My iBook had it’s Fifth birthday this year.

It’s really long in the tooth. This little G4 is slow compared to everything else in the house. But it works, it works really well for email and (Kylene’s) facebook, and … it’s really light and highly mobile, and the battery life on it is pretty darn good. We get about four hours on a full charge using the wireless network with the aftermarket battery I bought two years ago.

This little bugger used to occupy a spot on the coffee table. Now that the kids are big enough to whack anything on the coffee table, it occupies a spot on our 8″ wide oak ‘ledge’ between the kitchen and the great room. It’s always ready to lookup info from IMDB while we’re watching TV or simply relax on the couch and kill some time.

In the last five years it’s had some problems. It gets pretty light use these days, but for a while (about six months) it was my only computer, was taken with me nearly everywhere, and saw some real ‘road warrior’ type usage.

Aside from the $1300 I sank into it when I bought the laptop. Here’s a list of the repairs I’ve made over the last five years.

1.) New Battery – $75 for an aftermarket with higher capacity.
2.) New HD – $60 for a replacement. The laptop took a spill.
3.) New magnesium frame – $15 The frame cracked in the front by the latch, causing the whole front of the laptop to sag, the lid not to close properly, and uneven typing. Replacing this was _really_ fun!
4.) Keyboard – $20 Three years ago, the “d” key started sticking. It was so touchy that if you typed on the laptop, even if your finger wasn’t touching the ‘d’ key, you’d end up with d’s all over the place inserted randomly though what you were typing.
5.) Touchpad Button – $10. I have to return the part (ordered the wrong ‘top’) for this model (anyone need a U221?) and didn’t figure that out until too late. Anyhow, the button’s problem was the little black pad on the underside that contacts the actuator had slid from it’s normal position (somehow). A few seconds with the hair-dryer on high to warm up the sticky adhesive, and I slid the little dot back into place. Problem solved!

So over five years I’ve plunked down $180 to keep this thing limping along. That puts the cost per year at.. $296. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Jailbreaking your iPhone is now definitely legal!

I’m astounded at the crappy quality of software for working with a TiVo outside of windows.

Sure, there’s a few packages that try to tie it all together, and probably do a fairly good job. So far, everything I’ve tried is crap.

iTiVo for OS X tries to put a nice interface on the process of transferring, decoding, and transcoding — but does a horrible job when it comes to the most important part — the _interface_.

Got the tree transplanted. Hopefully it survives. We’ll be doing a lot of watering the next few weeks.

Dug the new step for the deck in place. I’ll secure it in tomorrow night with screws.

This weekend it looks like we may be doing mulch. If not, we’ll be cleaning the deck in preparation for stain… Fun times. Fun times indeed.