Apple just upgraded the MacBook to Core 2 Duo. And I didn’t even realise the Core 2 did 64-bit either!

I want one.

But I also want Leopard, so I’ll see you in the spring, MacBook Core 2 Duo… with 64-bit Leopard and all my KDE apps running on top of OS X.

In completely unrelated news, I now officially consider myself a Linux geek as I successfully compiled my own kernel and got it to run on my spare machine under Ubuntu.

Beat that kernel name! Hosted on Zooomr

The fact that the code is exactly the same as the vanilla 2.6.18.2 release is completely irrelevant and coincidental! 😛

The tutorial I used to build the kernel is here.

Do you think I was going to wait for Red Hat to package the official Fedora version of Firefox 2.0?

Aside from Mozilla being silly about names, I absolutely adore this browser. What’s more, only a few of my extensions weren’t compatible and I’m sure they’ll be updated very quickly.

And it’s so much faster than 1.5.0.x too, and aside from still having ugly buttons in forms on Linux (and the Mac as well), it’s beautiful.

W00t! I love this browser! OK, fine, I’ll try and return to sanity, I know, it’s only a browser, but it’s an app I’m going to be staring at for a long time until Firefox 3.0…

If anyone has a copy of the freely-available-but-apparently-no-longer-so StuffIt Expander 4 (or any Expander that will run on System 6 on a 68000-powered Mac Plus), then if you could get me a copy of it somehow I would be very grateful.

In case you’re wondering whether I got my hands on a vintage Mac, unfortunately not. I’m only exploring the Mini vMac emulator.

Just had a very quick play with Firefox 2.0 RC2.

The new icon theme is nice and there are various enhancements to the feed functionality and UI and stuff.

But by far, the best thing about FF 2.0 I’ve seen so far is that it is fast

On an AMD Sempron 2600+ (this is not my main system, a P4 3.0 GHz) it goes from nought to loaded up and ready to go in 1.05 seconds. Compare that to 1.5.0.4 (yes, it’s old because it’s a SLED 10 system and I don’t have any updates on it) which hobbles along and gets there in 2.88 seconds.

I’m officially fired up about Firefox 2.0 now – the only bad thing will be waiting for extensions to get compatibility (though I might resort to tweaking the install.js files if necessary).

(Why am I so fired up about less than 3 seconds? Because it really does make a difference to have your app instantly respond to you.) I’ll have the same for Thunderbird, please (TB 1.5.0.7 is not very quick to start up either).

I like it!

Disclaimer: my timing is in no way scientific, I just used a stopwatch, so they’re probably really inaccurate. But you get the gist, it’s fast and if you still don’t believe me, download it and test it against the latest 1.5.0.x build.

… and why Apple can’t be bothered to properly localise Apple keyboards this side of the Atlantic.

But I should really start at the beginning. Basically, for a long time now I’ve been pondering a decision to buy a brand new MacBook. I came to the conclusion that I will, but I’ll wait for not only Mac OS X Leopard, but also hopefully for an Intel Core 2 Duo (Merom) version, fingers crossed.

So today I saw a MacBook ‘in the flesh’, not for the first time, but I suddenly noticed that the keyboard layout was rather strange. Basically, British layout keyboards have some minor differences to US ones, including having a £ sign located at Shift+3, and having the “ character at Shift+2, not Shift+’ (the @ is then located at Shift+’ instead). Plus, also the # sign is somewhere else… you get the idea. It’s standard QWERTY with some tweaks.

Now the MacBook (and every other Mac in the, ironically named, PC World store) had the £ key in the correct place, but all the other keys were US style.

This would be a major problem for me, as I’m so used to typing with the British layout, I’d get endlessly frustrated having to hunt around actually looking at the keyboard to find a key. In fact, I couldn’t see the hash key (#) anywhere on the Apple keyboards! Not that I wouldn’t get over switching to the US layout, but you see, every other keyboard over here is in the standard British layout described above. I do not want to learn two different keyboard layouts and have to think which one to use!

A look in System Preferences revealed that the MacBook believed it was using a British keyboard layout and I couldn’t find any other layout among the many localised keyboard setups that seemed to offer the proper setting. Imagine if I plugged in the keyboard I’m using now. Like 99.99% of keyboards over here, it’s in the British configuration. I’d press “, but end up with an @ – I’d end up getting very frustrated.

Thankfully, I’m not the first to discover this and Phil Gyford has devised a solution which involves installing a custom keyboard layout. Thank you, Phil! Without this I may well have had second thoughts about my MacBook purchase, which I’ll make as soon as Leopard is out (provided they’re not just about to release a Core 2 MacBook at that point).

It won’t fix the labelling of the keyboard, but to be honest I won’t be looking at that while typing, will I?

Small details. Big impact. Like having the wrong keyboard layout that almost made me think twice about getting a Mac.

Seriously, sort it out, Apple. If every other manufacturer can do it (seriously, every computer sold in the UK gets it right), then surely you can.

You almost scared me off your entire product range. And you were saved only by a hack by a user of your products.

OK, end of rant.

So Apple have released the Mac Pro, previewed Mac OS X Leopard and I’ve decided to wait until Leopard goes gold to buy my MacBook (presuming I have enough by then).

With Apple’s WWDC conference going on, they’ve also made a good attempt to try and restart a free and open source software building community around Mac OS X. They’ve re-released the x86 kernel source of XNU (OS X’s kernel) and have launched a brand new FOSS community site, Mac OS Forge.

To be honest, it looks rather sad at the moment – only a very few projects are hosted there and there are precious little comments. Well, to be fair to them, Apple certainly are trying hard (again) to engage the open source community around OS X. They could certainly benefit from the community link if people were willing to take the source from bits of Mac OS X and do work on it, but that will only happen if developers feel like their contributions are going to be worth it – go to a good cause.
If/when I do join the Mac community, I plan to do some application development for Mac OS X (presuming I know C++ by then). Most of it will most likely be free and open source and I’d love for there to be a real FOSS community based around the Macintosh platform that I can join in with. So, good luck Mac OS Forge.
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Just thought I’d say that I’ve started watching a new vodcast, CommandN.

Despite the rather Mac-centric sounding name (Command being a Macintosh-specific key on the keyboard), it’s actually fairly platform-independent from the few episodes I’ve watched (no sign of Linux, though). It focuses on the tech stories of each week and gives some good links to sites around the web. It’s not exactly ground-breaking, but it is quite good to catch up on those tech stories I’ve missed and getting some good links to sites around the web.

Watch the latest episode here.

This video just made me laugh. I don’t know how you could let a MacBook Pro be subjected to this sort of damage. It would also make a very expensive cat toy. The cat’s having fun anyway.

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Yes, this is the extension I have been waiting for. Using Firefox on both Windows and Linux daily means I have two sets of bookmarks. Now that is a pain. Of course, I could try and synchronise them manually.

But Google have gone and made a really nice extension called Google Browser Sync. It does exactly what it says on the tin; that is it synchronises your settings between different installations of Firefox.

Admittedly, at the moment it does take a bit longer to load up Firefox, because it has to check for changes to your profile, but Google say it will get better.

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Corrected first link 15/06/2006.

OK, I haven’t posted for some time now. Sorry.

But today I have finally seen a MacBook ‘in the flesh’. And it is awesome. It might be quite a small screen, but personally, running at 1280×800, it is very nice.

It’s also fast (2x 1.83 GHz cores). The only thing I would complain about is the hard drive size on the £749 model, which is 60 GB.

But, I’m most definitely getting one now…