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So it finally happened - I will finally, in a few weeks, own my first Mac. It will actually be the third Mac in the house after the MacBook I bought Joe year before last and the MacBook Pro he got for work this week. But mine will be a MacBook Air.

I actually ordered it (well technically Joe ordered to get the education discount) Tuesday evening straight after reading through the specs and hearing the demo. Unusually hasty decision making whose who know me might say. Well not really - I've been looking around at new laptops since my current trusty Sony Vaio developed a problem with its power connection last summer and when the rumours started floating that Apple might finally launch an ultraportable it deserved serious consideration.

For my new laptop I wanted

• An ultraportable - both my laptops have been Sony Vaios and I couldn't see myself with something the weight of the standard MacBook


• Good battery life - despite not actually being really a road warrior I want that freedom for the times I need it


• A larger than 11" screen - I have to face the fact that the Sony's small screen is starting to become tiring if I do a day's work on it


• Something where I could do technical work - ie not Windows. A low power laptop is not the place to be running Microsoft Visual Studio (although I have). On the other hand when I reboot into Linux it's perfectly useable for programming in. Unfortunately even the latest Ubuntu can't get power management working on a 3 year old Vaio which makes it unsuitable for a permanent switch.

What I didn't really want were

• Vista - I just haven't read anything good about it


• A power cable socket that breaks as easily as the Vaio's - seriously this is a design flaw that has always been there on many laptops, but especially Vaios. It's not really a deal breaker but it is a problem that Apple have solved.


• Mac OS - let's face it, it's not as clever as it thinks it is, but given that all OSes stink, it's still a million miles from the old Motorola days when we all made fun of it as the OS only for non-techies so maybe I should give it a try.
  

Anyway so when it was announced I could see that it pretty much met my requirements and had a very reasonable price to boot - despite the rantings of the the horde of ignorant Mac fanboys on Engadget, it is a good price, I was expecting to pay around £1500 for my next machine, and would have done if I'd bought another Vaio. So in that order went.

Two and a half weeks to wait.

Dum-de-dum.

By the end of last year I had had my phone for 2 years and had been thinking about a replacement. I was quite happy with what I had on the whole - a Sharp GX15 - it was very small, had all the important (and not so important features), like a camera, colour screen, GPRS, bluetooth etc. The main problem with it was terrible battery life - it would only just last a day if I didn't make any calls. This had already led to some difficult times expiring at an important time. Obviously it should run for more than that, but when I'd sent it back Vodafone had taken several weeks to do nothing more than put a sticker on the battery saying it tested OK, without fixing the problem so since then I had just been living with the inconvenience.

I've been considering different ways to handle centralising the (digital) storage in the house. With a number of machines in daily house (ie desktop plus portable each) it would make a lot of sense to keep stuff we both need access to in one place. The main things this means is the music and photo collection.

Up to this point the music collection had been on one custom machine (Orsino - currently being rebuilt) connected direct to the hifi - but I've been experimenting with streaming it from a dedicated store instead. The photo collection - which when we get round to scanning all the old pictures will be large - is scattered over separate machines. Part of the problem with photos is they can be large and so if you're doing editing or even browsig you don't want them to be accessed over a slow network. But since we're going up to 54Mb then that won't matter so much.

So bearing all that in mind a NAS (Network Attached Storage) box seemed like a good idea - especially once I discovered that one of the UPNP servers I've been using to stream music from (TwonkyVision) can be installed directly onto some of the NAS boxes (they're mostly just embedded Linux so you just need to hack your way to the root password) - giving a completely PC free solution.

The LinkStation 250 looks like the best choice. It's pretty good value for money, is a good amount of storage, can be hacked and has 2 USB ports for adding external drives if you do run out. I'll probably order one next week and see what happens.

We've finally decided to upgrade the wireless network to 802.11g so I've put in an order for a 3Com Router. We don't strictly need a router - we've got a perfectly good 3Com one we've had for years now. However we did need a 100Mb hub/switch to replace the current 10Mb one and it actually turned out cheaper to buy a wireless router with builtin wired ports than a separate access point and switch. In fact I ordered from Komplett because the router there was cheaper than the access point and I could get a USB wireless adaptor for a tenner thrown in.

Of course we're going to have to keep the 802.11b access point running to allow the non-G devices in the house to still connect.

For the ultimate in executive toys visit eccentric genius - unconventional contrivances and machine arcana.

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via b3ta