Nerdvana: It's all here!

Nerdvana: It's all here!

The setup:

• 12 inch 1ghz 768mb PowerBook G4
• 17 inch LCD Apple Studio Display
• Icekey USB Slim Keyboard by Macally
• An earlier version of this mouse from IBM. Mine has a scroll-wheel instead of a scroll-nubbin.

I’m approaching computational bliss.

Here are my first day thoughts. With mild amounts of ontology for good measure.

The computer:

• It’s brick-like. The construction is much more solid that the iBook or the tiBook.
• Setup was a breeze. I booted it in FireWire target disk mode on the iBook. And used Mike Bombich’s wonderful Carbon Copy Cloner to duplicate my hard drive to the new machine. 30 minutes and a reboot later I was back in business. So far this exact install of Panther has traveled with me between three machines. And I’ve been using the same home folder since OS 10.1. I love OS X.
• It’s fast. Not G5 fast. But significantly faster than any machine I’ve had yet fast. I’m sure the 768mb of RAM doesn’t hurt either. I can even play 3D games now :)

Display:

• I have the 17” ASD directly in front of me with the PowerBook’s screen raised up on the left. For a combined total of 2,097,152 pixels of screen space. I love my pixels.
• If I had I camera I would just post a picture of all of this. Sigh.
• Exposé is handy on one screen. But it’s an absolute killer on two.
• The ASD’s supporting back leg adjusts in a hard to describe, but very nifty way. All you have to do is push or pull the top of the screen to where you want it and it says perfectly. Next time you’re around one try it.
• The brightness of the ASD makes the PowerBook’s screen look sadly dark.

Misc:

• The icekey keyboard is very nice. My only fault with it is that it’s cap-lock works like a toggle instead of a normal key. Which makes using it as a ctrl-key be flakey. But the real ctrl is in a decent position so I’ll cope.
• My cat likes laying on my new keyboard more than he did on my laptop.
• The 17” ASD has 14720 more pixels than the 17” iMac. Sounds impressive, but it’s only 121 pixels square.

Ergonomics:

• Having a full-size monitor at eye level is wonderful! If you use a laptop as your main computer you owe it to your back to get and external monitor and put your laptop up on eye level. I should have done this a long time ago. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go work off two years worth of hunching over a little screen.

Merry Christmas to me!

Xian 01:43 AM, 12.07.03 - p-link