I decided to check out Apple’s new music service today. Looks pretty good. Just for yuks, I bought a song — “Glad and Sorry” by the Faces. I was hoping I could find the cover by Golden Smog, but no luck. Also no luck finding “I Can’t Stop Loving You” by Ray Charles, which has been stuck in my head ever since I saw Metropolis.
Category: Apple
Happy New Year
Happy New Year!
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I got a chance to see Adaptation and Nicholas Nickleby this weekend. Both were definitely worth seeing.
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So what’s going on at Macworld right now? Boy it’d be nice to be in San Francisco right now.
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I give up on the Giants. Hey, the NFL admitted that there was an officiating screw-up on the last play, though. Can we just play the game over next week? Can we? Huh?
new iPod
I just listed my old MP3 player on eBay, since I ordered an iPod last night. I’m getting a refurbished 5GB unit for $200. (I couldn’t quite talk myself into a new 20GB unit.) Looks like the Apple Store already sold out.
printing
Hey! I got my iBook to print to my desktop printer, attached to my Win XP machine! Okay, maybe that doesn’t sound impressive, but it’s something I’ve wanted to be able to do since I had the PowerBook 1400, and I’ve never been able to do it until now. Relevant links:
Gimp-Print — for PC printer drivers
Mac OS X Hints — search for “SMB”, “printing”, or something similar.
Essentially, you need to enable SMB printing, install relevant printer drivers, then add your printer, using the arcane syntax “smb://user:pass@workgroup/server/sharename”.
blogging from the iBook
Just for yuks, I’m blogging from Mozilla on my iBook. The Blogger interface actually looks OK, although it doesn’t have some of the functionality it has under IE on Windows.
new iBook
The iBook showed up this week, too. It’s great. OS X is much better than OS 9. It looks great, too. DVD playback is nice. The sound quality is good, if you use good headphones. Lots of stuff to explore… I haven’t really even looked at the underlying BSD stuff yet.
new iBook
I broke down and ordered a new iBook tonight, from PowerMax. 800 MHz, 12.1″ screen, 256 MB RAM, 30 GB HD. And, surprisingly enough, they’re giving me $475 for the old iBook. I didn’t quite talk myself into getting the 20 GB iPod though.
I’m an idiot.
I now have both my Dell laptop and my iBook hooked up to my Airport Base Station, using WEP. I had originally disabled it, because I thought the USR card on the Dell wasn’t compatible with the 40-bit WEP implementation on the Airport Base Station. The USR config software only had options for 64-bit and 128-bit WEP. Little did I know that 40-bit and 64-bit are the same thing. And little did I know that the Airport Admin utility has a menu option to convert the text password used by Airport into the hex key required by the USR software. This nice little article explained it all: Flying into Other AirPorts. Yay for TidBITS! They rule!
My efforts to get WEP running again were of course spurred by Sunday’s Doonesbury.
hosting
I’m trying to decide whether or not I want to pay for .mac. It would be a much easier decision if the homepages function supported FTP uploading. Then, I could move this site over there, and have Blogger automatically post its pages, the way I can do with GeoCities (for $5/month). Then, I could drop the GeoCities account. It would also be an easier decision, if I wasn’t still using Mac OS 9. Some of the .mac stuff seems to be specific to OS X. Oh well, you can’t always have everything.
networking
Okay, everything’s hooked up to the network now, and all three machines (XP desktop, Win2K laptop, and iBook) can see the Internet. Now I need to get them to see each other…