apple

If you are the owner of an older Powerbook then iScroll is perfect for you. It provides the advanced trackpad functionality of new Powerbooks like two finger horizontal and verical scrolling and a few other tricks as well. The free utility can be downloaded from here:

iScroll2 Download Page

Yesterday the weather was a lot better than the previous day so in the afternoon we headed into town. Emma had an urge to checkout a medical library. I am allergic to libraries and the thought of a medical library freaked me out a little so I decided to go checkout Apples largest European store on Regent Street. Regent Street itself is cool enough but a really cool, two story Apple Store on Regent Street is just my idea of heaven. It was not really a store, more like an Apple Euro-Disney with presentations, music and lots of people. It did not take long (maybe 20 seconds) before I was reaching for the credit card so I could get the latest iLife and a tiny little iPod Shuffle. I already have a big iPod but the little ones are just too cute looking (and I justified my purchase by telling myself Emma could use it). After what felt like a few minutes (but turned out to be two hours) I went back to the library to show Emma my new toys.

I enjoy travelling between home and work with my iPod. Unfortunately the sound of the music plus the various noises of urban life often drown out the cellphone ring. I have the phone set to vibrate but even then I often do not register that my phone is ringing. My cellphone is a Sony Ericsson K700i with Bluetooth and touch wood it has worked perfectly with my PowerBook.
What I would love to see on the next generation iPod is Bluetooth connectivity and the option for your iPod to notify you of an incoming phone call when listening to music. OSX already notifies you of an incoming call when the phone is linked to the computer and the iPod already stores all your contacts (so presumably the bulk of the software development is already complete). It would be really nice then if Apple's synthesised voice would tell you who is calling so that I can then make the descision to answer the call or just keep listening to music.

It is great to have all your digital music, movies, email and other entertainment available at your finger tips. In the past I have used a Shuttle PC running Linux to provide this functionality. Coupled with a 19" LCD and a decent sound system the experience is fantastic. Unfortunately there are a few issues I always faced. The first was the notion that Linux is 'free software'. Application wise Linux stacks up well to other operating systems. Gnome is a great graphical environment and applications like MPlayer, Evolution and MythTV are really first class. Whilst the applications and the open-source concept is great there are some areas where things are a bit rough around the edges. Many of these inconsistencies are not significant but I do find them annoying especially in a system you are trying to keep clean and easy to use by all. For example the visual difference in the XScreensaver prompt plus the difference in appearance between GTK/Gnome and Qt/KDE applications to name just a couple.

For a number of months I have been using Fedora Core 2 very happily to run a MythTV/games system. Unfortunately as of about a month ago MythTV development on FC2 stopped and now only focuses on the Fedora Core 3 release. This development freeze left me in the lurch with only a partially working MythTV setup (due to dependency issues). Consequently I took the plunge and downloaded the FC3 DVD. Little did I know this process would eventually lead me to stop using Linux on my home workstation....

The install process went well and it sure was nice not to have to swap CD's at random times during the installation. After installation I was reintroduced to the same old Fedora headache's such as the yum package management system, no mp3 playback and no sound on rebooting. The first two issues were quickly resolved with the installation of Synaptic and a few mp3 libraries. The later problem was more difficult and it turned out FC3 was not storing my alsa.conf settings on a reboot. I resolved this by adding a line to my rc.local file that restored the correct settings. All these things were only inconveniences but still took a long time to resolve. I was happy with FC3's speed, default selection of packages and the pre-packaged NVidia kernel modules.