Some weeks ago my external HDD died and took most of my re-digitalized audio-collection with it. This was actually a very cleansing occurrence and I decided to put music back to where it belongs. And I do not mean the heading-straight-towards-terabyte wide opens of current harddisks, which do a very successful job in robbing music of what it’s supposed to be, making it arbitrary and the listener indifferent due to the pure amount of accessible sound. No, what I had in mind was a rack. Filled with records. Those big vinyly things. To get back in touch with the music, handling a record, putting it on the turntable, carefully lifting the arm on the record.. and listen.

So I got myself a turntable on ebay, a solid Technics SL-Q2, nothing fancy. After some issues with a broken stylus and waiting for a new cartridge it is up and running. Sounds very warm. The only remaining problem is that the replacement-cartridge seems to have a very low output, requiring to crank up my amp pretty far. It does not sound too linear and slightly distorted up there. Anyway, it will have to do for now while I take my time to figure out what new cartridge to get or if I just get a replacement-stylus for the original system, an EPC-207C.

I also bought my first record (post ~1995), Brant Bjork’s Tres Dias, at a local second hand record store. Besides that I got myself a used copy of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon which includes both posters, kind of rare, or so I’ve been told. I can’t wait to slowly but steadily build a fine collection of records, rediscovering music in the process.

I just bought and installed 1GB memory for my good old PB and it’s pure awesomeness! Until now it only had 512MB. Running Mail, a browser, iTunes, Adium and all the other little helpers, bells and whistles requires just exactly slightly more.

No more waiting/working cursors and rumbling harddrive while virtual memory is accessed.

Yes, it’s back. Somehow OS X is just more convenient on a current PowerBook than Linux:

• Airport Extreme: While the Linux driver is making good progress, it doesn’t seem to support any encryption yet and therefore a no-go for my pseudo-productive environment here. Anyhow, amazing work. As word spreads quickly, every decent news-site is reporting.
  Fiddling around with my bitchy ZyAir-G200 (or the bitchy driver?) is just annoying. It seems to need the ESSID set twice for some reason. Using KNemo and giving the user permissions to use iwconfig/ifconfig without password (sudo) works smoothly. Anyhow: there’s still that stick dangling at the side of my PB.
• Video out. It’s working, but that involves some tweaking, having the video-adaptor plugged in at boot time and is only capable of mirroring the main screen (Or so I read. Correct me if I’m wrong here).
• My left palm gets well done. Somehow the PB is heating up more running Linux as it does running OS X. Still the fans start more often. Checking my process table confirms that there are no processes out of line. Temperature/Fan-Control needs some tweaking?
• Detection of my external hardrive (IEEE1394/FireWire) isn’t reliable. Sometimes I just can’t get that thing to work.
• Suspend-to-RAM doesn’t work because of a lack of specification from NVidia. Seems it’s currently not possible to shake the GPU awake again. Suspend-to-Disk should work, though. But STR is so much nicer.

Nothing one can’t live without, I guess, but at the moment it kind of bothers me. OS X on the other hand runs pretty well out of the box, the only hardware issue being my scanner, a CanoScan N650U, and the main software issue being Finder (guess the moment everything works just like expected, I just disintegrate). So, while setting up OS X properly, creating filters, importing contacts and bookmarks and looking for applications for this and that, I discovered the following:

• Finder is a bad thing. Why, even Wintendo’s Explorer is manifested usability compared to that thing. Or maybe I just don’t get it. Found a MC clone called muCommander, but hell, there has to be a way to use Finder in a sane way!
• With XiphQT there’s finally ogg-vorbis support for current versions of QuickTime/iTunes. Ogg-streams not supported, though.
• If you want to import OPML into Safari, for example to import your RSS-feeds from Akregator, you might want to use this workaround.
• If you want to transfer your bookmarks from Konqueror to Safari, use this one.
• If you went looking for an app that draws functions, you probably came across EdenGraph a very simple tool for that task. If you then look into your Applications/Utilities you’ll find Grapher, a much more powerful application and a buggy one, too. Found that one by accident today. Who would’ve thought such a raw gem is shipping with Tiger?
• There’s no Gaim for OS X and no, although being based on libgaim, Adium can’t compete. At least when it comes to jabber support. Already wrote about jabber-clients for OS X in this post. If push comes to shove, seem that Gaim builds under OS X so if I get really bored, I might try this.
• The driver supplied by Canon for the CanoScan N650U seems to work with PhotoShop(CS) only. Besides that, there’s TWAIN SANE, a SANE implementation for OS X which seems to access my scanner, for it goes through all the motions using GraphicConverter, but never displays an actual preview/scan. Gimp just gives me a message about some png-related symbols that couldn’t be found. Guess I should really consider buying hardware that will actually run out-of-the-box on my systems. Funny thing is the scanner works flawlessly with linux..
• Found a really nice screensaver via powerbook_blog (de): lotsawater. Looks like, well, lots of water.

Nothing ground-breaking but that post is probably just for safekeeping the links to the appropriate apps anyway.

Last week I’ve re-installed my Debian-box, and well, it just feels great using KDE & Co again. I like OS X, it’s sexy and everything and I don’t want to miss the last months (ouch!), but it’s just no match for a properly set-up Debian with KDE on top. Which brings me to the things other operating systems are way more comfortable in:

• Removeable media. While this seems to work pretty good using the Gnome-Volume-Manager, KDE lacks proper mechanisms. In fact, Linux lacks proper mechanisms, GVM is just a good workaround. Maybe I’ll go for GVM for the time being.
• Wireless networking. It’s still a pain in the ass to set-up. Period.
• Configuring X. So I’ve had my Dell 2405FPW connected to my ATI X800 XT PE, used X.Org’s ATI/Radeon-driver and everything seemed pretty nice. Of course I headed for ATI’s proprietary drivers to unleash the full potential of my graphic board. At least I thought so.
  I downloaded the new installer and was pretty amazed of the ease-of-use. Just a few clicks and I had a couple of Debian packages. I installed the ones I needed, edited my xorg.conf and tara!, just couldn’t get a resolution of 1920x1200px, 1280x1024px was the max. After searching around a little bit, I found that I’d have to use modelines. Using get-edid it was pretty simple to make the appropriate entry to my xorg.conf. After restarting X, it came up with the desired resolution. (Note: unlike the Nvidia drivers, ATI’s need the option VideoOverlay enabled for XV to work.) The fonts have been way to big but that was fixed in seconds by simply adjusting them using kcontrol.
  So far so good, direct rendering was enabled and glxgears spat out 30kfps and I went on testing video using mplayer and xine.
  Unfortunately, they both screwed up the aspect ratio by stretching the picture. A friendly guy at #ati@freenode told me that mplayer needs the parameter monitoraspect set correctly (in my case 16:10 ) and xine uses xorg’s DisplaySize. Both players showed the correct aspect ratio after those changes, the only problem was that I had to re-adjust my fonts to sizes >32(!) to be readable. Checking the logs I found out why: the dpi have been set to 28x28dpi. Solution: just give DisplaySize in mm, not in pixels *cough*. After re-re-adjusting the fonts, the DFP and VGA-card seem to cooperate properly at least.

Notice something? Jepp, the only (well, mostly) issues I have with GNU/Linux are hardware-related. But that’s the fault of companies refusing to provide proper drivers or at least specifications so drivers can be written without having to reverse-engineer every single bit.

Apple introduced a full featured mouse, the Mighty Mouse Yes, it even comes with two buttons, sort of. This looks like a really nifty device, Apple just does it again and again. Anyhow, I will NOT fall for it. No way. I’ll wait for the Bluetoothed version, heh. Anyone needs a Logitech MX900 Bluetooth?

Well, besides the alarming affinity that I have developed towards Apple over the last few months, I booked my flight to San Francisco yesterday. So it’s Frankfurt – Atlanta – San Francisco on August, 18th and vice versa on September, 9th. Thinking about it, I might as well visit Cupertino if I’m hanging out in CA anyway. Rrrrrrrrr.