New iMac

Posted by George Wright Thu, 29 Oct 2009 04:57:00 GMT

Well yesterday I rejoined the ranks of Apple users and bought an iMac 27”.

Why, I hear a thousand of you screaming at once. Well, when I left the UK I had to reluctantly sell my 30” Dell monitor - quite simply one of the most astounding pieces of kit I’ve ever used. The only downside with it was that it was really, really stupidly expensive.

Anyway, I bought the iMac to replace it. The screen on it is absolutely fantastic (I’m ignoring that it’s glossy for the minute…) and has the ridiculous resolution of 2560x1440 - pretty much a higher DPI 16:9 variant of the 30” monitors currently on the market. I view it more as a monitor with a desktop computer slapped on the back than the other way around.

So far I’ve been pretty impressed. Aside from a few screen flickering issues I’ve seen at the moment (which I’m hoping are driver issues and not hardware, as the next unreleased OS X update has “Fix screen flickering issues” in its changelog) it seems like a fairly solid system. Mac OS X has really matured since I last used it (I think I was using 10.3 on a PowerBook G4) to the extent that the Terminal application actually has tabs now! I’m even installing Ubuntu inside VirtualBox. Will be installing Debian natively soon hopefully.

All in all, pretty pleased with it. Even if it is a Mac.

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Life on the other side

Posted by George Wright Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:19:00 GMT

Well I guess it’s been a pretty interesting three months in Canada so far.

I’ve settled down in my new home; the company I worked for was bought out by RIM; I’ve done no open source work; I hosted Troy over the weekend when he came to Toronto for the Ontario Linux Fest; I’ve played a lot of Super Mario World on my new Wii; I’ve seen Niagara Falls and finally I’ve been bloody ill for the past 11 weeks which culminated in 3 trips to the doctor, two courses of antibiotics and almost every weekend indoors sleeping.

What a great way to start life in a new country! Thankfully it looks like I’m finally on the mend and I’m feeling better than I have done ever since arriving in Toronto. I reckon it’ll be another week or two before I’m healthy again - just in time for Hallowe’en!

Maybe I’ll be able to go out on the bike at last.

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