Since it seems like such a large portion of my posts here have become Mac-related, and since I’m always following the news and learning more about my computer of choice anyway, I’ve just launched a new site: Macpot!

Macpot is dedicated to news, tips, and tutorials about the Mac and the OS X platform. To get things started, I’ve added most of the relevant Mac content from Distracto to Macpot. I’ll be writing lots of original content for the site, and will be linking to the best Mac-related stuff elsewhere on the Internets as I come across it. If it sounds interesting, check it out. If, on the other hand, you’re more interested in reading about my personal life, (1) you can still find that here, and (2) what’s wrong with you, anyway?

My iBook is included in the just-announced Apple battery safety recall. Something about a fire hazard, could cause a nuclear explosion, gloss over that, hey, I get a new battery for free! If you have an iBook or PowerBook, you might want to check your model and serial numbers to see if you qualify.

Having never participated in an Apple recall before, I’m impressed at how convenient they’ve made it to exchange the battery. Just fill out the form online, they ship you a new battery along with prepaid return shipping, and you send them the old one when it gets there. Nice and easy, and I get a brand new fresh battery to boot!

This tutorial has been moved to Macpot — as I make updates to it occasionally, I’m linking here in order to avoid maintaining two separate copies.

I’ve been experiencing some weird mouse trouble with the new PowerMac lately. And no, I don’t mean being unable to find the right mouse button, though that is also puzzling. My problem was a little more frustrating.

Occasionally, when moving the mouse around, and especially when dragging, I would get “phantom” clicks. The mouse would suddenly click or let go of what I was dragging, even though I clearly hadn’t clicked. You can imagine how much trouble that caused when moving files around — they were suddenly dropped into some folder my mouse was moving over, but I had no idea which one!

Then inspiration hit me. My mouse was plugged into the keyboard hub, which was then plugged into an external USB hub, and that was plugged into the computer. Perhaps if I knew more about USB communication, I would have realized that was a bad idea, but I eventually got it. Plug the keyboard directly into the computer, and bam! No more problems. Weird, but I’m much happier now.

Since installing OS X 10.4, I’ve been using a very similar system to what Giles Turnbull describes in Folksonomise your files with Automator. You can enter metadata (here, in the form of space-separated tags) into the file’s “Spotlight Comments” field that will be searched in any Spotlight query. This is great, and it (along with Spotlight in general) is changing the way I store and access files. When I download a reference PDF, I just throw it into my “docs” directory, tag it in the Spotlight Comments, and forget about it.

The article leads me to think, though, about how the buzzword-hungry internets seem to be mashing the terms “folksonomy” and “tag” into the same thing. Tags are a terrific way to organize data, as the break out of the more restrictive hierarchical structures (like a directory tree on your hard drive), and allow you to associate multiple pieces of information with a particular item (like a file).

A folksonomy, though, introduces a subtle but important distinction in that it describes an emergent vocabulary that evolves as a group of people apply their own categorizations to a shared item. del.icio.us is an example of folksonomy, and it has radically improved my efficiency when performing certain kinds of web seraches. While organizing files in this way is a tremendous shift in personal organization, it is clearly not a folksonomy.

I’ve been hacking together my own PCs from spare parts for years. It started when I was 16 and finally scraped up enough cash to replace my old Commodore 64. It wasn’t much cash, though, and in order to get the most bang for my buck, I wound up piecing parts together from old used computers. There was a lot of pride in that first 286, 12MHz PC. No hard drive, and not much RAM, but plenty of pride.

Every upgrade I’ve done since then has included at least one or two parts from the computer before it. Often it was nothing more than a video card, or a modem, or some memory, and eventually there were no remaining parts from the original PC. But somehow it always felt as if that first computer was always a part of whatever the latest one was at the time. Maybe not any of the same physical parts, but hey, this hard drive was in the last box, and that one’s video card was in the PC before it… My computer had its own lineage, and it, too, was proud.

So you will understand that it is a bittersweet time that finds me announcing the passing of that once illustrious line. But not too bitter, because LOOK AT THIS HOT NEW MAC!

I’ve already mentioned how much I love my new iBook. Ever since I got it, I’ve known that my next desktop would have to be a Mac as well. I’ve been patiently waiting, though, for the proper convergence of events, and with the recent release of Tiger and the (admittedly disappointing) updates to the PowerMacs, the time was ripe.

Unfortunately, everyone else in the bay area thought so too, and I had to call four different Apple stores to find a dual G5 2.0 GHz in stock (man, I love that I live within driving range of four-plus Apple stores!). But I managed to find one in the end, and took home this brand new powerhouse of productivity. You wouldn’t believe how much more efficient I am now at wasting time!

I don’t think many people realize this, but Apple has as much to offer the super-geek computer user as it does the technophobe to whom it seems to target most of its marketing. Darwin means that I can have all of the Unix tools on my desktop that I’ve become so attached to on my servers. That, and the second-to-none UI, bundled software, and professional-level software availabile combine to make this my dream machine.

Sorry if this sounds like an Apple ad, but I’m just excited. I get that way. Right now, I’m busy exploring the world of development for Mac OS X. It’s a slightly different world than Windows, and there’s a lot (Cocoa, for one) that looks very cool. I’m eager to share some of those experiences with you here as they happen.

I saw this on boingboing and couldn’t resist joining in with my own iBook. Pretty cool, eh?

My first major disappointment with the new iBook came yesterday as I realized that something was missing that had become so ubiquitous with laptops that I hadn’t even bothered to research whether it was supported.

The extended desktop, or the ability to connect an external monitor and see different things on each screen, didn’t work. Mirroring, where you see the same image on both screens, worked, but there was no splitting in order to increase the usable desktop area. This was particularly surprising since Apple pioneered this feature, and Macs had it years before Windows ever did. Today, just about any new PC laptop with an external monitor port has this feature, so why didn’t my new iBook?!

Thinking I must be missing something obvious, I took to Google for the answers. It turns out I wasn’t missing anything, because while the computer has the capability, it was intentionally disabled by Apple, presumably to incent people to check out the much more expensive (but only marginally more powerful) PowerBook line.

There is good news, though. Luckily, the option to disable extended desktop is an open firmware setting, which can be changed by the user. There’s even a handy utility to do it for you, which works like a charm on the new 1.2GHz iBook with the ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 video card. Now I have the best of both worlds: lots of screen space while I’m at my desk, and the mobility that comes with a super small screen.

Well, I’ve spent the larger part of my free time this week playing with my new iBook! Ever since Apple came out with OS X (finally delivering the elusive “Unix for the desktop” that Linux never seemed to achieve), I’d said that I would get one if only the hardware price were reasonable when compared to a PC.

Well, I made good on my promise. I was looking for a laptop that was small and light enough to conveniently carry to work every day, and powerful enough to use as a development machine. The 12-inch iBook has all that, it runs Unix, has a wireless card built in (nothing to snap off), firewire, USB 2, CD burner/DVD player, and a battery that lasts over five hours! I’ve hardly seen a PC laptop match that, and certainly not at the same price.

There are a couple down sides, but they’re not too bad… it comes with 256MB RAM, which performs less than ideally with OS X. But after adding a 512MB chip (standard laptop DDR - very nice!) for a total of 3/4 gig, it hums like a bunny (do bunnies hum?). At 1.2GHz, it’s not the fastest CPU around, but I’ve hardly noticed as I’m not using it to play games, and spend a relatively small amount of time compiling large amounts of code.

Anyway, my impression after a week is VERY good. I’m getting to love the UI navigation tools — it’s much easier to keep a million windows open, even on this 1024×768 screen. I’m running Eclipse, Camino, Quicksilver, Apache, JEdit, Fink, and yes, even vi.

Yes, I still have my Windows desktop at home for games, etc, and the email/web server under the desk is running Linux. But man is it nice having all of the Unix tools in one spot, and having that spot be wherever I am, even on the BART on the way in to work. Count me as a convert!