The available Jabber-clients for OS X are definitely not my cup of tea, more so as I need proper groupchat support (like for debianforum.de’s chat). I guess I gave most available OS X clients a shot:

• Tkabber – The reference. Functionality is unreached. When it comes to usability, well, you have to get used to it. I’m using this on GNU/Linux, but with OS X the feel is just horrible.
• JabberFox is pretty usable but I ran into problems with character encoding and wasn’t motivated to look into it further.
• Adium is a neat mulit-protocol client based on libgaim. Unfortunately, if you’re used to Gaim, Adium just lacks too many features.
• Apple’s own iChat AV also supports jabber with v3, but there’s not even nick-completion for groupchat – barely useable.
• Another mulit-protocol client available is Fire. Unfortunately the current version has issues connecting to jabber-servers on Tiger. Besides that I don’t like it’s look and feel. Fire’s icon is nice, though.
• For now I’ll stick with Psi. I used it for some time some years ago with Debian, got the current OS X version today and it works pretty well for me. TLS/SSL, groupchat support, GnuPG integration..

Somehow this happens every now and then, I don’t know what my problem with IM-clients is but I went through the same procedure more than once with GNU/Linux. For the sake of completeness: It took the KDE-fanboy in me over a year to realize that Kopete is attractive in both, optics and features (well, besides that horrible groupchat support, if any), but way to immature and unstable. Once I even tried the jabber-plugin for irssi..

When I switched to HFS+ on my external HD and copied over my audio collection using linux, it seems that resource forks for every single audio file have been created. This is very annoying when copying over directories to my mp3-player (actually, it’s a multi-codec jukebox ) for it takes some time until the forks are skipped and the music starts playing.

FinderCleaner lets you easily remove resource forks and the like by selecting the appropriate device or folder. Dead simple. Very handy.

On the developer’s site is also an announcement for MusicSync which will enable iTunes to handle non-iPodish audio players. For I can address my iriver as a storage device and therefore load it with everything capable of copying/moving files it’s not really a must-have, but promising none the less. I mean, I’m not exactly a fanboy of iTunes but getting used to it, it’s a nice app. And if I can use it as a single point of music management, so be it. A long way to go, though..

For me, my Mac’s startup chime has been annoying from the beginning. More so if I had listened to music with the volume of my amp cranked up and the powerbook connected to exactly that amp. Switching on such a setup after a pretty short and seriously drunk night knocks you straight off your feet. Searching the web, the more creative workarounds involve plugging in a jack to the audio out, but as written above, I already have a jack in there, with the amp connected to the other end. Great. Of course one might just mute the volume before switching the mac off or even better: just don’t switch it off. Or on. Guess that depends.

But not all is lost, StartupSound.prefPane to the rescue. It let’s you adjust the volume or disable/mute the startup-chime completely. Works like a charm and it’s free. As in beer.

Speaking of which, if you’re getting drunk and about to screw up, better bail out before it gets serious or screw up completely.. everything else will leave you in a pretty troubled state of mind. Come to think about it, I _did_ screw up completely. Even worse.

This is my 1st post using my freshly registered copy of ecto. Well, this morning ecto reminded me that the trial time passed. I took a quick look around if there’s an alternative that would fit my needs, none found.. and here we go. Actually, this is the 1st application I bought for a long time. Using GNU/Linux and having access to all the GPL’d software-candy, there’s not necessarily a need for commercial software.

Thinking about it, the last year there has been Half-Life 2 and Cedega and of course, Tiger two weeks ago (which was heavily apple-sponsored anyway).

Trivia: Lot’s of backlinks to my own blog. That’s poor, isn’t it?

with DashBlog. Unfortunately no support for categories or other fancy stuff, but otherwise it seems to work fine.. and now let’s edit the cat in the browser.. drrrr.