I like Linux.  A lot.  I first cut my teeth on Caldera Linux. Mandrake (now Mandriva) and and a rather unhealthy obsession with purchasing the boxed set of Red Hat soon followed.  I still remember the warm, fuzzy feeling of getting Return to Wolfenstein running on Redhat 8 with Cedega.  I've always loved operating systems, running the gamut: BeOS, QNX, Solaris, and SkyOS to name a few.  But Linux kept me coming back.  It goes without saying, I highly reccomend it.

However, since I purchased my Mac, I've largely just been using that - with my PC getting used for the occasional Grand Fantasia or Shaiya (which consequently, runs just fine with WINE now).  I've slapped Windows 7 on a 40GB drive to test, break and learn how to support it.  I decided, however, to put the Penguin where my mouth is: Running Ubuntu 9.10 x64 on a second 500GB drive.  Ubuntu 6 was probably the last time I really seriously used the OS - time for some catching up.

Essentially, I'm trying to use my Ubuntu box for everything I can now - to find out what works, what has to be done to make it work, and what plain just doesn't.  No WINE, no VMWare, just Ubuntu.  Thus far all I've run into is a problem with PPTP VPN connections - something I hope to solve soon.  I've yet to do the GtkPod with my iPod, just used FSpot for my photo management.  I want to find out what Ubuntu offers, where it excels, where it falls short, and become a better expert at it to confidently answer questions and suggestions to friends I've had switch.

I've been using Outlook too much at work - I press Control-K to make hyper links all the time now...

I've had all the Coheed and Cambria albums for at least 6 months, maybe longer, but never really listened to them. I hadn't really heard about them before I played Welcome Home on Rockband.  So I finally sat down with my Pre, plugged in my headphones, and used the Remixed Music App to read the lyrics as I listened.  About half way through Second Turbine Blade, I realized that this was a story arc - but something was missing.  So I did a little research, come to find out, this album (all of them actually) are only half the story, there's also a graphic novel.  Needless to say, I was hooked.

The whole storytelling process, visual and audio, is just amazing.  I've never encountered anything quite like it and I find it refreshing.  Enough is revealed to keep you from walking away from what could be a mess, but there is still enough mystery to keep you listening/reading.  During the Good Apollo series, when the story breaks down the fourth wall, well, lets just say it adds an even more interesting layer into the story.

I've read through volumes 1 and 2 of Amory Wars graphic novels, and I'm quite enthralled.  I'm currently enjoying/dissecting In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3.  No graphic novel for that album exists, so It's going to take a lot of diligence to get the whole idea pieced together, especially since the tracks are not necessary in chronological order.  If you're a fan of conceptual albums, ala Tommy, The Wall, Final Experiment, and you enjoy science fiction, I highly recommend Coheed and Cambria.

Something I've wanted to put together ever since the Black Jack taco came out.

  My PowerBook G4 is starting to feel it's age. Flash is atrociously slow, I can't seem to get Java 6 for PPC OS X at all. I've tooled around with PPC Linux live CDs now and again, so I thought I'd take the plunge and do a full install and see what PPC Linux on the Mac had to offer.

  I borrowed a Firewire backup drive and decided to give SuperDuper a shot at cloning my disk.  Plugged the drive in, followed the directions and let it run.  Took about 4 hours or so.  When I got back to the PowerBook the cloning had completed.  However, it was not bootable.  Granted, I didn't really do my homework when it comes to bootable drives for PPC OS X, so I can't fault SuperDuper for not warning me, but the Firewire drive was not formatted with an Apple Partition Map - and therefore was not bootable.  Slightly irritating, I fired up CCC and it promptly informed me of the partiton map issue, which I quickly corrected.  That cloning finished in the wee hours of the morning, but it was done by 5:00AM.

  Once I made sure I could boot of the backup drive, I went to work on installing YDL 6.1.  Since it's based on CentOS (Red Hat sans logos) , a distro I've used for servers, I knew I'd be fairly comfortable getting back in the saddle.  It installed rather quickly and I was able to get the Apple wireless Broadcom drivers working fairly easily.  All in all, a very painless Linux install.  Firefox was at 3.0.6 and GIMP was back at 2.2.  I mucked around with the E17 desktop for a while, but I eventually gave in and switched to GNOME (as I understand it, 6.2 gives XFCE, a desktop environment I'm very familiar with).  I won't say that there was anything wrong with YDL, but I missed OS X a lot.  It seems I've just grown accustomed to the shortcuts, reaction and behavior of Aqua since I've been away from Linux.

I'll still take Gnome/Xfce over Explorer for sure, but nothing feels quite as nice as OS X.  Windows 7 certainly has stolen enough features from OS X to make it feel more comfortable (Apple has done it's own share of "borrowing").  I just don't know that I can use desktop Linux when OS X is available.  I'd run Linux on a x86/x64 laptop for sure, Hackintosh is a little too kludgey for my tastes.  For now, Mac OS X gives me the least amount of "tiptoeing" - it works, and it works well.

  Granted I didn't give YDL a lot of time, but with everything I have loaded in OS X, I realized I just didn't have to time to customize and tweak a distro to get it to where I needed it to be production-wise.  I think if I still have the PowerBook for a few more years and Leopard is sorely outdated, the switch to PPC Linux will help prolong its usefulness, but for now, I can deal with Leopard PPC's quirks and ever so slight lagging behind the status-quo.

  Now I'm just waiting for CCC to finish cloning from the Firewire back to the internal drive...

  I've done a lot of research on the new everything phones - and it came down to the iPhone and the Palm Pre for me.  I love Apple products, and the iPhone is no exception, unfortunately, they're shacked with a rather unsavory carrier (Aside from Veronica's phone, we have no association with AT&T any longer).  There will be an iPhone in the house ~ Veronica's getting one, but it wasn't the choice for me.

  I've spend the morning getting familiar with my new toy and personalizing it. One of the features I wanted to try was the pseudo-ipod:itunes syncing.  Unfortunately I had upgraded to iTunes 8.2.1 - which is the latest in the ongoing war between Apple and Palm.  So I snagged an old 8.1 version and removed my current version.  Of course, it didn't care much for my 8.2.1 modified library - but not to worry: simply making a copy of both xml and lib Itunes Library files, deleting them so new blank ones could be created and then importing the copies as a playlist gave me back my library in it's full glory.  Granted, I can't listen to any previously purchased music without jumping through hoops, but that probably only accounts for 8 albums total - so in the future I just spend an extra 30¢ to get iTunes Plus tracks.  Worth it to me.

Since I have about 10 Gig of music, and the Pre only has 8GB, I've limited my selection to a few play lists - I still have an iPod Video clocking in at 30GB for long road trips and the like, but to listen to music on purpose, the Pre will do nicely.

I'd used the headphones that came with it initially, but decided to see how well it worked with my Oticon streamer: and it works beautifully.  The Oticon Dual doesn't transmit in stereo - but it's a nice way to quietly listen to music without being tethered while working.  I may yet still be going with Phonak Audeo, since overall they had a cleaner crisper sound, and have been a bit more comfortable (not to mention bluetooth stereo) - although the demo set I had had horrendous problems with the iCom which made it mostly unusable.

I was able to set up my google hosted email with my forwarding account with little trouble - the trick is when setting up an account, whatever you put in the first email address field is what your email will send as - so putting my mail.com forwarding address in that field,  but setting up my imap with gmail and using mail.com's smtp, everything worked perfectly.

I haven't played with the phone part much, just sent out my new number this morning, but what I've used of it, it works well.

Battery life seems pretty phenomenal - been using it for about 3 hours straight with wi-fe, almost 2 of those whilst playing music, and the battery is just over half way down. 

Though I don't have an extensive library of movies, the ones I have pull right out of iTunes and play nicely - the speakerphone is pretty good for listening to the movies in a fairly quiet and isolated environment, otherwise, I'll be using the headphones, both for quality and for courtesy.

Overall, I've very pleased with the Palm Pre and highly recommend it to any ex-palm user or power user, not sure that the average user would get the most of this phone, but to each their own. :)