Brian Sweeting

There comes the time in every laptop owner’s life when your machine takes a fall. That time came yesterday morning for me. I unplugged my laptop that was sitting on the couch and picked it up with one hand to carry it into the office to begin the day’s work. Unfortunately my PowerBook G4 never made it to work. It slipped from my hand and what seemed like slow motion, dropped to the floor. Fortunately the machine works just fine…unfortunately it hit right on the corner where the power adapter was plugged in, which cause the power port to bend leaving me unable to power my machine with anything other than the battery. I began frantically backing up everything from my laptop to both my external firewire drive and to my desktop (a windows XP machine).

I took the laptop in to the Cougar Computer on the BYU campus yesterday and this morning they called me with an estimate, which was much lower than I had expected. Turns out the logic board does not need to be replaced as they had thought, just the Power adapter port, the power adapter, and the bottom half of the case (which was just slightly bent).

I’m glad I have my PC as a backup, otherwise I would be dead in the water.

I discovered Adium X (an IM client for OS X) from Brad Choate this morning. I have been using iChat because I didn’t really like Fire IM, but I’ve missed not being able to connect to multiple IM clients in one app. So I’ve been giving Adium X a try and so far it is excellent.

- Very customizable. It seems like just about everything is customizable in Adium. I like the borderless buddy list that can be set to varying levels of opacity.

- Tabbed message window. This is just like tabbed web browsing…you can have one chat window with individual tabs for chatting with multiple people. Seemed like I was always looking for other chat windows in iChat.

- Web-kit powered message window. If you are a CSS geek, you can customize the message window as it is totally XHTML/CSS driven.

- Log viewer with search. This is something that should have been implemented in iChat long ago.

- Multiple connections. Allows you to connect to AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber plus a couple I’ve never heard of…Gadu-Gadu and Trepia.

You can see some screenshots on the about page. Adium X is available as a free download from adiumx.com

Yesterday marked my 27th birthday, and it also marked the day that I entered the digital music revolution rank and file by getting a 15GB iPod…thanks to my wife!

I have been wanting an iPod for some time and now I finally have one. I wanted the 15GB model since they were announced at MacWorld SF 2004, because after ripping all my CD’s into iTunes, I ended up with about 12GB of music. I don’t plan on buying 3GB of music that fast, so I still have some time, and some room, to grow.

The only complaint I do have so far is that there needs to be a better way to play the iPod in the car. I have an FM transmitter, but the sound quality leaves much to be desired. I also have a cassette adapter, which is a little better, but only one of my vehicles has a casette player. There must be a better way to play my iPod through my car speakers…and if you know what it is, please let me know.

I’m not sure how long Apple has been doing this, but here is an iTunes Music Store RSS Generator. It would really be cool if the tool let you specify keywords.

New G5 Xserves, iLife ‘04 (including digital music creation tool GarageBand), a 5 GB boost to the low-end of the regular iPods, and iPod minis were announced today at Macworld.

I was kind of dissappointed that the new mini iPods were introduced at a price of $249. I was hoping for somewhere at least between $150-$200. With a $249 price tag for an iPod that isn’t THAT much smaller and holds 1,000 songs, it isn’t too tough to spend an additional $50 for an iPod that holds 3,700 songs.

The other night I was ripping some CD’s in iTunes on my PowerBook and after ejecting a CD, I was unable to insert any other CD/DVD media into the drive. I have no clue what happened, and nieither did the Apple Support Rep I talked to. I was pretty impressed with the Apple Repair process. After speaking with the support rep, he next day’ed a prepaid Airborne Express box to me. The box had all the packing materials included, instructions for proper packing, and even included the tape strips to seal the box for shipping to Apple. I decided to send the machine in on Wednesday because that would give me the Thanksgiving holiday to get it fixed.

Well, this morning, the Airborne Express van pulled up and delivered my repaired Mac. A 4 day turnaround time was impressive considering Thursday was a holiday, and two of the days were Saturday and Sunday. I also had some white spots starting to show up on the LCD display, so they went ahead and replaced the LCD while they were at it.

Thanks Apple!

For some reason, the sharing feature of iTunes slipped my attention. Since I now use my PowerBook as my primary machine, I also keep my mp3 files on it–since I am without an iPod. :( The only bad thing is that my PowerBook just has a single headphone jack, so I can’t get the full listening pleasure of my 4-speaker system that is connected to my Windows desktop. Now I’ve installed iTunes 4.1 on my Windows desktop and enabled sharing in iTunes on my Mac so I can stream my music over the network to play on the good speakers.

Apparently in iTunes 4.0 you could stream music outside your subnet so you could listen to your music remotely. Apple disabled that in 4.0.1, but there are ways around that.

A Microsoft employee got axed due to a post on his personal weblog. The post, “Even Microsoft Wants G5’s“, is about a shipment of PowerMac G5’s he took a photo of as they were being delivered to Microsoft’s campus. Seems harmless enough, but it was enough for MS to decide he is “no longer welcome on Microsoft’s campus.”

With Apple releasing Panther (OS X 10.3) and Microsoft previewing Longhorn at the PDC, there has been alot of people comparing Panther to Longhorn. I would argue that it is way too early to do any comparisons between the “current” Mac OS and the “future” Windows OS. Longhorn is being portrayed in such a light that it is going to be the biggest thing to happen to computers since the GUI and that it is totally going to smoke the performance, features, and visual appeal of the Mac OS.

First, let’s not forget that Longhorn isn’t going to be released until 2006. From what I can tell, the new features primarily consist of WinFS (the new SQL Server based filesystem), Avalon (the new windows UI API), and XAML (Microsoft’s version of Mozilla’s XUL). Also, I’m sure there will be changes to the look and feel of Longhorn, but if you look at screenshots of it, it doesn’t look that much different than Windows XP. Don’t get me wrong, I think the changes in Longhorn are definetely going to be worth the upgrade, but then again, who wouldn’t want to upgrade their OS after 4 years?

As for Mac OS X, let’s remember that it’s initial release was March 2001, just 2 and a half years ago, the same amount of time from now until Longhorn is released. By 2006, Panther will be little more than a memory. The question should be “how Longhorn will compare to Cougar, Lynx, Leopard, or Tiger“. I’m sure that whatever Apple comes up with between now and 2006 will not fail to impress.

I just installed Panther (OS X 10.3) and I think the new features are worth upgrading for. The new finder and Expose are probably the two most notable features. There are many other subtle changes that are not noticeable until you actually dig in and start using things. See all the new features in Panther