Last weekend I decided to start using Tumblr for my smaller posts, rather than having them as a part of this website. I have several reasons for this:

Low barrier posting

Posting to my tumblelog has a very low barrier. It's super easy to quickly post a few lines about something nice I am thinking about or something I found online. Posting to Tumblr can be done through a Mac OS X dashboard widget, a bookmarklet and a mobile phone. Any time, anywhere.

More 'social'

Tumblr shares a fair amount of features with Twitter. People can leave notes, create favorites and become your follower. Let's say it adds a bit of a social touch to my smaller posts. Tumblr is more than Twitter and less than a real blog. Perfect!

Kick ass templating

Tumblr has totally kick ass customization. You can make your tumblelog look like pretty much anything you want. Write your own markup, your own CSS, add Javascript widgets, you name it, Tumblr has it. Too much fun to play with to resist.

screenshot of the iBlack theme

I like it even better than Virb though that may change again since Virb is about to release it's long awaited 2.0 version. But, we're talking about Tumblr right now.

Before you continue: this is NOT a full osx86 installation guide.

It's Steve Jobs' nemesis and nightmare. It's not for the faint of heart. But... it's there. OSX86 or often referred to as 'Hackintosh'. It's the art of installing Mac OS X on hardware Steve Jobs doesn't want you to run it on: generic x86 PC hardware. Since I've had real Macs almost exclusively for 8 years now I never really got into this rather interesting scene that exists since the first release of OS X for Intel CPUs.

Recently however I decided to give it a shot on the cheap used IBM ThinkPad T41 I bought right before moving to the United States. I wanted to have a computer for use at home (primarily by Pam) besides the MacBook Pro I was going to get from my employer. I didn't really have the funds for a MacBook so it had to be a cheap PC. Oh well. At first it ran Windows XP which quickly drove me insane because of it's sensitivity to viruses and trojans. I really didn't want to deal with all the maintenance it requires to keep these things free from evil. I ran Ubuntu on it for a while which was pretty nice, until I saw a picture somewhere from someone who had managed to get OS X Leopard to run on a T41... I had to have that too! Why? Because I can! And because Pam has become just as much as a Mac fan as I am.

About a year ago I wrote about Pleo, the robotic baby dinosaur created by Ugobe. For a long time I felt the price tag was a little too steep but... a few weeks ago I gave in. I had to have one and hopefully hack it in the near future. Since I wrote about it before when I didn't have one I figured it would be nice to write a followup post and review Pleo. So here it is, my non-sponsored (yep, I paid $325 for this baby) review of Ugobe's first and hopefully not last product. Read all about the good as well as the bad!

For quite a while before actually buying a Pleo I had been reading the PleoWorld forums ^*. What struck me as extremely odd, or even flat out weird was the way various forum members talked about their Pleo's. They don't consider it a toy, a robot or an inanimate object. Nope, Pleo is 'alive'. We're talking about grown up adults here, discussing Ugobe's robot dinosaur in the exact same fashion like I would tell anyone about our Jack Russell terrier Jackie, who is very much alive. I didn't quite get it! We're talking about a toy here, albeit a quite pricey one, right???

Ugobe themselves also don't refer to their product as 'toy' or 'robot'. Instead they call it a 'lifeform'. Possibly a bit over ambitious but it does illustrate the sentiment the company is trying to convey. Does the product live up to these high expectations? More about that later.