I Bought a PowerBook

The verdict?

Click to enlarge

Seriously, the 12″ PowerBook G4 is excellent. It’s quite dense and heavy for its size, but it packs so much functionality in there that I don’t mind. The only gripes I have with its UI is the lack of a maximise button, and I still think the Windows start bar is better then the Dock. Window management in Windows is much better than in MacOS. I think it’s stupid how they only have one button for the trackpad. Their lack of easily accessible Page Up/Page Down buttons is also annoying and I had to remap the totally useless “enter” key next to the space bar to something more useful. Apart from that, it took me about two days to get comfortable with the idiosyncracies of MacOS and now navigating around is a breeze. The battery life is about 4 hours if you don’t run anything involving video.

It runs WoW pretty smoothly as well. There is nothing like hooking up to an online world from the comfort of a sofa without any wires in sight. When my exams finished, I went into my flatmate’s room where he was studying. I plonked myself on his bed and sat there playing WoW. He turned around.

“What are you doing lah??”
“Playing Warcraft.”
“What?! You bastard, lemme see?” He ran over. “That’s so cool man. Chee bai… now get the fuck out of my room.”

  4:53pm (GMT +10.00) tomorrow  •  Computing  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (4)  • 

Redesign in Progress

Watch your step, there may be lots of broken stuff about while I fix things up.

  4:57pm (GMT +10.00) tomorrow  •  Site News  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (7)  • 

You can tell it’s exam time

The Corps Act is kicking my ass, and travel planning is very distracting. Proper updates will resume when the stress levels subside.

  12:17am (GMT +10.00) tomorrow  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (1)  • 

Too early?

Ivan has some respect, but I have no such compunctions. I present to you, Monopoly: Indonesian edition.

  3:16pm (GMT +10.00) tomorrow  •  Humour  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (2)  • 

Computer Heresy

I’m about to commit heresy and order a 12″ Powerbook G4. Yes, that’s right, a beast with horns that runs MacOS.

I wanted a portable laptop that I could take travelling, so that means something smaller than a 14″ screen. Unfortunately, all the Windows laptops are so damn expensive at that size. For a little over $2000 (including a nice student education discount) the Powerbook comes with USB2, 802.11g, 5 hour battery life and a burner. In terms of software compatibility, MacOS is a Unix base. It has Apache and I can do all the web development I need. It runs Office, Photoshop and is compatible with Windows file formats. It runs WoW.

The only real downsides I can see with the Powerbook are that it only has one button on the trackpad (this is really annoying) and no PCMCIA slot (though this is only an issue if I need to subscribe to iBurst). The software compatibility issue isn’t so bad because I still have my desktop for when I need to do real work.

I think MacOS still has some crappy UI aspects, like a dodgy maximise button. I much prefer the Windows nested windows UI rather than the Mac’s floating palettes UI. Maybe it’s just a matter of adapting.

  11:58pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Computing  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (4)  • 

My ear hurts

I just spent three hours on the phone trying to finalise a travel itinerary… it’s almost there. I think its possible that we may have packed a little too much in… on paper it looks really exhausting, but it should be flexible to drop out stuff while we’re on the run. More details later.

  11:51pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Travel  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Today is special for some

:P

Update: A big thank you to those who today called, smsed, e-mailed, left a comment, bought me a meal or some combination of these things, as the case may be!

  12:05am (GMT +10.00) tomorrow  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (6)  • 

Backbench Issue 14

Issue 14 of The Backbench is now online.

  10:56pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Site News  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

*Sniff*

Currently have this damn cold that’s been obstinately lingering around since the weekend. I woke up today to find my voice sounding like someone had rammed a dozen clothes pegs up my nose and a bunch of feathers down my throat (they feel that way too). There’s a cocktail of amoxycillin, potassium clavulanate, terbutaline sulfate, oxymetazoline hydrochloride, ibuprofen and pseudoephedrine hydrochlorine currently circulating in my bloodstream which is possibly doing me more harm than good. Not been a great year in terms of health – third time in five months I’ve come down with a cold, normally it’s only one or maybe two per year.

  9:12pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  •