The mac is pretty well set up now. I’ve finished transferring all my music to it; the long part was just getting it on the USB drive from the old computer. (And I’ve even ripped a few more CD’s: I was really running out of room on the last computer’s hard drive.) The only thing that didn’t get transferred was my subscriptions to podcasts for which I didn’t have any episodes currently saved; I can live with that.

I made an account for Liesl. Safari hung the first time she tried to use it, which is pretty weird; hopefully that won’t repeat itself.

I’ve installed X. Still some futzing to do there; xemacs comes up from panini (the new Ultra 20, for those of you who aren’t closely keeping score) with ugly fonts, so I guess I’ll have to give my .Xresources file a look. xterm is clearly inferior to Terminal.app (or whatever the appropriately mac-savvy way is to name the beast); fortunately, if I set my DISPLAY in Terminal and log in, everything works just fine, but I wish X11 didn’t insist on bringing up an xterm when it starts. Does the mac have some hidden preferences somewhere that I can tweak behind the scenes?

I still need to figure out how to get Safari to behave the way I want, or for that matter how much I care. Or maybe I could switch to Camino and try to get it to behave the way I want; I’m not yet motivated to do so, however. And, in general, I should probably read through documentation to see what I’m missing about things. (The last time I got a new mac was 1989; the last time I regularly used one was 1998. I hadn’t quite realized that it’s almost 8 years since I left grad school…) Which is a big change from Windows – there, I felt dirty touching the thing, and had no desire to learn anything about it. (To be sure, that has at least as much to do with me as with Windows.)

The wireless reception in the front of my house would seem to be a bit spotty; unfortunate. Weird, too – we’re talking about 20-30 feet here. Maybe I’ll get another access point or something.

The nano is nice. I wish it had a bit more storage, but that will get fixed in a year or two. And I hadn’t realize that I had a full 2GB of podcasts stored; I suppose it would help if I didn’t have all sixty or so episodes of JapanesePod101 saved up. (Most of them are around 10 minutes each, but it still adds up.) Don’t ask me when I’m going to get around to listening to them; I have not the slightest idea. I was a little worried about how managing the collection would work, given that the nano doesn’t have enough space to store everything I’ve got, but it turns out that iTunes is happy to sync the podcasts automatically and leave music syncing up to me to perform manually. Which should work just fine.

Nice screen on the nano. My first reaction was that the form factor was a little small, and that I wished they’d kept the original iPod’s dimensions (other than the thickness – thin is good), but it seems to work fine. So maybe I was worried about nothing. I was also surprised to see that it didn’t come with a charger – does it use little enough power that plugging it in weekly for my podcast updates will keep it charged? If not, no big deal – after all, I’ll be using the mac frequently, unlike the situation with XP. (And even if I only plug it in once a week, I’ll be happy to leave it plugged in longer.) Will the other iPod’s charger (which worked through the firewire cable, which isn’t provided with the nano) work, or will it damage the nano somehow? I guess I’ll google. Also, I restored the old iPod to its factory settings while I was playing around with things, so now it uses the mac filesystem instead of FAT32. It looks like iTunes wouldn’t have complained too loudly if I’d left it in FAT32, but on the other hand it was insisting on deleting all the music stored there, so restoring it didn’t add significantly to the time to get the old iPod working with the new computer.

Hmm: this editing page doesn’t look right on Safari – the buttons to control formatting, add links, etc. aren’t there. That could be an annoyance; I’ll investigate that, but I could imagine that pushing me to use Camino.

I still need a name for the new computer; any suggestions?

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