Bargain

This evening's weird bargain was a pen with a built-in laser pointer... purchased in the pound shop in Church Street market. And yes, the price was a pound. The same shop has recently provided packs of three scissors, calculators, stopwatches, and packs of two magnifying glasses, all at that price. Damned if I know how they do it.

Apple Aware?

As I mentioned a while ago, I want a new laptop, and am now more or less committed to buying a newish iBook G4, 1.2GHz, 14", 1.2Gb RAM, 60Gb HD, DVD/CD-RW, Bluetooth, Airport Extreme (aka 802.11a), 100BaseT, ethernet, modem. It's probably considerably more powerful than I actually need in a laptop, but I can live with that.

A few questions for the Apple-aware:

1: How easy is it going to be to get this to talk to my home network via (a) 100BaseT and (b) Wifi - the network is 802.11b? The network is the basic setup XP does, with the PCs connected to a Linksys broadband router / WiFi point.

2: How much compatibility can I expect with things like USB mice? I'm not a fan of touchpads and I usually carry an external mouse.

3: What should I do about anti-virus etc.? Apart from sneering at Windows XP, which I think comes as part of the package...

4: What's a good (and preferably free) text / HTML editor for the Mac? The one I use for my PCs is NoteTab pro, which does some nice things such as allowing multiple open documents - I've had 30-40 open simultaneously a few times.

5: Anyone used one of these with (a) a Belkin USB memory thingy and (b) a Fujitsu digital camera? Don't expect there to be problems, but you never know.

At the moment I expect to continue to use a Windows XP machine as my main PC; I simply have too much committed to it in software etc., so any tips on running a hybrid network like this would be useful.

Wow!

Just add my own voice to the chorus of people saying how amazing today's apod picture is.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050211.html for the direct link.