I’d recommend reading the bug report for a clearer picture on what happened.

As promised, here is my review-cum-grizzle at Mashed08. This is prompted by the excellent Guardian piece here which you should go and read, as it’s not at all as self-interested as what I’m about to write.

Firstly, I don’t live in London. Perhaps the only reason I was interested in going to Mashed was the fact that I could get there for free, via one of the buses that they put on. However, the bus was an epic endurance ride that managed to brake myself, Brian and Alistair for the duration of the weekend, turning us into shallow stumbling wrecks.

The point of the weekend was to actually make something cool with technology, and while I was unable to do that I kind of see how it works. You see, most people who work with IT are phenomenally bright, and their salaried job only covers a small part of what they can do. Events like Mashed allow them to use their other skills to create fun things – which the BBC where hoping would be ‘fun things that have some relation to BBC products’.

There was talk that there should have been a lot more people at the event – at one point, I heard that 400 people hadn’t turned up. I don’t think this can be a fault of the event management team, as attending did involve sacrificing your weekend. Those that did turn up where fully laden with free gifts, up to and including the BBC beanbags that formed the bulk of the furniture at the event.

This makes a huge difference from art conferences that I’ve been to, where you might get a free coffee if you are lucky. Mashed not only had free coffee, but also free food all weekend, making it a world apart from any conference that I had attended before.

Perhaps that’s the rub for me; art is seen as such a peripheral activity that it receives no investment, and yet it is constantly surrounding us. There is obviously huge amounts of money in the combination of broadcasting and IT that Mashed represents, and yet it could be described as a much more selective interest.

(Brian’s short blog-post on Mashed can be seen here)

(Further update: Alistair’s post on Mashed can be seen here)

• Most of Saturday’s Guardian (Family, Travel, Review, Work sections unread, News, Magazine, Money, Guide sections read)
• A-N magazine for April (which I only found out after reading for a bit)
• A-N magazine collection ‘Production Lines‘
• A copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird”, by Harper Lee
• An unread copy of “Why Do Buses Come in Threes?”, by Rob Eastaway and Jeremy Wyndham
• A copy of the novelisation of Howard the Duck (which is really good, actually)
• Unix for Mac OS X Tiger, by Dave Taylor
• Visualizing Data, by Ben Fry
• Processing, by Ira Greenberg
• Make Magazine issue 14

Technology

• The fleece case for a nokia N800
• An ipod shuffle with cable
• A usb to usb-mini cable
• My mobile phone
• A watch I got for free from Marks and Spencer
• The power unit for one of my hard-drives (12 volt 2 amp output, it says here)
• An extra copy of a Zelda game that ordered when Amazon went a bit weird on me
• Laptop of great annoyance and it’s now requisite extra keyboard. Bah.
• A TV remote

Miscellaneous

• One of Elizabeth’s notebooks
• One of my notebooks
• Various letters and A4 pieces of paper that have been sent to me by doctors and Waygood.
• Some ibuprofen
• My bag, the mysterious Zook (full report coming this week!)
• A box of sultanas
• A laminating pocket in it’s pre-laminated phase
• A gel pack for applying cold/heat to my knee

Rubbish

• A double-decker wrapper
• The inside of a box of Marks and Spencer Dutch biscuits
• Various envelopes and mailing packets

Clothes

• A v-neck jumper in royal blue
• A pair of jeans
• The detachable trouser legs from the shorts that I’m wearing

Th answr, as I’m fining out, is ‘vry’. For som rason, a row of kys on my laptop has just stopp working. I’v alraly tri to tak it apart an put it bak togthr again, with th hlp of my goo frin Brian ggr, but to no avail. My prvious flowing txt, whih I was so prou of, is now lik th mok-yslxia of Basul or an Irvin Wlsh haratr, an ras lik th ant of a man punh in th mouth.

This oms at a rally ba tim for m; whil I’m stuk at hom, prtty muh unabl to gt aroun apart from th oasionally hobbl, I hav ha to turn own th han to work in an xhibition at th Balti. I was to b pai tn pouns an hour to typ sribptiv txt about th popl who am into th gallry, but my blast lg mant that it was just too painful to sit in on spot. Not only that, but whr as a month ago I was rgularly travlling thirty mils a ay unr my own stam (not on publi transport or by ar) I am now barly abl to mak my way vry far at all.

I’ll upat th st on I know what I shoul o nxt. For now, this has bn an xpnsiv friay th thirtns.

EDIT Seems to be some sort of clash between vimeo.com and the rest of the universe in regards to video hosting. Anyway, go here to see the video in a player (which should be easy to embed but it’s not) and read about why I’ve only made one arts-related video in the past year.

I decided to update my laptop to Leopard, OS X 10.5, as I was coming across more and more software that I wanted to use. In particular, I wanted to start using the versioning system Git, which is only available for install in 10.5, unless you use DarwinPorts. I was also interested in using MacFuse rather than Cyberduck for my FTP/SFTP needs, and so I could write to NTFS on my parents computer, and I was convinced that I’d have better luck using it under 10.5 than I would under 10.4.

(I warned you that this would be boring. Stick with it though.)

The install was not easy, fast, or good. In common with a lot of other users of elderly Powerbooks, my DVD drive died some time ago, so I had to install it from an external Firewire drive. Unlike 10.4, I didn’t have a huge amount of trouble doing that (thank god) but it did take a very long time. After I’d finished with the install process, I rebooted the machine and was faced with a kernel panic. Twice. Eek!

On the third time, the machine booted up and I watched the lovely welcome-to-new-mac video. For some reason, I immediatly set to work making my desktop look exactly like my old desktop, by swiping my backdrop from my twitter account.

At first, I was struck by stacks, and the general glitzy-ness of the new operating system. However, after about two days of use, I’ve got some issues with it that I’d like to point out. Perhaps they’ll get picked up by google, because I’ve been doing a lot of searching on them, and it would be nice to know if other people also had these issues.

• Fans now work overtime

Before the update, my fans would generally kick in for only two reasons: watching videos or using Java based programs. Now, my fans kick up, and stay on, whilst doing most things. I can’t figure out what I’m doing that’s so processor-intensive when I’m only browsing the internet, so I assume that it’s something to do with Leopard. For instance: right now, I’m working in a Firefox window and typing, and I’ve got the fans whirring at full power. This is something that should not be happening, and didn’t under 10.4.

• Battery life down to 20 minutes

Alright, I’m not saying that my battery was healthy to start out with. It had some issues, sure. But on Leopard, my battery just cuts out after about 20 minutes. I don’t get the ‘you are now running on reserve’ warning, it just cuts out at around 84%. I’ve tried resetting the PMU, as per Apple’s instructions, but frankly I think that the install did ‘something bad’. Unless I buy a new battery, I don’t think that there’s any point in looking into this, and seeing as a new battery is a significant chunk of money I’ll just leave it.

• No bluetooth SMS sending

I used the old SMS sending in bluetooth all the time, as it was pretty useful – I hate typing with my thumbs! Now, I’m stuck with the ol’ thumb method, as Apple have removed the function to send SMS’s via their Address book application. (Adopts fake mafia voice) Eh, what gives? Didn’t I treat you right?

There’s now a range of third-party vendors taking this space, which offer various levels of computer/phone interaction, from BluePhone Elite‘s complete integration to SMS widgets which you can use via the dashboard. But this has turned the Address book application from being ‘a useful thing’ into something that’s just more bumpf.

• No Quicksilver
  

I admit to knowing about this before I upgraded, but after using Quicksilver on my mac for over two years, it’s a shame that there isn’t a version around for Leopard. A quick check of the Quicksilver group on google tells me that others feel the same.

The more basic actions are dealt with by spotlight, but I found that the ability to do things such as upload images to flickr, open documents in a specific application, and move files to the trash with only a few keystrokes was great. Now, there is only one application that can do all: Terminal.app. But if I’m going to spend all my time on the command line, I might as well go Linux.

Conclusion

In many ways, my move to Leopard has been good. I can do a number of things that I just couldn’t do before, such as use MacFuse. I’m still getting the hang of Git, but I expect to be able to do some interesting things with it soonish.

What I wasn’t expecting was that my four year old Powerbook would suffer so badly from the upgrade process. When I originally got it, it was running 10.3, and the 10.4 upgrade (about six months later) really made a difference to the speed and ease of use with the system in a good way. However, with 10.5, I find that my venerable laptop, which previously served me well, is now kind of clunky.

Update: Temp Graph

Over on Flickr, I’ve posted my findings about from using a temperature monitoring tool on my laptop. Also, this post got immediatly picked up by some nerdy link-spam blog.