The Register has an interesting article that talks about Google working on its own distribution of Linux for the desktop. While it’s not clear whether they plan on actually releasing it to the public, they’ve confirmed they’re working on it, so who knows what’ll happen. Apparently, it’s based on Ubuntu Linux. If nothing else, it’ll certainly be interesting to see what happens with this whole thing if they do release it into the wild.

As I mentioned previously, I had a 20” Intel iMac on order at work. It arrived about a week ago, and now that I’ve had a chance to play around with it, I thought I’d post a couple of my initial observations.

1. It’s fast. Much, much, much faster than my 15” 1.25GHz PowerBook (granted, the PowerBook only has 512MB of RAM and the iMac has 1GB). Even running non-Universal binaries through Rosetta (such as Office 2004 or Photoshop CS2) is reasonably fast; they’re certainly not slow enough for me to get impatient waiting for them to load.
2. The screen is gorgeous. It’s the brightest screen I’ve ever used. I even had to turn the brightness down because it was so bright it was hurting my eyes.
3. It’s quiet. There are a bunch of reports (search Google for more) about excessive fan noise with the iMac G5s, but I haven’t noticed it at all with the Intel-based one.

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The Red Sox finally have a replacement for Johnny Damon in center field. They just completed a deal that will get them Cleveland outfielder Coco Crisp. ESPN.com has the full story.

Update:

I plugged the latitude and longitude from the USGS page into to Google Maps, and it shows the epicenter was right about at the intersection of E. Burnside & NE 31st. Crazy.

Original Post:

I was sitting here watching The Office (I <3 TiVo) a few minutes ago and the entire building started shaking. After living in the SF Bay area for a few years, I got into the habit of checking the USGS Recent Earthquakes site whenever I felt one. Sure enough, there was a magnitude 2.8 earthquake a few minutes ago.

There’s a great post on digg about some folks in Australia whose 17” PowerBook was stolen. Instead of sitting back and waiting for the police to do their job, they posted it on eBay warning people not to buy it if it shows up.

They were also able to track the people who stole it because they were still checking the mail account that was set up and they even sent pictures of the thieves to the account since they knew the mail was being read. Not only did the thieves reply, they also called the victims telling them they saw the post on eBay and aren’t getting their laptop back (hah!).

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