is a very nice environment, with some significant differences from WP — some features are better, some worse. For whatever reason, though, I just couldn’t get as comfortable with b2evo as I did/am with WP. Something that really helped my decision/thought process was a great blog software comparison chart/worksheet & blog entry, graciously made available by Owen Winkler. He, like a lot of folks out there I’ve found, chose WP over b2evo, and his process really helped me work through what I want to do in a blog, and what I want in the software that helps me produce the blog. A great site & a great service!
So, the end result is this — I’m now back in blogness, and I plan on not futzing around with my server & blog software setup any more (for the near future anyway…). I’m going to try and focus primarily on content, and secondarily on learning the ins & outs of WP so that I can customize things to my taste.
As always, please feel free to comment, and let me know what you’re thinking (note the bold assumption that someone/anyone will actually read this… ;^) ).
-ghp
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