Feelin' Fine

Here are some early stats, just as they're presented within Mint:

Tony Arnold was kind enough to put quite a lot of Mac users out of their misery and updated the fabulous Virtue desktop manager to work on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). He says it is more or less a dirty hack, read his news story for all details as well as the download location.

For those of you who do not know Virtue, it is an awesome open-source desktop manager for Mac OS X, probably best known for its eye candy. You know all those nice effects in Mac OS X like the cube you get when using fast user switching? Virtue does those. Go check it out if you haven't seen it yet.

I installed Mint today, and I think it is absolutely fantastic. Here are some screenshots:

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Update: There's a Dashboard widget for Mint, here's what it looks like:

I have been a great fan of iWork since Steve Jobs presented it at MacWorld SF 2005. Although it only consists of Keynote (a presentation application) and Pages, I have put it to great use in the past 9 months. Most people want Apple to add a spreadsheet application to iWork, and there were reports earlier this year that Apple is planning to include it in the next major release of iWork.
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Serendipity 0.9 was released today, so I went ahead and installed it. Please let me know if you notice any issues on my blog.

I have recently purchased a number of books dealing with Cocoa and Objective-C, and there is one book in particular which just blew me away. Of course it is Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass of Big Nerd Ranch.
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Lately, basically every Mac fan has been wondering whether Front Row will work on other Macs besides the new iMac G5. Some guy may have found at least a partial answer. Read More

One of the four major German mobile telephone providers, E-Plus, recently introduced a flatrate 3G service - it's only like 39.95 € a month and there is no time or traffic limitation at all - now guess what I got today :D

On Friday (yeah, I know I'm pretty slow) the Flock project released a first public preview of their upcoming browser, so be sure to check it out at their site.

Apple has quietly introduced a new feature in the dual layer SuperDrive versions of their 15- and 17-inch PowerBooks called "Safe Sleep". It basically writes the RAM contents on the hard drive when the PowerBook enters sleep mode, ensuring that even if the PowerBook runs out of battery during sleep, all open documents are safely stored on the hard drive. Once the user wakes up the PowerBook again, the RAM contents are being restored and work can continue where it left off. Finally there is a practical method for changing your PowerBook's battery without having to close down all those applications first :-)

MacBidouille has a photo of the procedure, a knowledge base document at Apple describes the new feature.

Maybe you have already heard about the upcoming browser, Flock - it promises to be a revolutionary new browser with del.icio.us and flickr integration, as well as an XML-RPC interface to interact with your blog.
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This afternoon, my buddy Jan messages me asking whether I wanted to come over and have a cup of tea. Since Jan knows good tea and my PowerMac G5 was doing some longterm copying work, I decided to take my PowerBook and drive to his house.

However, Jan does not have a wireless access point at his home. So, I simply unplugged my AirPort Express base station, put it in my jacket, closed my PowerBook and jumped in the car. Since the AirPort Express neither has a big power brick nor antennas to carry around with it, it is perfect to be carried around.

When I got to his place, I plugged the AirPort Express back in again and made a new profile for his place so I could switch between the settings for our houses in no time. It all worked like a charm, and a few minutes later I was sitting on his couch surfing the web.

When I got back home, I loaded the profile for my place and everything was working like it did before. Now, that's what I call useful technology.