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I dropped XAMPP on my Mac yesterday to do some offline dev work. It really highlighted the shortcomings of my 12" PowerBook G4. It's been a tireless workhorse over the last five years, being replaced once by a newer, swisher Intel Macbook Pro that lasted less than six months before I sold the new upstart and returned to the old faithful. It's great for running a web browser, a few terminal sessions and a mail client. But asking it to run Apache and mysql with PHP running on top is proving too much. It's taking about a minute to render a local copy of this blog!

Here's why the G4 is great! http://garan.org/why-macs-are-great (from November last year)

So it's time to start thinking about a replacement. Macrumors.com is anticipating a September release of Macbook and Macbook Pro upgrades. I don't need the power of the Macbook Pro range but the aluminium case on this model has seen a lot of bumps and scratches without a hiccup, most recently being bounced off a shelf in the garage onto the concrete floor! So the rumors of an aluminium case for the lower end Macbook along with investment bankers anticipating that Apple will lower prices to maintain their market edge. Glass trackpads that will give iPhone'esque gesture controls are another possibility so I'm going to start saving!! :D

I've been playing about with Drupal themes to see where I can drop ads. The colours leave a lot to be desired but I think that the layout is better. Will see what it looks like on a few different screens as I've only got my 12" Powerbook screen where I'm sat..

Steve's latest blog entry inspired this..

The UPS emails I mentioned last week have now become 'Custom Service' emails. Again do not open as they contain a trojan zip file.

Beware of emails coming through with the subject line 'UPS Tracking Number 56429599222' or similar. They are junk emails with zip files containing trojan viruses. The latest version of Avast identifies it as a trojan.