OS X: Various

Well, looks like Leopard did end up pre-releasing a couple of days early via the usual channels. This final build (9a581) has performed much more solidly for me than the last one I tried (9a559). I decided to go ahead and do a clean install though, just to start off on the right foot. Time Machine has been running regularly and has already filled up the space I partitioned on the external hard drive for backups. Certainly nothing revolutionary here- looks like Windows System Restore to me with a pretty make-over.

On another note, I bought an Apple TV used for $200 and am pretty happy. Again, nothing revolutionary as I've ran a modded Xbox with XBMC for years until recently. Needed to get back into the game so went Apple TV route this time. It's sleek for sure...hard drive is a little small so I'll be upgrading that. The modification process to get Divx and Xvid playback going was pretty straightforward:

1. Disassemble and remove HD.
2. Mount hard drive in external 2.5" USB enclosure
3. Copy over a NON LEOPARD (Tiger or lower only!) copy of the "sshd" binary to the "OS Boot" partition on the Apple TV hard drive.
4. Make sure file permissions are set to execute for sshd.
5. Return drive to Apple TV and boot it up.
6. Copy over some various codecs.

It's no XBMC but I was tired of burning Divx to disc for playback on the DVD player and it's nearly as much of a pain to set the laptop up for TV-out.