As most Mac users know, there is a small difference between PC keyboards and Mac keyboards, and it’s not just the presence or absence of the Windows or Swedish campground symbols. The default key mapping for a PC keyboard swaps the position of the keys mapped to the Mac’s Command and Option keys. The Windows key serves as the Command key, but rather than appearing just to the left of the space bar, it is shifted one position further to the left, and the Alt key, which has the function of the Mac’s Option key, appears in its place. Here is a not particularly helpful illustration:

PC keyboard

MacBook Pro keyboard

Under OS X 10.4 Tiger, in order to keep the Command and Option key functions in the same physical place on both of my keyboards, I had to go in to the system preferences each time I plugged in or disconnected my USB keyboard, and re-map the keys. With the help of Quicksilver (best. utility. ever.) I got pretty quick at it, but I still had to do it 2-3 times a day.

Leopard has saved me literally seconds per day by allowing me to set key mappings per keyboard. It remembers!

Not only does the OS automatically swap the keys on my PC keyboard when I plug it in, but the keys on the MacBook stay in their default mapping regardless of whether the PC keyboard is attached. About damn time. Thanks, Apple!

* I’ve always felt that one thing Microsoft does particularly well is hardware. With one glowing exception, that is.

Cabel from Panic Software has photos of the MacBook Pro on his site. Looks pretty nice. Not quite nice enough for me to want to ditch my 15″ 1.67mHz PowerBook for first-generation hardware, but nice all the same.

Many are lamenting the loss of FW800 and PCMCIA card capability, and what is ExpressCard/34 anyway? Also, is a 15″ screen really big enough to warrant FrontRow and the remote? I watch plenty of video on my PowerBook, but never from further than arms’ reach from the machine. That said, I also plug my laptop into my TV and stereo on a regular basis…

So, no HDTV, no DVR, but two new blazing-fast MacIntels. I predict I’ll own an iMac within the next two years.

I’ve recently picked up my copy of O’Reilly’s Learning UNIX for Mac OS X Panther again, and have been messing around a little bit with the command line.

Refreshing myself on a few basics left me feeling confident enough to try using Tynsoe.org’s GeekTool, an OS X system preference pane that allows you to display the output of terminal commands on the desktop. Tynsoe.org’s most recent update of GeekTool does not support OS X.4 Tiger (I’m up to date with 10.4.3), but an Italian developer has released a Tiger-optimized version.

With a little assistance from the Mac OS X Hints forums and Bryant Mairs’ Thrash the Swap weblog, I’ve now got GeekTool displaying my current CPU load as well as the 10 most CPU-intensive processes currently running. These displays refresh every 10 seconds, and show the PID, which thanks to the abovementioned book, I now know is quite important when it comes to managing tasks from the command line.