So far, I'm very happy with my iBook. Especially the battery. 5 hours, easy! Six even, if I dim the screen a bit. I haven't experienced this kind of battery life on a laptop since Unnur and I lugged a lead-acid battery across Eastern Europe to power her tiny Toshiba Libretto...

I'm giving OS X a spin instead of stubbornly installing Linux on the machine. So far so good; iTunes is brilliant at mp3-coding my CDs and I quite enjoy the eye-candy of Exposé, fast user switching and the overall experience. Safari is nice and I'm giving it a go as my default browser, although I've also installed Firefox. I can even see myself using the Dashboard a little bit.

Although the machine itself is a little bit bigger and heavier than I would have preferred, it makes up for that by feeling very solid and durable.

...

I've managed in a relatively short period of time to customize the few bits of the OS X user interface I couldn't imagine "getting used to", much to the dismay of my mac-loving girlfriend.

You swapped the alt key and the command key?? Blasphemy!

But I did, which means that I don't have to re-learn how to touch-type in Icelandic and don't keep closing applications when I mean to type an e-mail address or something else containing an @-sign. As a programmer and Linux geek, that's more than a little important. Learning new keyboard layouts is painful and I'm very happy I won't have to.

I also figured out how to get Icelandic to work properly in the Terminal and my ssh sessions to old UTF-unaware Linux machines (klaki). That took quite a bit of experimentation, but it all started working much better when I told it not to "escape non-ASCII characters". I'm still resisting the jump to Unicode-land, I've told my Terminal and shell environment that I want to use the good old ISO-8859-1 encoding.

The last thing I "fixed" was getting Windows/KDE-like keyboard-only window switching to work. OS X Tiger's default was almost good enough, but not quite; it would let me switch between running programs with command-tab, but if an application had multiple open windows (such as many ssh sessions or many open web-windows), then I'd have to use a different hot-key or the mouse to choose between them. I found that annoying and unintuitive to say the least.

Peter Maurer's "witch" program fixed that right quick, with the surprise bonus of defaulting to the hot-key "alt-tab". Since I told the OS to swap alt and command, that physically happens to be in the expected place: "command-tab".

I actually think that's all the tweaking I've needed to do to feel comfortable using my new mac. I was expecting more pain.

I set Annie up as her own user so she wouldn't have to endure all my little "fixes" when she borrows the machine.