Wordpress just recently released Wordpress 2.7 “Coltrane”
Here’s the webpage summarizing some of the new features.
http://wordpress.org/development/2008/12/coltrane/
Coltrane

After applying a update for Shadowrun a cross platform FPS game I play on my PC against 360 players, I got a new Dashboard for the PC.
I guess Microsoft is updating it due to the new Xbox 360 update coming up on November 19th.
You can find out more about Games for Windows Live here – GamesforWindows.com

I tried to triple boot my mac a while back, but I realized later it wasn’t as easy as seemed since the mac uses a EFI loader instead of a BIOS and XP doesn’t really support multiple OS’s.
After trying different things and searching the net, I finally found a method that enabled me to triple boot my mac successfully.
Something to note when you reboot, you can always hold down alt/option and it will let you choose to boot to a CD or eject it if you need to switch.  Also if you install rEFIt, you will also be givin the choice to boot to the CD, but you won’t be able to eject and swap CDs once rEFIt loads.

Installing.

• First I installed rEFIt a boot loader which enables the mac to boot to more volumes than just holding down alt/option.  It has a cool graphical menu selection screen where you can choose the OS you want to start.  It is free and can be downloaded.

• Next I partitioned the Macs hard drive to add two more partitions.  I ran terminal commands to complete this:
  diskutil list
  diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 123.6G “Journaled HFS+” “Linux” 10G “MS-DOS FAT32″ “Windows” 15G
  The list command will show the partition and total size of partition 2.  You want to split it up so they add up to this size.
• Reboot and hold down alt/option when the boot sound comes and choose to boot to the Windows install CD.
• After agreeing to the user agreement choose to install Windows on the 4th partition you created that is labeled FAT32.  When it asks you to format it, choose NTFS or FAT32 and quick if you don’t want to wait a long time to check the disk for errors.  (FAT32 does not support file sizes greater than 4GB)
• After it copies files and asks you to restart, choose the Windows partition to boot in rEFIt and finish installing XP and do the same again after it saves all the final setttings so you can boot into XP and install the Bootcamp Mac drivers.
• Reboot and hold down alt/option and press eject if you need to change CDs and ut the Ubuntu disk in and choose to boot to the Ubuntu install CD. (It will say Windows CD)
• Choose English, Mac keyboard, and install and follow the usual install up until the partitioning selection.
• At the partition choice, press FN+CTRL+ALT (OPTION)+F2 to backup the MBR to a temp location.  At the terminal run: sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/sda.mbr bs=512 count=1 . Then press FN+CTRL+ALT (OPTION)+F7″ to exit back to the installation.
• Choose Manual and the SDA3 choose EXT3 filesystem and format checkbox and mount point / then click ok then foward.  It will warn you about SWAP space, but ignore that click continue because with 2GB or more ram, you shouldn’t need a swap file for ram.
• Enter your name and password and I just skipped the migrate doc and settings part.
• At the READY TO INSTALL part, click ADVANCED and choose SDA3 to place the boot loader.  You can review the settings where at the bottom it should say the following partitions are going to be formatted and it should list sda partition #3 as ext3. Click install.
• When it says the install is complete you need to restore the Windows MBR.  Press FN+CTRL+ALT (OPTION)+F2.  At the terminal enter: sudo dd if=/tmp/sda.mbr of=/dev/sda .  Then press FN+CTRL+ALT (OPTION)+F7″ to exit back to the installation and reboot.

Hopefully you should have a triple boot going now and a bootloader to choose which OS you want at boot time.

Windows information.
After installing bootcamp drivers and everything, I still had a device in device manager with a exclamation on it.  I went to intel.com and downloaded the inf chipset file for the 960 chipsets and it reinstalled the chipset drivers and it seemed to take care of that.

Ubuntu options. Some of these I got from – https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro
To show the temps in the top panel:

sudo apt-get install hddtemp

add this to /etc/rc.local :
modprobe coretemp
sensors -s

sudo apt-get install lm-sensors sensors-applet

Now you can right click the panel and add the sensor options.

Function Keys on Keyboard.

Pommed is a daemon to support extra keys on apple computers. These include the brightness, eject, volume and others. Releases of Pommed 1.8 or up fully support the MacBook and MacBook Pro keyboards. It can be installed with this command:

sudo apt-get install pommed

You can check your pommed version number with this command:

pommed -v

The default behavior on Apple keyboards is to have the top row keys primarily function as media keys (brightness, volume, etc), and have the expected function keys (F1, F2, etc) accessible with using the fn keys.

To reverse this behavior, edit the pommed configuration file with this command:

sudo gedit /etc/pommed.confChange the value of fnmode to “2″, and save. At any time, you can change this value back to “1″ to return to the default behavior.

Touchpad Fixes.

Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and replace :

Sections “InputDevice“

• Identifiers “Synaptics Touchpad”
• ..
• ..

EndSection

With :

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Synaptics Touchpad"
        Driver          "synaptics"
        Option          "SendCoreEvents"        "true"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/psaux"
        Option          "Protocol"              "auto-dev"
        Option          "LeftEdge"              "10"
        Option          "RightEdge"             "1200"
        Option          "TopEdge"               "10"
        Option          "BottomEdge"            "370"
        Option          "FingerLow"             "10"
        Option          "FingerHigh"            "20"
        Option          "MaxTapTime"            "180"
        Option          "MaxTapMove"            "220"
        Option          "SingleTapTimeout"      "100"
        Option          "MaxDoubleTapTime"      "180"
        Option          "LockedDrags"           "off"
        Option          "MinSpeed"              "1.10"
        Option          "MaxSpeed"              "1.30"
        Option          "AccelFactor"           "0.08"
        Option          "TapButton1"            "1"
        Option          "TapButton2"            "3"
        Option          "TapButton3"            "2"
        Option          "RTCornerButton"        "0"
        Option          "RBCornerButton"        "0"
        Option          "LTCornerButton"        "0"
        Option          "LBCornerButton"        "0"
        Option          "VertScrollDelta"       "20"
        Option          "HorizScrollDelta"      "50"
        Option          "HorizEdgeScroll"       "0"
        Option          "VertEdgeScroll"        "0"
        Option          "VertTwoFingerScroll"   "1"
        Option          "HorizTwoFingerScroll"  "1"
        Option          "SHMConfig"             "on"
EndSection

Edit the Font to match OSX more.

By default, Ubuntu uses a style of font rendering different than that used on Mac OS X. You may prefer fonts similar to those on Mac OS X, and you can have these on Ubuntu by doing the following:

1. Open the Appearance preference panel (System-Preferences-Appearance)

2. Click Fonts, and click on Details…, on Hinting select the “Slight” option.

Wireless Network Card:

Installed WICD to control network.

Bluetooth Mouse or Keyboard:

If having issues with connecting using the icon in panel.
Open terminal and type:
sudo hidd –search
It should scan for the mouse of keyboard then you can see the mac address of the device.  Next type:
sudo hidd –connect aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff
Where aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff is the mac address of the mouse or keyboard.
The mouse or keyboard should now be connected.  On the next reboot it will probably ask if you want to pair and connect on future reboots.

Printing to a Airport or Brother wireless printer.

Printing to a Apple Airport device is simple.
You just click add printer and choose AppSocket and put the IP of the Airport which is default 10.0.0.1 and port 9100 is default.  Choose the printer driver and it should work.

For my Brother Wireless MFC-665cw I went into Synaptics package manager and searched for MFC-665cw and it found two packages with drivers.  Installed those and then added the printer via socket like the Apple Airport.  Choose the correct driver and it should work also.

As I find more stuff I add, I will post it here as reference.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them below.

Some developer created a really cool plugin for Windows Vista MCE that allows you to interact with Netflix via the MCE interface.
More importantly, it allows you to browse the instant Watch Now movies that Netflix offers through the MCE interface and allows easy playback.
I installed the plugin on my Vista MCE machine and it works really well. It was also easy to install. I highly recommend this plugin if you have a Netflix account and a Windows Vista MCE.
You can find out more and download the plugin from here – http://www.anpark.com/Software.aspx

Microsoft recently released a whole new suite of Live services and programs for Windows XP and Windows Vista.  A new MSN Messenger Live, Photo Gallery Live, Windows Mail Live, and Windows Live Writer Suite.  If you use Vista, the new Photo Gallery Live won’t look much different from the existing Windows Vista Photo Gallery, but it has a upload to Flickr option that makes it easy to upload your pictures right from the gallery.
As I write this post, I’m using the new blogging program from Microsoft called Windows Live Writer.  When I first ran it, it asked me if I want to setup a new Blog using Microsoft’s Live Spaces service or if I all ready had a existing blog somewhere else.  I host Wordpress on my own web site and not on Wordpress so I thought it would be slightly more complicated to setup.
It asked me some information like my Blog URL and my username and password.  Right away it detected what type of blog and started up this neat interface which I am testing out now.  Now I can easily post to my Blog using my PC.  Thanks Microsoft Live.

Today I received my Microsoft Bluetooth 5000 Notebook Mouse from Amazon.com. The mouse is very light compared to the Apple Wireless Bluetooth Mighty Mouse due to it using smaller AAA batteries.  The mouse is not as thin as other mice.  I find it’s not as ergonomic as the Apple Style Mighty Mouse.  One good function is the mouse has a low battery indicator to remind you to change the batteries.
You can find more about the mouse here.

Microsoft just announced on Tuesday a new line of Zune Digital Media Players.
The new Zune will come in pink, green, black, or glossy red and have 4GB or 8GB of flash memory.  They also have a larger Black 80GB hard drive model that has a larger 3.2″ screen.  All models have built in FM-Tuners.
Among some of the more interesting features are:
Wireless Sync – You won’t need to plug in your media player to sync with your computer.
New innovative touch controls – Similiar to the iPod?
Recorded television content to go – You’ll need a Vista computer for this with a TV Tuner.
The new Zunes are priced from $149 to $249 and will be available in stores this November.  They are available for pre-order now at Amazon.com and CircuitCity.com.