Uptime

Since the day I purchased my iMac, there have been only three reasons why I would turn it off:

1. I need to relocate it,
2. I want to upgrade its RAM,
3. Or there’s a software update that requires a restart.

Mind you, I use my Mac extensively everyday -and even during the night, I leave it busy downloading over 15 video podcast episodes rather than putting it off into sleep mode. I also thought I could push it over the edge by using the CPU-intensive Folding@Home app for almost an entire month but all that did was make the fans louder. I’ve never come across this kind of performance on Windows machines so kudos to Apple for their truly solid platform and reliable hardware.

Playing with Kubuntu

Thanks to this guide, I finally managed to get the Airport Extreme card (Broadcom’s Wifi Controller for Apple) to work under Kubuntu. My 12″ PowerBook G4 is now set up to dual boot between Mac OS X 10.4 and Linux because I don’t intend to upgrade it in the future.

Despite speed, stability, compatibility and security, the latest version of Kubuntu/Ubuntu is still not fool-proof. I was impressed when it recognized my Bluetooth hardware, but when I came to change my display setting from, “custom 1″ to ‘12″ Apple PowerBook’, the GUI completely stopped working! I had to resort to writing commands to autodetect my display, and even after that I was stuck with 256 colors. Thankfully, there was a backup of the initial preference file and after a few attempts I was able to get it restored.

Overall, I think the Ubuntu development team is heading in the right direction, but in the meantime, I haven’t found any particular feature that I would want on OS X. Keeping in mind that the Linux is completely free, you can’t really complain :P

Water Water Everywhere…

I woke up around 7 to the loud clashes of thunder and rhythmic sound of rain drops tapping on my window. It was odd for me to be up at this hour; I had gone to bed rather late the night before and my lectures are not until two whole hours. Something didn’t feel right. The rain kept tapping like a drum and after a brief moment, I figured that the rain must have been leaking through the window.

I got up to look for any damp traces but everything was dry as it was, so my next suspicion was the AC unit. My AC has a record for leaking during humid weather, and for that reason, I’ve deliberately changed where my computer desk used to reside to a more arid location. But just as I was about to investigate further, I noticed that the ceiling, the region directly above my, “supposedly-safe” desk was leaking! To my horror, the foul-scented water had soaked my router and was still trickling down to the side of my already-operating iMac!

I was living a nightmare; what I was looking at was on the verge of short-cuircuiting and I have absolutely no kind of backup.

I quickly turned everything off, moved the desk away to let dry and placed a bin under the stream of water.

Luckily nothing was damaged but even now, 7 hours later from this incident, the leak hasn’t seized to stop.

1 GB DDR RAM

I’ve just added another 512 MB of RAM to my iMac G5 and now I enjoy running all the applications and widgets I can ever want. Woohoo! :D