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1. Get intrigued by the low prices of the Intel based Mac Minis and use them as an excuse to finally buy your first Mac.
2. While on holidays in Hong Kong (or any place else without a VAT), get yourself a black 8GB iPod Nano to go along with the Mini. Again, use the comparatively cheap price as an excuse.
3. When your boss offers you a bonus, insist on getting payed in hardware and choose a black MacBook.

Been there, done that, loving it!

Sweetmorn, Chaos 6, 3173 YOLD

As my PR manager told me, large numbers of fans have already complained about the recent lack of updates. Since I’m only my reader’s humble servant, I of course have to comply with this wishes, so here are the long awaited news about yours truly:

Gentoo:
After being a Gentoo developer for 2 years, I finally decided to leave the project. Since I haven’t really been active for the past 4 month anyway for several reasons (e.g. work), this was long overdue anyway. I’ve met a lot of nice and interesting people in the Gentoo community and working with you guys has really been a pleasure! Thanks for that, I really appreciate what I have learned from all of you during that time!

Mac:
Today I’ve joined the team of Open.Source.Mac and have already published my first little article on the site. Enjoy!

Personal:
On the 2nd of August I celebrated my 27th birthday at Xeno. A lot of friends showed up, whereas certain people decided to get drunk somewhere else and then blamed innocent squirrels for their not showing up. It was a cool evening which I really enjoyed, but working on the next day didn’t exactly qualify as a good cure against the headaches…

Capitalism:
I have to admit that I love portable consoles, especially when they are as sexy as the black Nintendo DS Lite I bought three weeks ago. So far I own Advance Wars: Dual Strike, Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day, Feel The Magic XY/XX and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. All of them are really great and I can hardly wait until my copy of Mario Kart DS finally arrives.

I also got myself a nice M9 DX enclosure with a 250GB Samsung HD as a backup disk for the Mac Mini. Overall it’s pretty neat, although it could match the color of the Mini a little better.

Misc
Found an article about Habbo Hotel on the Pardus forums and just had to try it out. Like the author of the article I most likely won’t visit the site again, but I had a lot of fun during the hour I spent there.

teemow recently blogged about BumpTop, a new take at the desktop metaphor we all grew used to. The video is quite impressive and I’d really like to try out such an interface myself, as I’m interested in how well it works for everyday usage.

Prickle-Prickle, Bureaucracy 5, 3172 YOLD

I always found Apple’s Mail.app in its Tiger incarnation be a really neat MUA because of the nice interface and the good spam filter it offers. Unfortunately it lacks a little when you have to deal with large amounts of mail or want to use some of the more advanced features other MUAs have to offer, so I started looking around for some plug-ins. I soon found Hawk Wings, a site dedicated entirely to “Tips and add-ons to make Apple Mail even better”.

Here’s a list of the plug-ins I’m using so far:

• GPGMailBundle (Review): Lacking support for GPG in the default installation is IMHO one of the greatest shortcomings of Apple Mail. Fortunately enough there’s GPGMailBundle to remedy this situation. This nice little plug-in of course needs a working GPG installtion to function properly and I recommend MacGPG in combination with GPGKeychainAccess from the same site for this. Once you’re set up and ready to go, GPGMailBundle can easily be configured from Mail’s preferences panel. A great plug-in, which makes Mail.app a lot more useful to me!


• Letterbox (Review): If you too own a widescreen display, Letterbox may just be the plug-in you’ve been waiting for if you’re trying to make the most out of your screen real estate. What it does is arranging the interface into three vertical columns by putting the message preview right of the message pane instead of below it (as known from Entourage). This definitely depends on personal preference and reading habits, but so far I really like this layout, especially with all the additional information GPGMailBundle adds to the message preview.


• Mail Act-On (Review): A cool plug-in which allows you to create a plethorea of different mail rules and to assign them to keystrokes, therefore making your mail sorting a whole lot faster and more efficient.


• MailTags (Review): Coming from the same author, MailTags does for managing mails what Mail Act-On does for sorting them. It adds a little tag to all messages, which lets you add keywords, notes, due dates, priorities and other useful infos to them. And as if that’s not cool enough already, you can also build smart mail boxes from this metadata (which btw can be used and changed from Apple Mail rules). Now consider that this great plug-in also allows you to link messages to iCal to do items, and you’ll immediately see how useful this thing really is. The only thing that annoys me a little is the “begging” for donations. Not because I don’t think it’s worth the money – I’m probably going to donate something too – but because I think the PayPal button on the web site would have sufficed, since I really don’t want to see it all the time…

That’s it for today, but since there are a lot of other nice and useful looking plug-ins for Apple Mail, I’m pretty sure there’ll be a followup post to this in the near future.

Setting Orange, Bureaucracy 1, 3172 YOLD

I found a great tutorial about how to make KDE look like MacOS X on the Baghira website and although I didn’t follow all the steps, I’m really satisfied with the result:

Sweetmorn, Confusion 60, 3172 YOLD

June was pretty busy, so I only managed to blog once. So here’s a little update of what happened during the past few weeks:

Work:
Still the same old bullsh*t, except that I spent 7 days at a customer’s site in Upper Austria, where we set up several virtual Heartbeat clusters in VMware Server. Summary: the scenery and people in Upper Austria are pretty nice, VMware is one of the coolest things since the invention of sliced bread and Heartbeat really can be a bitch to set up correctly (no surprises here I guess).

Capitalism:
Got myself a nice widescreen 19” LCD for my beloved Mac Mini. I also decided that it’s about time to get a new digital camera, since my old one broke ages ago. I finally settled on an Olympus SP-700, which Amazon sold for a really good price. The camera arrived last Thursday, and from what I’ve seen so far I’m really impressed with my new gadget. Today I once again went on a DVD buying spree and bought Ken Park, Romper Stomper, Bad Taste and the first season of The Sopranos. Next on my list are an external Mac Mini HD like the miniStack and a new notebook. Unfortunately neither the MacBook nor the MacBook Pro does really cut it for me (no 12” version, too heavy, too hot and far too many issues reported by early adopters), so I will probably settle for an X60s running Gentoo. I’d really would have loved to buy a portable Mac, but I’m not enough of an Apple fanboy to buy a product which doesn’t really fit my needs…

Books:
If you want to read a really good book by a Cuban author, you definitely should try The Insatiable Spiderman by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. Next on my list is Playing the Moldovans at Tennis, which I’ll start reading tomorrow. I also got myself a copy of Mac OS X Tiger: Missing Manual, which has shown me some neat tricks although it mainly targets a non-techy audience.

Geek stuff:
I’ve always been a great fan of tiling window managers like Ion3. However, lately I fell in love with wmii, which I think is an absolutely amazing WM. I’m using version 3, which features dynamic window management as known from acme or Oberon. Reading the guide doesn’t take longer than about 15 minutes, after which I was already able to conviniently work with wmii. So far the experience is really great, and I haven’t even started using the scripting capapilites 9P offers… Additionally using wmii once again made me play around with Plan 9, an operating system I’ve been strangely interested in ever since I first heard about it around 6 years ago. Note to self: spend some time with the 9fans at 23C3!

Gentoo:
Another month spent without doing anything Gentoo related. To be completely honest, my Gentoo box has only been started twice since I moved into my new apartment in early March. Given that I’ll be on holidays for around 10 days in July, you once again shouldn’t expect too much activity from me… I’m really thinking about leaving the project, as I’m currently not doing anything which warrants my developer status. Probably the only alternative to that would be dropping all the ebuilds I’m currently working on, and to focus solely on Gentoo-alt, maintaining the Gentoo/FreeBSD and Gentoo/NetBSD docs, while also working on Gentoo for Mac OS X (although Fink works really well for me). Input wanted!

Random:
September 19th is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Yarr!

Boomtime, Confusion 36, 3172 YOLD

I’ve done it. I decided to finally get my first Mac and ordered one of those nifty new Intel Mac Minis. Since it will mainly be used for mailing, surfing the web and other things which don’t need lots of CPU cycles, I’ve decided to go for the Core Solo, which should be more than enough for my needs.

I’m really looking forward to have a new machine to play around with, and I think I’ll have lots of fun installing Gentoo on the Mac Mini (dual boot) and giving Gentoo for MacOS X a try.

Prickle-Prickle, Discord 26, 3172 YOLD