All in the <head> – Ponderings and code by Drew McLellan –

First Impressions

So here I am – all PowerBooked up. All the hardware worked with no bother, in fact I was amazed at how quickly it was configured and ready to go. OS X found my wireless network using the built-in Airport Extreme card, and has worked so well that I’ve not found the need to plug a network cable in yet. After setting it up and checking everything was working, I powered her down, flipped her over and installed the extra 512MB that I’d ordered from Crucial. Apart from needing to find a tiny screwdriver to open the hatch (I used the one I have for adjusting the screws on my specs), memory installation was a breeze. Powered her back up, and all was well. I seem to have a single dead pixel on the screen, but I guess that’s within official tolerance levels, and besides it doesn’t bother me in the slightest (what’s a pixel between friends?).

Following some advice I’d read in a number of different places, I set up the machine with an initial account called Administrator, and then created myself a Drew account for working from. To be honest, I’m not sure of the precise practical benefits of that, but the concept is sound and I’m prepared to learn from those wiser and more experienced than myself. Worst case scenario will prove it simply unnecessary. After moving the dock to the right hand side (to make use of the extended horizontal space and free up some vertical), I dumped all the applications from it and installed TigerLaunch. (I think that advice came from Tim Bray).

I’m currently in the process of downloading and installing the applications I need to get going – I’ve just installed a demo version of Transmit (looks great) for FTP, and am currently downloading a demo of BBEdit. One thing’s for sure, with the US Dollar being so weak against the British Pound at the moment, it’s a great time to buy software online.

I successfully paired with my phone using the built-in Bluetooth thingy (module?), sync’d my contacts into the AddressBook, and sent Rachel an SMS from my desktop. Neato.

I’m in need of some cool wallpaper in this funny ratio too. Any suggestions of good PowerBook wallpaper sites?

(I also just spellchecked this post using the OS X spellchecker. This is a really useful feature for me as I type quite fast but with little accuracy. The OS-wide spellcheck will save me a heap of time copying and pasting stuff from browsers to word-processors).

Arse: I’ve just noticed that the default install has dumped an entire Mac OS 9 install on my disc too! WFT would I want with that? Arse. Is there any way to remove it without reinstalling?