Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

I love my Mac. Really.

I’m not the sort to evan­gel­ise Apple products like oth­ers do online (Apple can do their own advert­ising thanky­ouverymuch). But it must be said, I love my Mac.

Cherry and I are get­ting along fam­ously. So fam­ously in fact, that we kiss eachother before we go to bed each night; I treat her well by help­ing her with daily chores and lov­ingly clean­ing in-between her keys each week and she recip­roc­ates by mak­ing sure that she looks good for me every­day so that I don’t lose interest.

I can now say rather mer­rily that I intend not to bother repla­cing my Win­dows PCs when they finally bite the dust. Don’t get me wrong, this is still very much a Win­dows house­hold. Lola and K’s PC [a Dell Dimen­sion 1100 also run­ning WinXP] are still alive, well and used daily. And just this morn­ing, this Dell Inspiron 1525 was delivered (sadly, run­ning Vista):

I tried to con­vince K that buy­ing the 1525 with Ubuntu pre-installed would be an infin­itely super­ior idea. I explained why Open Source was so much bet­ter; like buy­ing Fair Trade cof­fee, energy effi­cient light­bulbs and get­ting into the habit of recyc­ling reg­u­larly, but she wasn’t con­vinced. I even tried the (rather weak) argu­ment that since she’d never used Vista before and would have to accli­mat­ise to it any­way, she may as well go the whole way into new ter­rit­ory and opt for a totally dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing system.

Nope. No go. Bugger.

I think she ori­gin­ally wanted a Mac­Book, but was put off by the prices as you’re still talk­ing £700-ish for the basic model, whereas the basic con­fig of the 1525 was closer to half of that. And it’s not like she’s plan­ning to take over the world with it, she just wants to fart about on the inter­net and take notes with it whilst out and about at work. Still, she’s agreed to open source office soft­ware at least, so I’ve won that battle, if not yet the war.

That said, if there’s one wall I’ve hit as a Mac/Open Source user it’s been get­ting Cherry to talk to Little Doris, my PDA and port­able part­ner in crime. For those unaware, Little Doris is run­ning Win­dows Mobile 5 (Pocket PC), which doesn’t get on with OSX that well at all, in fact the pair of them like to pre­tend that one another don’t exist, even when bound together by copi­ous amounts of cables.

I’d con­sidered repla­cing Little Doris with some­thing a bit more Mac-friendy, some­thing Palm-related per­haps that I was lead to believe synced with OSX nat­ively, but one look at the dross that was out on the mar­ket put the mock­ers on that bright idea. Des­pite Little Doris being a couple of years old now, she still wipes the floor (in terms of spec) with most of her com­pet­i­tion. It seemed such a step back­ward to fork out another few hun­dred quid just to end up with a hand­held that had less memory and pro­cessing power than the model it was meant to be repla­cing. And I need those resources. Little Doris isn’t a glor­i­fied elec­tronic address book-cum-diary, I use my PDA like I used to use my laptop (when I had one). Surf­ing the inter­net, writ­ing emails, word pro­cessing, listen­ing to music, watch­ing films and TV pro­grams I’ve recorded/converted, I do it all on my PDA and I’d be lost without those func­tions. I can’t tell you the num­ber of times I’ve sat in a car park for over an hour, watch­ing music doc­u­ment­ar­ies to pass the time, whilst wait­ing for K to fin­ish buy­ing up the con­tents of Tesco.

So, the Axim had to stay.

I had a poke around on the Axim­s­ite for­ums and although I couldn’t find any Open Source altern­at­ives, I did dis­cover three soft­ware options when syncing WM5 with OSX:

• Pock­et­Mac
• Syn­cMate
• The Miss­ing Sync

When I first invest­ig­ated Pock­et­Mac sev­eral weeks ago, I couldn’t find the men­tion of my model of PDA any­where on the web­site, so I shrugged and gave up. Of course since then, they have put a new, fan­dangly, but­ton in their nav­ig­a­tion bar that now hand­ily tells me that Pock­et­Mac is com­pat­ible with Little Doris. Sod’s Law, that is. I can’t tell you if it’s any good as I’ve never used it, but I can tell you that by look­ing at the blurb on the web­site, it looks like it does the same stuff as The Miss­ing Sync, costs about the same, but comes with more bloat/superfluous soft­ware to install.

Syn­cMate provides with a nice free ver­sion to try (although obvi­ously, it has less fea­tures avail­able than the full ver­sion). I down­loaded the free ver­sion and gave it a whirl. Sadly, although it’s reportedly com­pat­ible with the Dell Axim X50v, it ignores my X51 com­pletely. Sob.

So onto Miss­ing Sync by Mark/Space. I was wary at first as there was no trial or free ver­sion avail­able and I didn’t want to blow money on soft­ware only to find that it wouldn’t work prop­erly or do what I wanted it to do. But it was either take the plunge or be stuck for the life of my PDA out in the cold laun­dry room spend­ing 25 minutes fir­ing up Lola just for a dock-job that should take 2 minutes, tops.

It was worth the risk. Not only are Cherry and Little Doris chat­ting reg­u­larly, but I’m rev­el­ing in the joys of syncing like never before. On a PC, I only ever docked my PDA to install soft­ware and convert-and-plonk files onto the memory card. I never actu­ally bothered syncing data like my email, con­tacts and cal­en­dar as I always thought that Microsoft Out­look was a right load of wank. On a Mac, it’s a dif­fer­ent story. My can’t-live-without ‘Cal­en­dar’ and ‘Tasks’ now sync won­der­fully (and com­plete with colour-coordinated cat­egor­ies!) in iCal, my Address Book is now fully-stocked without hassle and ‘Notes’ now syncs with Mark/Space’s Note­Book soft­ware that came bundled free. There are plenty of other syncing oppor­tun­it­ies (iPhoto, iTunes etc), but I haven’t really invest­ig­ated those yet as they’re cur­rently sur­plus to requirements.

All of this has totally renewed my love for Little Doris, whilst reaf­firm­ing how great I think Cherry is, I can’t recom­mend The Miss­ing Sync enough for let­ting me have my cake and eat it, too.

… In other news: The issues sur­round­ing the car haven’t so much gone away as been vacuum packed into cel­lo­phane (to limit their oxy­gen sup­ply) and hid­den in the back of the ward­robe so that we don’t have to face them any­more. Obscene amounts of ridicu­lous­ness have occurred over the last week to the point where I lost faith in the san­ity in the human race and at points, was forced to sig­ni­fic­antly increase my med­ic­a­tion just to get through the day func­tion­ing at some­thing remotely close to normal.

Obvi­ously, it doesn’t pay to be hon­est and it cer­tainly doesn’t pay to put your trust the assumed “good” judg­ment of “experts” and in the concept that the truth and common-sense will prevail.

As John Bay­ley (1998) so aptly said whilst I was read­ing yes­ter­day, these are “The Dog Days. Where everything has gone to the dogs.“¹

Pro­mo­tional images and the Dell logo are all copy­righted property/registered trademark(s) of Dell Inc.

1. John Bay­ley (1998) Iris: A mem­oir of Iris Mur­doch, Lon­don: Duck­worth, pp. 11. [back]