In an earlier blog entry I kind of promised to come back to explaining how I try to be more secure about how I browse using FireFox. So here it is. First of all there are two different ways I do this, one is on my Powerbook (laptop) which I bring with me and therefor has a higher risk being used by others (unauthorized) or worst case scenario: it can get stolen. And my Mac Pro in my computer room which doesn’t get used much by others, and when so, only by those who I trust. Regardless, in both situation, unknown people might try to hack into the system from the outside or steal traffic via sniffing and such. Preventing abuse is impossible, making it harder to do so is possible.

Because I was enjoying (cough) the flu around Christmas I invited my parents and my sister over for a catch-up dinner. We’re just getting together and having a nice dinner. Nothing fancy. We’re ordering it from a catering service so no fuzz or anything.

Today I’ve tried to work on installing BootCamp 2.0, doing a 32GB partition for Windows XP Pro with SP2. Boy oh boy, that cost me a few hours of nothing but frustration. After a lot of screwing around, a lot of reboots, a lot of forced shutdowns and a lot of swearing towards Microsoft .. it’s finally here. A working version of XP so I can play my old games like Half Life 2 and Counter Strike: Source. And .. I had to write a review which required native Windows (no emulation) for a specific benchmark program.

No new blog entries today, I am having a day off. I can’t do much work and don’t feel like writing a lot. I am feeling under the weather and I thought this would be a great time to repost a few of my old blog entries. I will do this a few more times in the future so I slowly restore the lost entries. So check them out if you haven’t already.

At this moment I can not browse the web without running into a Top X list, and some are fun or nice to read, but the majority of them are just made without any thought. For example, there was an article on Digg about top25 movies from 2007, but a good handful were all made and released in 2006. But ok, maybe the author meant the ones he’s seen in the last year. What I haven’t seen yet is an Apple Top 10 list of products and services they offer through their stores. So I guess here it is. Yes, I am not doing any research either. I am going to wing it, but I will try to provide some arguments why I made the pick.

The categories are Software, Services, Accessories, iPhone, iPod, Laptops, Computers, Underdogs, Failures, and Rumored.

## spoiler ## And if you think ‘damn this blog is long’ let me spoil it for you. The winners in my eyes are for handheld devices and iPod, and media experience the iPhone, no doubt. And as computer system the new 24″ iMac has no competition. ##spoiler##

The latest upgrade to Mac OSX is 10.5, which is Leopard. An awesome operating system, but with a few little issues. It has a lot of cool new features too such as the awesome Time Machine.

However, we all know that with great powers comes great responsibility. Apple is new to playing with time. At this point they can travel back in time, but not forward (I am sure Steve Jobs will make it happen in the near future). Going back in time turns out to be risky. Many TV shows and movies have mentioned that the same matter and energy can’t exist in the same space and time (or something like that).

My Mac Pro has a bunch of hard drives right now, and I have been adding, swapping, and removing drives the last few months. It was time for me to get a bit more organized and I think that’s a great tip for everybody. It gives you a much better understanding of what is on your computer system.

You might think “What is so hard about finding stuff on your hard drive”, well .. let me give you a simple example: Your browser might store downloaded files on your Desktop, while you have an OS ‘Downloads/’ folder, or perhaps your torrent client stores it in ‘programs/client/downloads/’, making it a bit annoying having to browse around while a single link on your desktop to your ‘Downloads/’ folder might make it a lot easier for you.

Since I’ve moved away from Windows I’ve found myself wanting to be more organized with the way I store important information such as logins to web sites, private web addresses, shell accounts and what not.

In the past I’ve either written it down (with the risk of finding out the o might be an O or a 0, or simply being unable to find the paper, or … finding out that password is now outdated. I’ve also just placed details into plaintext documents. This got spread over the directories on the computer, or even worse, spread over my local area network. A solution had to be found. If not only to get the information organized, but also to improve security.

My Mac Pro arrived, completing my switch from Windows to Apple 100%. I took pictures and threw together a gallery for my friends. (Build using just Lightbox2 / Prototype / XHTML  CSS) Bye Windows, you crappy crashing, data corrupting, poor performing OS. First impression: Boy what good looking, easy to upgrade, high performance, quality machine!

http://vbfans.com/macpro/index.html

After much anticipation Steve finally introduced to us his latest addition to the Intel powered Mac family, the new 2x Xeon dual core powered Mac Pro and, with an reasonable price of only $2499 I was ready to make a purchase. However, as always, the prices in Europe in Euros are the same as the US prices in Dollars.

Setting me back over $700, which I could have used to upgrade the Mac Pro, or purchase additional hardware, how honest is this gap? As a consumer I must say it does not feel that honest. Maybe ‘honest’ is not the right word, try ‘reasonable’ instead then.