I managed to live with Ubuntu for over a year. I learned to do almost everything that I used to do in Windows, and the few apps that I couldn’t find replacements for I ran in Windows within VMWare. Of course, my Ubuntu rig was never fast (much faster than it would have been running Windows), but with a 1.2ghz AMD chip and only 768 megs of ram, it was time for me to find a replacement.

When I found out my buddy Tev was upgrading to a new Mac, I dove in and bought his old one. And by old I mean, only a 2ghz Intel Core Duo, 2GB ram, 160GB HD, DVD burner, 13″, 3+ hour battery MacBook. He gave me a great deal, and included two power supplies, two batteries, case, iLife and iWork.

With a fresh install of Leopard I had to fight some of the newbieness of a new system, but now I feel I’m fairly up to speed. My time with various flavors of linux and unix definitely helped make this system my own. I got some of my favorite open source apps installed (audacity, imagemagick, gimp) and even figured out how to compile some of the command line tools that I like (burp blowfish encryption, mp3gain, etc.)

My first real tasks were to collect all my MP3s and photos from all my portable hard drives, old computers, current computers etc. and then de-dup all this to have a final definitive collection of both. I used iTunes to import all my MP3s from the various sources. A few perl scripts helped find the most basic duplicate files, but then I moved to Dupin to do some serious work.

Photos were a lot more difficult. I needed to de-dup them before importing into iPhoto. So, again, a perl script to remove exact file duplicates. Then I slimmed it down with a mac app called Duplicate Image Detector. It was fairly easy to use, but only did the most basic duplicate finding. For advanced visual duplicate removal, the only tools I could find were for windows. No problem, I was able to move my existing vmware windows image from my Ubuntu box over, and it ran directly in Vmware fusion on the mac (I’ve also got Ubuntu running in a VM!). The best results I got, even though the program frequently crashed and just blinked itself out of existence, was with DupDetector.

So, now I’m at a point of actually using the computer to stay organized and be creative. I’m organizing photos, and trying to decide whether to use iPhoto to export to Picassa or Flickr (I’ve given up on rolling my own photo site). I’ve also bought some gear to start recording music again, so I’ve got to play around with Garage Band.

Of course, summer is just around the corner, so I’ll be busy biking and towing the kids about. I’ll have to compute in my spare time (but with 3+ hours of battery life maybe I’ll just bring the Mac along on my bike rides!).