I’ve got me one of those new shiny expensive phones from Apple, called an iPhone. It’s got a compass, and has a shiny Apple logo on the back.

Pic some what related, taken with an iPhone. Haha, turns out people from an IT background can start a fire, and cook meat.

So I went and spent some disposable income on the Apple Wireless Keyboard, not just because it has an Apple logo on the back, but because I find the low set keys much nicer to type on. The other great thing about the keyboard is the fact that it runs on Bluetooth, allowing it’s range to be longer, and not require a silly dongle. The use of Bluetooth may also be a disadvantage as the devices battery life was much shorter than I was expecting, and I am yet to put rechargeable batteries in. Being Bluetooth, I can easily use the keyboard at work and at home, although the Dell Bluetooth driver aren’t the best, and I usually have to turn my keyboard off every 2 hours.

As well as changing my keyboard, I have changed my keyboard layout to Dvorak, as it makes sense. I’m still learning the layout, but I can already notice the difference. Aside from the issues with OS X logins and remote desktop, it seems to work well. Learning the new layout on computer games is hard though :P.

I’ve been wanting to do this for awhile but never really built up the motivation to try. I gave it ago this weekend and actually came out with a decent result. I managed to get my AMD Phenom II 940 Black, on an ATI Gigabyte Motherboard, with a GeForce 8600 GT (Yes I had to put away the 260+ since it’s not supported in Leopard… Yet), to boot OS X and run it nicely.

It took a few attempts, and worked out what I needed for the IPC install. The graphics drivers were the hardest to work out, as there is little documentation on the process, and each distro changes.

How I got full support for my 8600 GT was to download the nVidia drivers from here and then modify the EFI strings for Chameleon using OS x86 Tools. My card has a VGA port and a DVI port, however I had to select DVI-I – DVI-I for it to work.

Sound drivers, wireless drivers (my card shows up as an AirPort, however I don’t think draft N is working), network drivers and display drivers all work seamlessly.

HOWEVER I still have one unresolved problem, screen saver won’t ask for a user name and password when I dis activate it. All in all, it took me a few days to work out how ever worked together, and a lot of debugging, but once I got it running “it just worked”.

:P

For the purposes of Apple INC, I own a copy of Leopard, and the EULA is invalid due to the failure of requiring me to accept the contract when I bought the software from the retailer.

Collage of the album you can find in my iTunes Library. I made this with the help of a few programs and scripts. First off, getting the album art out of iTunes I used a script from Doug (for mac only I guess). I then pumped it into a nice use once chuck away app, Shape Collage. Upload to flickr, and rinse and repeat.

BTW with the help of zzap I bought flickr pro. Mainly because I’m using flickr for all my blog posts.

First off, which is the reason I missed posting on Sunday, is that I am mirroing wikipedia so I can use it as school without an internet connection. It’s a simple, but length process and if you follow this ( guide it’s easy. I’ve been processing pages from Friday and I’m only just half-way through. The compressed download is 3.7gb and the decompressed version is 16gb.

The second thing I would like to touch on is Bonjour which is brilliant networking system made by Apple, which simplifys networking. I’ve been using Leopard and Tiger for more than a year now, and this is the first time I saw it in action. I had a ubuntu box up, and I enabled vnc access. I started searching for some alternatives to Chicken of VNC os OS X since it was getting old, and tried a few, and then I noticed that the ubuntu box was in my finder window. I clicked on it and noticed that it screen sharing button enabled. It’s preformed its job so well and seemless. It’s kinda a mash up of Hamachi and local networking.

I created an iPod stand using the template at listanddiagrams.com. Here’s a quick picture. It suits my need, and is free. Really easy to make too. Btw, the lighting is really shit in here at the moment, hence bad photo.