I did have to install Ruby, and RubyGems onto my Powerbook. And that took a while, but the instructions at MacOnRails.com made it pretty easy, although I didn’t quite understand everything they were saying.

You can read about how Dougal Campbell is using glTail.

Now Laura gets to do the transcript of our conversation. She uses Transcriva to type the transcript. Transcriva lets her hit Apple-Enter to slide the audio back a few seconds, and then easily switch between different speakers.

It’s taken us a while to work out a system, but the process we are using is great.

• GPULife the game of Life rendered using only your video card
• Electric Sheep distributed computing sued to create what computers dream of when they are asleep
• Fracture creates fractals. View the gallery of fractals created with Fracture
• Chemical Burn a traffic estimator
• Soundstream responds to sounds in the room

I don’t think most people will miss Classic. I had to rebuild my Powerbook a few weeks ago, and I decided not to install Classic at all. There were a handful of games I wanted to be able to play, but I really haven’t missed them at all.

There are ways to run Classic on Intel Macs. One useful page is VNC, Basilisk II, and SheepShaver: 3 Ways to Run Classic on an Intel Mac.

• Audacity
• Chicken of the VNC
• Galerie
• NetNewsWire Lite
• Chax

From left to right:

• GizmoProject: VOIP client, $5 month for an incoming phone number, portable to any computer
• iKey: keyboard macros
• DeskTopple: hides my desktop’s icons (a bit better than Backdrop)
• NetMonitor: shows my network throughput,a nd my IP address info when I hover over it. I like it’s output a bit better than MenuMeters’ outout
• ClamXav Sentry: anti-virus monitor
• Boinc: a distributed processing client looking for new planets
• Spirited Away: hides applications that haven’t been used in the last few minutes
• SSHKeychain: manage keys for connecting with ssh servers
• Slim Battery Monitor: (no icon when plugged in) more useful information than the built in battery icon
• MenuMeters: shows disk activity, plus optional modules showing memory, cpu, and network info
• Keychain Access: allows me to easily lock my screen when I leave the computer, without the annoyances of starting the screen saver by hitting a hot corner of the screen accidentally
• iChat Apple’s AIM client
• System clock, part of OS X
• Airport status, part of OS X
• Spotlight, part of OS X

I also use Quicksilver, but have the menu icon turned off.

I used to have the Speaker Volume icon up, but removed it and don’t miss it. Same thing with the Displays icon. I have two different monitors I plug into (home and work), and the Mac just remembers which is which, so I removed the menubar icon.

(Update: 2019-05-21 Links to bad URLs removed.)

Then I remembered that OS X 10.4 includes a VNC server in the system. On Tiger clients, its in the Sharing system preference pane. On Tiger server, however that option is not available. So I decided to install a VNC server.

1. Download the OSXvnc server application. http://www.redstonesoftware.com/vnc.html

2. Copy the OSXvnc application to your XServe’s /Applications/ folder. I did this by sharing the root level of the hard drive, logging into the XServe (Apple-K) from my computer, and copying the application into the /Applications/ folder. Then I disconnected from the drive, and turned off the sharing of the root folder.

3. Ssh into the XServe.

4. I then ran the OSXvnc program by typing “sudo open /Applications/OSXvnc.app/” You should be prompted for the system password.

5. Then using a VNC client (I recommend Chicken of the VNC, available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/) I connected to my XServe. I was prompted with a standard OS X login box. I logged in as a user with administrative privileges.

6. Then I ran the Retrospect Client installer. It prompted me for for a few things (Retrospect password) and then restarted the server. Once the machine restarts, you will be disconnected from the VNC server. You’ll need to re-enable it if you want to log in again through Chicken of the VNC. You can enable OSXvnc to come up automatically when the server starts up, but be sure to set a password if you do that. You can also change the port that is used.

That’s all there was to it. I saved $300 through two open-source applications.

(Edited (2012-08-28): I removed this from function from my site, I never really got it to work reliably and have moved on to other systems. It could be useful though to use it as a link journal. Hmmm.)