Here Kitty Kitty…

Well, the release of OS X Leopard is imminent now, but I don’t think I’ll be picking it up.

At least not by itself. I’ve gotten a lot more use out of my iBook than I expected (browsing the web from The Comfy Chair is so much better than at the desk), but it’s almost four years old now, and is starting to show its age. It has trouble keeping up with even Youtube videos without a bit of stutter, the screen still feels a bit cramped, it bogs down a bit even with the maximum amount of memory in it, it would be nice to dual boot to Windows once in a while, and so on.

I think I’ll wait until the next hardware refresh though, just to make sure I get the latest-and-greatest, and by then there should be a dot release or two of Leopard out to help stabilize things, too.

I’m still not sure whether to go for a MacBook or a MacBook Pro this time around, though. The primary difference (based on the current specs, anyway) would really be in the screen size, resolution, and video chipset. A higher res would be nice to relieve the cramped feeling a bit, and it would be nice to have enough horsepower to run some games that are still usable on a laptop. But is that niceness alone worth the $600 difference? Hmmm.

And hopefully they’ll also adjust the prices to account for the recent currency surge. I’d actually save over $250 by ordering from the US Apple store instead of the local one, right now.

Getting Zapped

Ouch. I just paid the biggest power bill I’ve ever had, at $73.84. It wasn’t that long ago that I was only paying around $30-35, and I don’t think I’ve ever even had one in the $60-70 range, it just shot straight up from the mid-50s. According to the little graphs they include, my usage hasn’t really changed, it’s just that the rate keeps on climbing.

Maybe I should unplug my DVD player, so the LED clock on the front doesn’t waste all that power… :P

Uncle!

Alright, I give up. For a very long time I’ve been wary of specialized, often proprietary programs for organizing my data. Keeping a sensible directory structure always seemed to be good enough, without having to worry about programs becoming obsolete, incompatible metadata formats, licensing changes, platform restrictions, data-corrupting bugs, and so on.

But, I’ve reached the breaking point. There are some things that have just become too unwieldy to manage with my ‘old school’ ways, or features I’m missing out on that I can’t easily replicate myself, so I guess it’s time to start giving these programs a chance.

And first up, of all things, is passwords…
Continue reading “Uncle!”