Enough: Titanium Powerbook 500
Well I guess you can say it all started with David Allen’s GTD. This leads us to 43folders.com and the Hipster PDA, numerous attempts with web apps and Outlook on our work PC. But it just wastn’t what we wanted. Then Omnigroup announced they were working on Omnifocus, a mac-only GTD application. I joined the beta and loved it. Once the full version came out my trusty 2 GHZ Core 2 Duo 17in iMac became a GTD powerhouse…but one problem: It was home and I was stuck on a PC at work. Not a comprehensive solution. So I thought “Well if I had a powerbook I could take that to work and Omnifocus could help keep me working on what needed to be done.”
Omnifocus needs 10.4.11 to run and that will run on even the earliest Titanium Powerbook G4. So off to Ebay we go. A couple of hundred bucks later and we have a 500 Mhz TiBook with Panther and a broken hinge. A 512MB dimm from a dead unit moves the machine to 768MB of RAM.
The only Tiger disk I have came with my Intel iMac….hmmm Wait! Didn’t people get Leopard to run on a 400 G4? Lowendmac.com is your friend. Just hack the boot file to fake the Leopard disk to think it’s seeing a 867mhz G4 and a couple hours later, Leopard is installed. And then we added the apps we needed, but only what we needed as we only have a 20 GB hard drive.
These are what I use almost everyday:
TextWrangler (3.0 just came out and what we wrote this with)
The built in apps Mail(with Mail Act-On), Safari , iTunes, Quicktime Pro, Preview, iChat.
Occasionally used:
Back to my Mac (A feature of Mobile Me) Screen Sharing.
Everything is on the latest version including Leopard(10.5.8).
When I first started to take it to work I had to put the Omnifocus database on a thumbdrive to move between the iMac and the tibook. Later upgrades brought .Mac synching so it’s all over the net now. Mail, Safari, NetNewsWire, and Omnifocus synch through .Mac and Evernote has a web synching thing that works on all three devices (imac, tibook and PC). I have a few tunes in iTunes but normally just plug my iPod Nano in and have iTunes play from there.
Video is a drag, but does work if you let it download first. The DVD player doesn’t work even though the drive does, but that’s not why I have this machine. For only a couple hundred dollars I got a working machine that can do Email, browse the web, handle RSS, tunes, GTD, and I can even remote control the iMac. I probaly use this machine more than the family iMac.
Most important my GTD is with me where it counts. It must be working as May brought me the best performance review I’ve gotten from my boss in the 10 years I’ve worked for him. Doing more with less.
(Submitted by David Emmons)
Big thanks to David for submitting this. It proves that you don’t need a whole lot of Mac to get a whole lot done. Especially if you are getting a laptop to act as a satellite to a desktop machine. I think a lot of people fail to really think about how and under what conditions they will use a laptop and, therefore, get something far more powerful than they need.
This post is part of a series called Enough – Folks enjoying the technology they have because it is enough for their needs.
Notes:
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old TiBook was always
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