Jen said I was posting too much tech stuff and she’s right. Sorry about that, but that is what I tend to post about most…Anyway, the baby is doing great. We’re (most likely) having a boy according to the ultrasound. It is quite an amazing thing to see this awesome guy growing inside my wonderful wife. And we get to hear the heartbeat during our monthly (soon to get more frequent) visits to the Midwife center. More and more now I’m feeling the baby crawling around inside Jen – it’s so cool!
I painted the baby’s room a few weekends ago. “Brown Teepee” by Behr is an awesome color! Last week I pulled up the old carpet. The old carpet was pretty disgusting and I’m glad it’s gone. I’d like to keep the hardwood, but Jen wants new carpet installed. Either way, the room is starting to come together! Oh, we ordered the crib and dresser/changing table – really nice looking furiture!
Once I got OS X booting on my Dell desktop, I thought I’d give it a try on the laptop, a Dell Latitude D600. I read that OS X would indeed install on the D600, since it does have SSE2 – it’s a Pentium M – using one of the OS X images floating around. I won’t detail the whole process as others have done that. The main down side it that the ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 is not supported – or at least not supported well, so I don’t have any hardware acceleration, but I did get it running at native resolution of 1400 x 1050. It works pretty well – speed it comparable to XP and Ubuntu which I also have installed on the laptop. Wireless networking worked out of the box as did sound. The wired network connection required a kext (kernel extension) patch to get working. All in all, not to difficult. Why do this you ask? 1) I like OS X, 2) I can’t afford a new Mac right now and 3) It’s a cool, geeky thing to do.
No, software update doesn’t work for the system patches, but I can live without that for now.
I’ve been using an Enermax Crystal aluminum keyboard for like a year now and love it. Since I’ll be working from home more once the baby’s born, I’m trying to get my home office as productive (or more) than my work office – that means getting my computer up to snuff. I’ve always liked the feel of laptop (aka scissor-switch) keyboards and the Crystal keyboard has one for desktop use. The new Enermax keyboards - apparently they don’t make the Crystal any more and it was a bit pricey - have the “L” shaped enter key which I detest, so that was out of the question for a new keyboard for home. Luckily I found the Kensington SlimType keyboard while making a pit stop at MicroCenter the other day. For $30 this keyboard rocks! It’s got a really nice feel and the layout is the same as the Crystal. Once again, I’m a happy camper.
I created my “hackintosh” a few weeks ago on my Dell Dimension 9200. The main reason was so I could check out TextMate - the editor most Rails guys seem to use. I’ve been using NetBeans on Ubuntu for a while now and like it, but just wanted to give TextMate a whirl. Well, after using OS X, I’m really starting to dig it. Not sure if I like it as much as Ubuntu, but it’s better than Windows. Some things take getting use it – like the close/minimize/maximize buttons on the left side instead of the right. Also the application menu always betting at the top of the screen is strange, although in some ways nice. Oh, and TextMate is great.