This year though the weather wasn’t really nice it was raining almost the whole Friday and that kind of sucked the fun out of the day. Anyway I had my new Mac with me to our cottage to get to know the new system a little better and to have somewhere to store images captured during the holiday.

After some initial searching and a lot of getting used I’m really starting to like OS X. It took some searching to find out how to install a program or how to delete a program. Since I’m used to Windows and Linux where it’s quite different. I couldn’t believe a computer could be this easy to use. Just drag and drop to install most software and drag them to the Trash can to uninstall. Could it be any simpler?

iPhoto is also a great program for some image editing. It also keeps all my photos in order. Simple editing like removing redeye and adjusting levels is also made easy in iPhoto. It also handles RAW photo format which is the format of choice for professionals and even hobbyists.

Still the one software on this machine I could praise is Time Machine. I’ve never seen a smarter backup for personal computers. Plug in a USB harddrive if you don’t have a Time Capsule, Time Machine will ask if you would like to use it for backup and run the first backup of your computer. That’s it. After that it will check for hourly changes and copy them to the external harddrive when connected.
Restoring is even easier and there are many ways to restore. To see an introduction on the new features of Leopard go to www.apple.com/macosx/guidedtour and take a look at the introduction video.

I have no idea why but somehow me getting a Mac made me want to play with graphics and dig out my camera again. Anyway I took a few photos during thursday and friday that I use as wallpapers. Maybe someone else will to so they can be found here. The listing of that folder is still very very ugly but it was fast enough to get it to list the few files found there.

Anyway I need to get back to playing with my MacBook so I can start working normally with it soon. Bye for now.

Powered by Qumana

I’ve been using this evening researching programs to use and I must say there seems to be a great number of choice when it comes to programs. What I really need to get work done is a good IPSec VPN client a good terminal(which is included) and a good editor for scripts and some programing. Also any network security or network debug programs are welcome.

There are also some other things I’m worried about I have a Nokia E90 phone and I really need to connect to 3G sometimes. So I hope I can get it running in OS X .  Another thing I’m worried about is that this blog will take a turn to "praise the oh so holy Macintosh". I hope I won’t turn in to one of those people. I do have the multi OS use on my side so let’s hope I keep my feet firmly on the ground while testing this one.

What I will try to write about is my life with this computer, since I have been a PC user. My opinions might still be a little biased since my Linux usage might come to assist me in this first year test drive.

Well the time is now 00:48 local and Verkkokauppa.com opens at 09:00 so I guess I’d better go to sleep so I can get out of bed and drive 200 kilometers to get it in the morning. Meanwhile feel free to give me pointers, links to pages and what software’s are a must for a new Apple user.

I’ve been looking for a portable Mac, a PowerBook to be more exact. Why a used PowerBook you might ask. I’m not looking for a mac because of the power. I can get a PC to do the same a lot cheaper. I want the old G4 because it did not consume a lot of battery and it ran cool.

So what’s the problem?

The problem when it comes to Mac’s are their second hand price. To get an 12" Powerbook in a decent shape I’d have to pay somewhere around 450-700€,depending on the setup. And that to me is a lot for a second hand laptop that is 3-4 years old. The batteries might be dead, it usually has signs of the use, scratches and so on. Why is it that macs are so expensive. Can anyone explain that to me. I mean there is nothing special about them except for looks. They look good, otherwise they are just like any other computer. They run a OS and you can use programs on them.

The price thing goes to new macs also. They cost way to much for me to even consider. I don’t think the quality/price go hand in hand on them.

If you disagree, which you might please tell me why…

How come I didn’t think of that. Well I blame it on how much time I’ve been spending in the Windows server/client environment lately. So I think I’ll have to play with my SPARC linux server at home again.

30.4 2008 my old ISP cut my 2M/2M SHDSL line to our apartment and we still live in it. 2 may the new ISP connected the 24/1 ADSL line to our new house.

I brought all the servers to the house first of may and the apartment is really quiet now. We are both used to watch TV series and listen to music located at one of the file servers. So how does it feel? I must say it’s weird. Being at home and not being able to look something up whenever you want. Read email, read the news… I could go on forever. I’m really surprised to see how "hooked" on the Internet I am. A lot of my daily activities are on the Internet, and suddenly the activities are cut of. Well almost at least, as I said I can still surf at the building site but then I loose precious time. *cough cough* like writing this blog post. Well I did it while taking a coffee break.

This makes me wonder are the modern people really this dependent on the Internet? And if we are, is it a good or a bad thing? How did we manage before the Internet, mobile phones, mp3 players? Sometimes I think back to the times when you could go out to the summerhouse and no one could get a hold of you. We had no phones there and for a week or two, sometimes for a longer time the only thing that you’d think about was fishing, catching some sun, swimming and other normal summer activities. No work related calls, no interruptions in the vacation.

Are people more stressed due to this? I’d say they are, you can’t get any real peace anymore. The companies and colleagues assume they can get a hold on you anytime. Setting auto replies to email might cut some of but some still don’t get the hint.

Comment and tell me about your experiences in this.

I need to get back to building my house so I can move in sometime soon and get my Internet back. 

You can easily insert pictures and change styles. I wish I could use this tool while editing the main site www.nixadmins.net also, as it runs with Drupal.

If you know of a better editor or a good editor to use with Drupal please make a comment and I’ll check it out.

Signing out for now.

So here is the process in it’s simplicity

1. Install the needed tools in Ubuntu. by running sudo apt-get install dchroot debootstrap
2. If you haven’t alread, partition and format the hard drive you are using for Gentoo.
3. Make a starting point for the gentoo install. sudo mkdir /mnt/gentoo
4. Start mounting the partitions
5. Follow the Gentoo handbook from chapter 5.  Download stages and get installing.

This worked out fine in Ubuntu 7.10 and I’m now back in my favorite distribution.

I’m not sure if there is any harm to it but I also merged xorg-x11 and gnome-light via Ubuntu. This way I had a full graphical desktop as soon as I rebooted.

Many of us use our car to get to work and back home, I know I do. Instead of raising fuel tax and coming up with totally IDIOTIC ideas like this lower the prices on public transportation so that it would appeal to the general public. Right now riding a train in Finland is more expensive than riding a car, yes you heard me. If you don’t need the car at all the train is cheaper but if you need to make your way to the train using a car, which I would have to do, it’s cheaper to ride the car ALONE from Karjaa to Helsinki. Sure I pay for insurance, the car, wheels and so on and so on, but that’s something I’d have to do any way. So instead of taking the train and pay a monthly fee of 300+ euros I can ride in the comfort of my Audi A6 and have my peace and quiet for 300 euros in fuel cost per month.

I bet you are thinking that, well for that price you’ll still save money going with the train, wrong. I’d still have to take the bus or tram the rest of the way, which also cost a monthly fee. I mean COME ON, are Finnish politicians really this stupid? These prices were with a monthly fee, which is the second cheapest way to travel by train. If I’d pay for a whole year I’d save a few buck, but what if I get really sick and can’t go to work, money down the drain and Valtion Rautatiet makes some profit. If I want to go to Helsinki and back with a normal ticket from Karjaa, how much will that cost, well with the Inter City trains(I wont travel with something that has plastic seats, because it’s not comparable with a car in any way) it costs 16,10 euros, one way. If I pay that in fuel I get about 13 liters of diesel with the prices today(1.189€). Considering my car takes around 7,8 liters / 100 km I drive almost 170km for that. So for the same amount that a train take a person 70km a car can take you 170km.

Now today some f*****n idiot like Tuomioja comes up with the great idea to save fuel by setting coupons, that would mean that everyone got some coupons and that’s the fuel you can buy. After that you’d have to buy coupons from someone that doesn’t use as much fuel as you do. Who the hell is to say how much another person needs to be driving? Are we all kids in this country now? God damn what kind of idiots voted that son of a b**h to the parliament.

I pay my taxes, so I also pay his salary. And this is the s**t they come up with. For crying out loud, you can’t fix the fact that people here use a car a lot. Our public transportation is not really good everywhere, I admit it’s quite ok between my house and Helsinki but it just costs way to much. Public should be cheap, the government should pay for some, our taxes should be put in that also. If you lower the prices more people will start to use trains and we will have less costs in fixing our roads(if you’ve been to Finland you know how bad they are) and could put some of that money back to public transportation.

So to end this post, one image says more than a thousand words. So here is a image for you Erkki

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 running at 2GHz
Graphics: Intel i915 chipset
RAM: 4Gb DDR2

Eager to get it up and running I put my favorite distribution cd, Gentoo, in the drive and started the install. I’ve been using Gnome for a long time now and as Gentoo was installing I was checking out the latest Linux Journal and saw a preview of KDE 4. I thought, well I just have to try that one out. So after the basic installation was done I started merging KDE 4.

Left the computer compiling overnight and returned to the office this morning eager to see what KDE had to offer. I fired up KDE and I have to say it was a huge disappointment. The system was really unresponsive, everything looked huge on the display, I couldn’t fit anything in my 1680×1050 display. I know this is still new software and there are for sure enhancements on the way, but still this was too much.

The feeling of checking out KDE 4 was really close to the feeling when I first installed Windows Vista, thinking WTF have they been up to. A few hours later and KDE 4 and all it’s dependencies are gone, Gnome is back and I feel at home.

Eventually I will probably give KDE 4 another go but right now it just doesn’t seem mature enough to use.