I took my gaming PC into the shop (again) this weekend. It looks like this time they’re going to replace the motherboard. Lord knows they’ve replaced almost everything else in it, without getting to a stable point. Who knows, this may work.

In the mean time, I was down to “just” my PowerMac to play with and, you see, I’ve become used to watching television on one computer while playing games on the other. What to do… Ah, right, my laptop!

I shoved the MacBook Pro under my desk (on top of a laptop cooler), plugged in all of the stuff that was connected to my gaming PC, and sure enough, I was back to two useful computers.

Now having the PowerMac and the MBP side-by-side, both connected to 1280×1024 monitors led me to wonder which one was the better WoW machine. You guessed it, the MBP was significantly faster, even with the detail settings in the game set much higher. It was eminently playable, actually, with a solid 30fps everywhere I went.

Of course, the gaming PC gets three times that framerate (when it’s working), but it’s nice to know that I can still get a good experience when I’m travelling (or the next time my PC fails).

I briefly considered installing BootCamp to see if the PC version of WoW would perform better (and so that I could get some Everquest 2 playing in :-)). Unfortunately, the 100Gig drive in my laptop was already 78Gig full, which was too much for BootCamp. If it wasn’t a company machine, I’d replace the drive with one of the new perpendicular recording 200Gig ones. That way I could set up a 60Gig partition on the PC and still have more space than I have now. Next time.

Update: Sorry to all who saw the bogus, half-complete version of this article, which I accidentally posted earlier. It’s gone now. 😛

I’m planning on getting Deb a new laptop for Christmas. (Yes, she knows about it already.)

Of course, I have been trying to convince her that what she really needs is one of the new MacBook Pros, because they really are excellent hardware. Unfortunately, even if I did get her a MacBook Pro, she would probably run Windows — used to be a link to Bootcamp on the Apple site — on it most of the time.

You see, Deb tells me she needs to run Windows. When I pressed her on this, she claims that she has a couple of programs Quilt-Pro and Stitch Painter that she uses regularly — read “occasionally” — which she can’t live without. I told her about the joys of Parallels Desktop and how she could still run her Windows programs at the same time as Mac OS X, but she wasn’t convinced. Hm…

Well, if you didn’t click on the above crafting software links, I’ll let you in on the punchline: Both programs are available for Mac OS X. I ran the demo of Stitch Painter, and it seems to run fine.

So, I got to thinking… All you Windows users out there, what do you actually still need it for? For me, I can think of only one thing: Games. In fact, I still do have a PC, but literally all I use it for is gaming. (It has one 60Gig drive in it, since that’s all I need to hold my active game files.) There may be a day when Macs have as many games available as PCs — they certainly have the hardware to run them now — but as of today, there’s only so much WoW you can play.

Let’s see, what else do I use regularly… There’s Eclipse, or course. And Lotus (er… IBM, or is it HCL) Notes — nm. You can’t get it any more. — and Office at work. I make music with Reason and Logic Express. I run the GCW family of websites, and I watch TV.

That doesn’t include all of the free stuff that comes with your mac for personal productivity (iCal, Address Book), internet (Mail, Safari), and multi-media (iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD), all of which I use regularly. The fact that my contacts, events, todos, and bookmarks are all automatically sync’ed between the G5 and my laptop makes them even sweeter.

All in all, I’m done with Windows. What about you?

As you know, I got an EyeTV Hybrid, and I’m very happy with it. One of the nice things about the device is that you can control it with your Apple remote, if you attach it to a Mac that includes one. Unfortunately, I’m using the EyeTV with the PowerMac in my basement, which does not.

So the obvious next question is, how could I remote control the EyeTV. (Because you know, it’s not a real TV until it has a remote control. :-))

First off, the EyeTV appears to have an IR receiver built into it, so I tried a couple of the universal remotes I had around the house, but didn’t get any reaction.

I then considered just buying a remote. The Elgato site identifies several commercial Mac remotes that will work with the EyeTV, but even I could figure out that buying one doesn’t make sense: it’s not like I’m actually going to use it, I just want to be able to claim that I could.

Then it came to me: Salling Clicker!

Salling Clicker is a software package that allows you to remote control almost anything on your Mac (or PC) using a bluetooth cell phone or PDA. I’ve been running it on my laptop for quite a while. It’s a convenient way to make sure that I always have a presentation remote with me, since I know I’ll be carrying my cell phone.

There was only one problem: The G5 doesn’t have a bluetooth interface either.

Now, I still had a D-Link USB bluetooth transceiver from back in the days when I used to use my PC for something other than game playing. I remembered from the last time I plugged it into the PC that it needed a very specific driver to work, so I went to the D-Link site, only to find out that there was no Mac driver. Hm… Oh well, I plugged it in anyway and, as I should have guessed, the Mac recognized it immediately.

The rest of the story is short: installed Salling Clicker, paired my phone with the Mac, discovered that Clicker already knew how to control the EyeTV (woot!), and happily spent the rest of the night clicking through the channels.