der Laptop ist kaputt!

The Apple Powerbook that I brought to Germany decided to go to sleep at random times. It turns out that this is due to a faulty temperature sensor under the trackpad, and many users have the same problem. There are no simple and free solutions, and none of them seem to cure the problem permanently.

My German host lab has graciously loaned me an Apple MacBook Pro. That's terrific. The only problem is the keyboard. The loaner has a German QWERTZ keyboard and the one on my old machine is a US QWERTY keyboard. I have now instructed the Mac operating system to treat the keyboard on the loaner as a QWERTY keyboard, which means it is cumbersome to type the seldom-used keys (as they don't get mapped to the same keys on the QWERTY layout).

The loaner also uses an Intel processor, which is different from the PowerPC processor in my old machine. This means I can't simply copy most programs (particularly the ones that I wrote for research) without re-compiling and linking (read: a lot of work). But this is something I would have to do if I am to get a new Apple laptop.