computers: miss my Mac much

I gave up my Titanium PowerBook G4 from work. Anyone who says they love their computer either has low standards or needs to get a life, but damn I miss it. I'm moving my life over to a Windows XP AMD and it's painful.

What I miss is not the Mac UI or productivity suite, it's the networking utilities and UNIX toolchest.

I wanted to just transfer all my files over (/Users/spage/Documents -> C:\Documents and Settings\S Page\My Documents\ ) using rsync, one of the greatest open source tools ever. No rsync comes with Windows. So I turned on Windows file sharing on the Mac, mounted the drive, and copied files over in Windows explorer. But somehow every copied file got a creation date of today. There are no command line options with the mouse.

So I had a .zip backup of some key files with the right timestamps, and I want to unzip them with options and remove the Mac-specific .FBC* and .DS_Store files. More UNIX tools. I broke down and installed the Cygwin toolset, but just running the commands in a Windows console is horrible, so I installed the recommended rxvt, but that didn't work without some fiddling. Compared with opening Mac Terminal and everything just working, Windows is awful! On the other hand I can run Google desktop apps on Windows.

Categories: computers, Mac, Windows, cygwin, UNIX