I posted a fun little howto to hackszine today that you fellow geeks might enjoy. Using the Q virtual machine for OS X (it's a Cocoa port of QEMU), I was able to get Puppy Linux to run nicely on my Mac. If you haven't heard of it before, Puppy is a tiny desktop Linux distribution that's meant to run off of a bootable CD. It normally stores all of your files and save data to a file on a flash drive.

What's cool, though, is that you can virtualize the boot CD as well as a small virtual disk image. This lets you put the emulator application, the boot CD image, the virtual machine config, and the entire save state all on a single flash drive.

You can toss the QEMU Linux and Windows binaries on there as well, and have a private Linux box that fits in your pocket and will run on just about any desktop machine. Slick, no?

Running Puppy Linux inside OS X - Link

Since I'm the last person on earth to upgrade to Tiger, I figured I'd play around with some of the new features and make something cool for you guys.  It turns out that there are a few nice hackability enhancements to the OS, including a nice little gui-based programming tool, Quartz Composer, which allows you to create interactive visual applications. 

The interesting thing is that OS X has direct support for using Quartz files as screensavers.  If you're a Tiger user, you may have seen the slick RSS Visualizer screensaver that's included.  This is written in Quartz, and it's exactly the sort of cool stuff you can build too.

The downside of the built-in RSS screensaver is that it only supports a single feed.  If you're a blog or news junkie, this is where you scream "boo!"  If you're also a hacker, you follow that with "fine then, I'll roll my own."

So here's my own RSS screensaver, called Site Feedz, which can be configured to pull up to 4 feeds, and allows you to jump straight to the article by pressing the 'r' key.  Cool, yes?

I was checking out Open Source Mac, which provides free open-source software for Mac OS X, and came across Adium, which is an instant messaging application that combines all of your instant messengers into a single app. 

Apple released OS X 10.4.3 for download.  It's supposed to be available via software update, but you can also download it here.

It includes fixes for:

• AFP, SMB/CIFS, NFS and FTP network and file services
• AirPort and Bluetooth wireless access
• Core Graphics, Core Audio, Core Image, and RAW camera support
• disc recording when creating and burning media
• Mac sync services
• Spotlight indexing and searching
• Dashboard widgets: Dictionary, Flight Tracker, Stickies, and Unit Converter
• Address Book, AppleScript, Automator, Dictionary, Font Book, iCal, iSync, Mail, and Safari applications
• Disk Utility, Keychain Access, Migration Assistant, and Software Update
• compatibility with third party applications and devices
• previous standalone security updates

Unfortuntely, I'm still stuck in the abandoned world of 10.3.  It seems enevitable to me that the market price for operating systems will drop to $0 some day...  oh for the lack of $140 for an upgrade today.

Apple, you're such a tease.