Updated: 11/19/05; 12:31:18 PM

 Saturday, June 11, 2005
JWZ Buys a Mac
A picture named images.jpg

First the Intel announcement, now this? It is one cold week in Hell....

Remember last week, when I tried to buy exactly the same audio card that 99.99% of the world owns and convince Linux to be able to play two sounds at once? Yeah, turns out, that was the last straw. I bought an iMac, and now I play my music with iTunes.

This took... let me see... just about zero effort. Well, I still have to go buy some longer audio cables, but that's it.

I plugged a mouse with three buttons and a wheel into the Mac, and it just worked without me having to read the man page on xorg.conf or anything. Oh frabjous day.

Go ahead and say "I told you so" if it makes you feel better.

Anyway, this means several things:

You shouldn't be holding your breath waiting for a new release of Gronk. I also got to stop using the crapware known as Mozilla Sunbird; now I can use iCal, which Just Works (for example, the alarms actually go off, and it doesn't periodically shit a WAV file into my .ics file.)

The future direction of xscreensaver has become... highly ambiguous. I'm still using my other Linux machine to read mail and run XEmacs, but I'm hoping to wean myself of that eventually, one way or another. If all goes well, then in six months or so, the only Linux machines I'll ever have to touch will have no video or sound cards in them at all.

The only thing I couldn't figure out how to do: compile xscreensaver. It stopped working some time between OSX 10.3 and 10.4 due to some GTK/Fink stupidity where pkgconfig/gobject-2.0.pc never gets installed. I'm trying not to care. That's going quite well.

Dear Slashdot: please don't post about this. Screw you guys

Jamie's Slashdot response obviously got him noticed over on /. which you can read about here.

11:38:37 PM