After a long day of studying at the library and some relaxing hours at home I felt the need to exercise my physique for just a little while. So I grabbed my MacBook, placed it in front of our crosstrainer in the other room, set my ergometer to 45 minutes and started "running". How cool to own an apple with a remote control and Front Row, I thought.

I was wrong.

Right after starting front row and switching into the "Video" section, front row crashed. Nothing worked. No effect. No task switching, no quitting, no anything. Phew. Pretty hard to operate a wall mounted MacBook while you're using an ergometer. OK. Press and hold the power button to reboot. I have done this a thousand times before when I was still owning a windows machine. Never had a problem. So what could go wrong this time? Nothing!

I was wrong!

After rebooting, the MacBook started to act funky. Started iTunes and noticed that my whole library was gone. Not the actual mp3 files, but all my playlists, playcounts, ratings, everything. What the fuck? This has happened to me once before a couple of months ago. At that time I bought some network attached storage, set up a script that automatically mirrors my harddisk to the network disk on a daily basis. But when I switched from a MacBook to a MacBookPro the other day, I forgot to reinstall the facilities that initate the backup process every night. The backup script itself is still there. So while I do have a copy of my iTunes library, it's a couple of weeks old already and misses a lot of ratings. OK. This sucks, but it's not too bad of an accident, I thought.

I was wrong!!!

Not only my iTunes library was gone. My KeyChain (all saved passwords: browser/website passwords, mail account passwords, chat account passwords, ...) vanished, 90% of my programs lost their preferences: Firewall settings, chat logs, user accounts, cachefiles, and this list goes on and on. What's up with that? On top of that, the whole KeyChain library seems to remain corrupted: It forgets passwords right after saving them and keeps prompting me. Maybe all this filesystem corruption happened because I have my home directory encrypted using apple's FileVault and the machine was unexpectedly shut down? I don't know. But what I do know: This sucks big time and has never happened to me on an ext3 filesystem. I'm just saying.

I am right.

So tonight's message to apple is: Eat a bick, ditch! And my message for you is: If you use an apple make sure you have nightly backups!

After evaluating a whole bunch of different MacBook sleeves a while ago, I ended up ordering the MacBook Laptop protector offered by the very friendly and communicative folks at wrappers. Unfortunately it was out of stock when I ordered, but after a good week of shipping from the UK I received it a few days ago. As far as I can tell now, it's a really nice sleeve for my MacBook, which conveniently slides in and out of it's microfibre pocket.

It's shell is made of white rubber which is not only a good shock absorber, but also keeps your MacBooks heat away from your lap, which comes in very handy for all male users who want to keep their seeds fresh and cool and use their MacBook as a laptop at the same time.

To sum it up, I'm super happy with it, the only question is how long the white rubber will look stay clean, and how fast it wears off. I'm not sure it's so durable when it comes to inside-a-backpack-friction.

The black MacBook I ordered last thursday is finally here. I have equipped it with 2GB of RAM and does really not feel slower than my old Dual 1.8GHz G5! Wohoow! I'm pretty busy with university right now, so I'm just gonna drop a few fotos of my new funtoy workstation here for you to click and look at:

I already cleaned up and packed the old G5 and I'm ready to sell it. The MacBook is connected to my old display allowing me to significally extend my desktop workspace. Another great thing about this setup is, that it is so silent - especially compared to the rather loud PowerMacs. But then again, I'm really picky about noise. :-)

The first thing I tried, of course, was Microsoft's Virtual PC, that lets you run a whole Windows XP Pro (or the operation system of your choice). Over all, it was pretty okay, but far from anything that I would call responsive or even fast. I was a little surprised by this fact, as I thought a dual PowerMac G5 with 2 gigs of ram would be enough for another operating system. I was wrong.

I wasn't happy with this, so I continued to look around. I found iEmulator which is built upon the open source processor emulator qemu (AFAIK) and claimed to be a "high-performance PC emulator for Macs" (quoted from their webpage) . Hooray, I thought! Open Source Power! Yeah! I then found out, that iEmulator is not free. How weird. Oh well, if the trial period goes well and I like iEmulator, I'll pay the $23. But wait! There is no trial version of iEmulator. I was dumb enough to spend the $23 nevertheless.

Soon after buying iEmulator I found out why they don't offer a free trial version. Because it's slow. iEmulator is slow. It is slow beyond imagination. It is a pain in the ass. It is not usable. Even on my hardware which is not exactly considered slow. Windows XP would run faster on a symbian smartphone.

The point I'm trying to get across here is: Don't buy iEmulator. It is not worth it, it sucks, and it's a ripoff.  iEmulator is so very very slow.

So my problem remained unsolved. Until my simple mind was blessed with a brilliant idea: Use the thinkpad. I still have this old IBM Thinkpad with a broken battery and a display that does not display anything. But it has a licensed (!) Windows XP Professional on it, and apart from the display, it works. I activated XP's remote desktop support, downloaded the (from Microsoft), hooked up the laptop to my WLAN, and voilà, it works. And it's actually usable. I chose it over (Tight)VNC, because it is a whole lot faster and it also transport all sounds from windows to my Mac. How nice.

It's not very fast, but still faster than VMWare and it doesn't produce any load on my workstation. I could probably get a nice speedup by hooking them up via a patch cable, but I don't want another  humming computer in my room.

For those who didn't notice my subtile rants: iEmulator is slow. Don't waste your money on it.