Fairly interesting results, yes? At least there’s more love than anything else out there! At least at the time of writing…

Those of you using a feed reader may have to actually visit my blog to see the chart. Shock horror! Alternatively, the chart is on this page.

Firstly, the Mac image on the USB stick refused to boot properly, and would only get as far as displaying an Apple logo before hanging. But we soon fixed that by booting with the -v (verbose) option enabled, and for some reason that seemed to work.

Once it had installed, we had to reboot, still using a funky way of booting via Syslinux installed on a USB stick, and go through the first-install registration process of OS X. When that was done, and we’d run a couple of pieces of software available from the guide we used, we rebooted without the Syslinux, and …. voila! A working OS X installation on a Dell Mini 9. The rest of the evening was spent tweaking OS X to work just the way I like it.

Some photos of the installation are here:

The only issue so far is that you cannot tap the trackpad to click, you have to use the buttons; but I am fairly sure there is a fix out there somewhere waiting to be found. Other than that, it all went smoothly – the wireless and ethernet work, as does the bluetooth, the display, the sound, any external monitors, the function keys, etc… everything as you would expect. Excellent!!

It came with Ubuntu on it, but tonight hopefully Dan and I will be able to turn it into a hackintosh and install Mac OS X onto it without a hitch! I’ll post a better photo or two of it when I have them – for now, you’ll have to make do with this shot from my camera phone:

I have now ordered my birthday present! It’s called a Dell Mini 9, and has an 8.9″ screen, 16Gb solid state harddrive, 2Gb of RAM and all the other essentials such as USB ports and memory card slots. But, the biggest thing that sold it to me was the fact that you can install Mac OS X natively on it, with NO issues whatsoever.

So, when it arrives (and it can’t arrive quick enough…) that’s what I’m going to do. Turn my Dell Mini 9 into a beautiful little Hackintosh.

Oh, and Dan ordered one today as well… Just can’t let himself be beaten by me can he?

It seems I’m posting a lot less (probably a lot fewer random useless posts!) and that the average number of words in my posts has decreased. I also seem to be losing readers (or at least comments) !

Let’s see what 2009 brings.

This is such a cool cube, I want one… but it’s a shame it’s only a concept and not going to be commercially available.

Now it seems to run a fair bit faster, and can happily run even the biggest programs like Photoshop and Illustrator side by side. Wahey!

On a totally different note, it was 4.7°C when I cycled to work today, there was loads of frost on the ground and it was so misty you couldn’t even see the fields. That’s cold… I don’t like being this far north!

For one thing, it has to be completely unobtrusive, I don’t want to have to have a window open constantly, or an IM client type message window open constantly just so I can see if I have updates. I also don’t want to have to check my dashboard every now and then just to see if someone has updated. I did originally look at a few dashboard Twitter widgets, but having to press F4 and then wait for the widget to update isn’t my idea of smooth.

I like my desktop to be as minimal and clean as possible. If it wasn’t for the fact that I like to see what contacts I have online, I’d even keep Adium’s contact list closed, but as it is, it feels like part of the desktop as it’s not a proper windowed application. But for Twitter, there was nothing there I could see that worked in that way.

Then I got thinking – I use Growl notifications for my Adium conversations, iChat (when I used to use it for Google Talk), FTP connections and transfers, SSH connections and transfers… so wouldn’t it be great if I could also use it for Twitter updates? A bit of Googling found some Ruby scripts, but they required some certain gems I couldn’t find, and besides, I don’t know how to run a Ruby script like that! But a bit more Googling came up with TwitterPost, which works almost exactly as I wanted. It’s an application that has a window, but you don’t have to keep the window open, so it merely sits in the dock as an extra icon. I have two gripes about it though – the dock icon is horrible, and it just seems to stick out like a sore thumb on an otherwise good-looking dock! Plus, the growl notifications may appear, but they don’t disappear unless I click the X, which is just a little irritating.

So, still looking for the perfect one, but for now, TwitterPost will have to do.

*Edit* I’ve redesigned the icon now, so slightly happier! See below!

*Edit again* I’ve now discovered a combo-box in the Growl preference pane that enables me to set whether the notification stays on screen or not. It was set to “Application decides” for TwitterPost – quick change of that to “No” and the only other gripe I had with the software is now solved. Excellent :)

And you should have seen the grins on our faces when we got the router password and made our computers fully accessible from outside of our own private network..

Stop using IE or Safari and start using Firefox.

Great stuff. Genius, he is.