Seth’s gone live with his “build a bundle” extension to his charity Mac software auctions.

Pick what you need, make an offer…all the money goes to fight cancer. Everyone wins!

Ok, really just an excuse to play with Dashcode, but, yes, ladies and gentlemen, I now have a custom Dashboard Widget for this blog. Please download if you’re of the OS X persuasion.

That’s how many little, tiny screws it takes to replace the hard drive of a MacBook Pro. Not for the faint hearted. Took me about 20-25 minutes start to finish.

I’m very proud to have a friend like Seth Dillingham. He’s really pouring a tremendous amount of effort into raising funds for charity. Today marks the beginning of a series of auctions of donated Mac software he’s organized. Proceed from all the auctions will directly benefit cancer research.

Cancer research rocks, too! I don’t mean that as a joke. I’m alive today because of it. It’s one of the great killers that we’ve made real strides to defeat — largely thanks to the great amount of funding that’s been thrown at the problem through generous people who give time and money to charity efforts.

So, long story short, if you have a Mac, you owe it to yourself to place some bids. It’s a win-win.

The new DotMac upgrades are great. 10 gig of storage is awesome, but watch out.

I noticed I was running really low on disk space on my MacBook Pro the other day, much lower than I realized. After digging around to free up space, I found that since the .Mac update, the sync’d local copy of my iDisk is now 10 gig! — even though I only have about 150 meg up there. It’s located in ~/Library/Mirrors. If you have an iDisk, you may want to turn off local syncing in the .Mac system pref pane and kill that file to save some disk space.

I got hands on with an iPhone for awhile at a 4th of July party yesterday. Very impressive. The UI is downright cool. Little things like the magnifying glass over text when you’re making selections, etc. are great. EDGE was very slow where I was at…probably still fine for email, but not so much for the web. I was going to post to the blog from the phone, but it was taking too long and I gave up.

I imagine if you’re near a hotspot, however, that the web would be great on it as well.

We drove by the local AT&T on the way out to dinner last night. There were already 5 or 6 avid campers lined up on the sidewalk. Ah, to be young. Did that for concert tickets a few times, I guess. Once for a huge sale at a music store.

Of course, those represent opportunities that would not otherwise be available. I know, if I choose, in several weeks I could walk in unimpeded and get an iPhone under the exact same terms (only slightly better, probably, because some of the bugs will be worked out) — so I don’t see the benefit.

I took my MacBook Pro into the shop this week. One of the fans was making a weird noise, and the trackpad button had been sticky for sometime. I feared taking it in, because I thought it would end up shipped off to Apple and I’d be without it for weeks. Not so. The Apple Store techs ordered the parts, no questions and had them and and installed in 2 days…$0, under warranty.

They changed out the whole “top case assembly” to do the trackpad button, which is nice because the metal where I rest my hand was showing wear and is now good as new. Sweet!

My favorite show’s on today. Whohoo!

Sold the G5 prior to the end of the auction. Had a local guy get in touch needing it fast, since his G4 tanked on him the day before. We agreed on a price and he drove by and picked it up. Easy as can be, and I think I got a fair price for it.

My G5 PowerMac is on eBay this week. Bid away!

It’s a good machine, but I just don’t have a use for it since I got the MacBook Pro.

I spent some money this week. UPS is in the process of delivering a new MacBook Pro (15″) for Kt and a new iPod for me. I love my MacBook, and Kt was hurting for a new machine. She pretty much only uses my old original 400 MHz TiBook, and it’s just not up to iPhoto and some of the other things she wants to do on it.

We’ve been putting off the expenditure for about 6 months while the Intel stuff shook out, but now that the MacBook (not-pro) is out, and really seems too small for her, it was time.

As far as the iPod, well, I needed that. My 3G is getting pretty sorry. Batteries about gone…and, hey, no proper Podcast support? No artwork on a color screen? I mean really. I need that. I got the 30 gig in black.

The MacBook arrived today. It’s very nice, and very fast. I also went through the Bootcamp setup process, and got a large portion of my Windows environment setup and installed quite a bit of software — no problems. It’s still going to be inconvenient to reboot to swap environments, but you do what you gotta do, ya know?

Compiles are blazingly fast. I setup Ruby/Lighttpd/FastCGI tonight and was amazed how quickly “make” burned through the installs. Definitely noticeably faster than it was doing the same setup on my single-processor G5.

I’m also pleasantly surprised at how many of my regularly used apps are already available as Universal Binaries.

Developing with Core Data. Looks nice. This is the first I’ve heard of this, but I must admit I haven’t been following OS X development news much.

I think Dave may be right that it was a bad move for Apple to sue the rumors sites. From a purely PR point of view. I think they are, however, in the right. I don’t see any reason why any journalistic privilege should be extended in this case. I also don’t think Apple’s really risking much loss of loyalty due to their actions.

Is this really a product that’s worth developing? At least at that price point ($239)? A 20x bus multiplier! I guess you’ll really be able to get the most out of that 500 meg drive that shipped with your 7300 now.