TechgnosisWeb Prime

Well, folks, it’s finally happened: I have a Mac. I won’t go into the details of how and where, but suffice it to say that there was blood, sweat, and tears involved. The main point of acquiring a Mac, of course, is for my Significant Other: she’s planning and plotting to go into Graphic Design, and as everyone knows, that’s a world dominated by Macs. I’d been planning to get her one for a while now, but the price tag on a new Mac was pretty much out of my immediate reach. Then, one of those once-in-a-blue-moon opportunities showed up to snag a used iMac, one of the cute lamp-y shaped ones, and I jumped on it.

So, of course, as often happens with tech-toys that I acquire for the SO, I’m the one that’s been mostly playing with it. I upgraded the operating system, installed a few handy apps, and I’ve been happily playing with the new toy all weekend long. I’ll give my girl a chance to play with it tomorrow.

How’s my Mac experience been so far? Interesting, to say the least. First hurdle was where to put the machine. There simply wasn’t any room in the computer room for it, so we decided, since it’s a pretty compact machine, to set it up in the bedroom. However, there was a general concensus that we didn’t want any ugly Ethernet cables running from the computer room to the bedroom, so that meant acquiring a wireless adapter. Now, the lamp-shady iMacs are cute and all, but their unique shape doesn’t leave much room for expansion: regular wireless cards were out of the question. So I tripped on over to CompUSA and took a look at their Mac section. Note to Apple: your AirPort products are way too fucking expensive. After some hunting, I found a Belkin Wireless USB adapter, for a little under $40. Doable. The box said it was Windows-only, but I had a hunch. I knew the employees were gonna be useless (I asked one of them earlier about a Firewire cable and he just looked at me funny), so I found a place in the store with decent celphone reception, hooked up Glitch to the KatsuPhone’s EDGE network, and did some quick googling: turns out Belkin has Mac OS X drivers for that adapter. Neat. One quick purchase later, and I’m at home, plugging the thing in. I download and install the driver, plug everything in, and wait. Nothing. Cute.

One call to Belkin Tech Support later, and I’m well and truly pissed. Turns out they do make Mac drivers, but not for the latest version of the OS, only for 10.3. And no, they don’t know when or even if they’ll make drivers for 10.4. Sigh. Still, I don’t give up easy, and the Mac crowd can be quite resourceful. Google is my friend. A couple of queries later, ad I find a guy who claims that the adapter I bought actually uses a fairly generic chipset, and points me to where I can download the OS X 10.4 drivers for that chipset. I download, install… and voila! We’ve got a wireless connection! And here I thought my days of having to find weird, hacky solutions to hardware and software problems were over now that I’d moved to the Land of Apple.

Other than that, my experience has been pretty great. I like OS X, it’s pretty, it’s interesting, and it’s got lots and lots of little things to discover that make you go ‘Oooh!’. Coming from a mostly Windows/Linux background, it’s a bit of a culture shock, but I’m getting used to it. And, luckily, most of the apps I use on a day to day basis have Mac versions available, so it hasn’t been that hard to get up to speed with doing the things I normally do. Heck, look at me, I’m blogging already! And from bed, too! I hope Glitch and the Folding Keyboard don’t get too jealous, but, really, given the choice between a PDA and a full-on G4 iMac to blog on, well, the choice is easy.

So, I’ll be keeping y’all up to date on further developments from the iSide, but don’t worry. I’m not a Switcher. This will not become MacGnosisWeb. I just have one more (very, very neat) toy to play with.