Torfinn Nome - Life as a …

I recently bought an Apple Airport Extreme N. Mostly to get a more or less decent NAS. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it supports IPv6 out of the box; both automagical 6to4 and manual sit-type configured tunnels. As my trusty old IPv6-ISP PowerTech seems to have, temporarily (?), stopped caring about IPv6 (tunnel up, upstream IPv6 links down), I had to find an alternative tunnel broker. I ended up with SixXS. Got me a tunnel and a /48 net with reverse DNS to a low latency POP in Sweden. The tunnel terminates at a linux server (hosting this web page), from which I have delegated a /64 net to my Airport via a static sit tunnel. It’s working great, and all my hosting services are now multihomed. Not as great as if my physical upstream ISP (Lyse) would provide native IPv6, of course, but still. Now, if only you could nag your ISP to provide IPv6, maybe we could all finally get rid of that nasty NAT! (Oh, wait, that’s right, Apple was forced to firewall all IPv6 traffic by default after massive negative publicity. And there is no IPv6 NAT-PMP/uPNP yet. Here is an interesting read on the topic: Turning a feature into a flaw.)

Some months ago, my dad bought a Navibe GM720 (from Clas Ohlson, ~550NOK) to use with his laptop and AutoRoute while going on vacation to France. A couple of weeks ago, I started searching for an alternative to AutoRoute using my Mac. I found RouteBuddy. But I’m slightly turned off by paying $200 (program, maps for France and Scandinavia), when Autoroute is less than half that price. So I searched some more, and found Roadnav! It’s free, open source (GPL), and works with my Mac. Even the maps are free! For maps in Europe, Roadnav uses the OpenStreetMap database. Only … well, there is a high discrepancy between The World and OpenStreetMap, said gently. Some scattered roads, no street names, etc. Especially in places like Norway (excluding Oslo, the capital). Too bad. Well. Not really. I connected the GPS receiver to my MacBook, downloaded some software, and started driving around. GPSd while driving, to get the coordinates. GPSBabel to convert the raw file to GPX. And JOSM to map the coordinates into streets and upload to the OpenStreetMap project. I spent this evening listening to my favourite cellist, Truls Mørk, drinking whisky, and mapping parts of Fredrikstad and Ås. Not at all bad. Now, if I only spend the next 200 years driving, I might cover a fraction of Europe, to make the maps I thought I needed…

I recently convinced my sister to buy my beloved MacBook Core Duo, while I upgraded to the MacBook Core 2 Duo. Being lazy, I just swapped the hard drive from my old CD to the new C2D. I ran into two problems on my C2D:

1: The trackpad was recognized only as a mouse. I was unable to use all the life saving features like “two finger tapping means right click”, and “hold one finger, use the other to scroll”.

2: The function keys didn’t work. (To manipulate screen brightness and audio volume.)

Seaching the net revealed no clues. Except a linux kernel patch. It turns out the CD uses the Geyser III trackpad, while C2D uses Geyser IV. I dived into this, for me, rather unknown Mach/OS X-territory (altho I consider myself a long time unix zealot), and located the file /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBTopCase.kext/
Contents/PlugIns/AppleUSBTrackpad.kext/Contents/Info.plist. My old hard drive, from CD, contained no information of Geyser IV. Stupidly trying to edit this manually, and reloading the kernel extention (using kextunload and kextload) was, of course, unsuccessfull. But, behold!, copying the AppleUSBTopCase.kext-directory from the new hard drive fixed everything. I am now happily scrolling using a new MacBook C2D using the original OS X installation from my old MacBook CD.

As I already mentioned, I’ve left the Dark Side, and has been rejuvenated. It feels great. This is a collection of software I utilise (to be updated).

VirtueDesktops, Sidenote, Adium, Google Notifier, Connect360, Growl, RCDefaultApp, Flip4Mac, VLC, Journler, Cyberduck, iTerm, Mail.appetizer, Shrook, Xtorrent, Corripio, 4Peaks, EnzymeX, Geneious, Coot on OS X, NeoOffice, Firefox, LiquidCD, Quicksilver

My friend Rune made the switch close to 10 years ago. I’m slightly annoyed it took me this long. OS X is beautiful. Virtue, *nix, widges, Bonjour, Spotlight and Exposé. Not much to say, really, you just have to try it. I maxed out the memory (2GB, not via AppleStore), and I’m glad I did. She really does fly away! (I might be slightly biased, having lived with a 0.25GB Sony Vaio the last 6 years…)

It’s official. I’m a Switcher! May 17th, after having waited at least 12 months, I ordered an Apple MacBook (white, 2.0). Today, May 19th, it shipped from China. It may arrive prior to my exam the 31th. I really wasn’t expecting it being delivered this fast. Already, she is spreading despair and havoc; the beginning of a beautiful relationship. I can’t wait!

(MacBook review)