The good

It looks like I'm getting fairly decent battery life on the machine, somewhere between 2 and 3 hours depending how hard I'm using it. I found XBattery 1.1 and I've been using it to watch the behavior of the battery. When I yank the power cord, the machine says 3:12 remaining.

Gentoo's keychain for SSH is working fine.

One way around the scroll mouse "problem" is to use SideTrack, a replacement driver for the PowerBook touchpad which allows you to use the edges of the trackpad to scroll. This feature has been around on PC laptops with trackpads (did I mention that I hate them), and SideTrack brings that to the Mac. The only thing is that I keep dragging parts of my hand across the trackpad surface and moving the cursor where I don't want it to go.

Fire has turned out to be pretty unstable. It periodically quits for no apparent reason, so I downloaded Proteus and I'm going to give that a try. It costs a little money, but it also seems better integrated with Mac OS X.

The bad

The meta key doesn't seem to work right in iTerm, which is resulting in menus popping up at inconvenient times. This is really annoying, and I may have to go back to Terminal.app, which would be disappointing because iTerm is otherwise excellent.

In additin to SideTrack, there uControl, which can swap around keys on your keyboard, like turning caps lock into control and turning shift-delete into forward delete. Only problem is that it seems to be disabled for some reason that I don't understand.

I've been porting over my Emacs setups today, cleaning up and modernizing as I go. So far the only real problem child has been gnuserv, which is refusing connections. I think that there's a security thing that I need to do, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

Keep those suggestions coming. I haven't really gotten to the hardcore UNIX hacking yet.