I have written a number of reviews in my life, but this one is different.

It is about my “colan”, a kind of trousers that athletes wear when exercising. Basically, my mother bought this colan for me in 1988, for 4,000 greek drachmas. 16 years later it is LIKE NEW. And I do wear it at least 2 days a week, the whole day. This is the only piece of clothing that I have it being so old and look like it was bought yesterday. The black color is still there as it was back then, and it fits exactly right. I don’t know how this thing was actually made, but it feels like it was made of steel, it’s in an amazing shape. 😮

The reason I write this is because I still remember my mother being unhappy buying me that, because it was too expensive back then (about $12, but that was a lot of money in the Greece of the ’80s). However, its quality paid off by being the most reliable piece of cloth I have ever seen. As my JBQ says, “there is a reason why I prefer to pay more for keytronic keyboards and logitech mice”. Same for other things in our lives, apparently. You get what you pay for.

I used the Apple Cube today, after many months (it switches on and off all by itself so I was avoiding it on purpose).

So, I updated it to the latest apps and 10.3.4 and it works well (apart of the common Cube hardware problem of auto-switching on/off, it didn’t do it today though).

I like the Cube. It has its problems, for example the DVD drive won’t read any DVD+ or – disks burned at home, it has no audio in/out/mic inputs, it only has 2 USB connectors while it comes with 3 USB devices (the speakers need powered USB, they won’t work when connected through the keyboard). Also, the original card was a 16 MB ATi Rage card which I replaced with a GeForce 2MX 32 MB AGP and so now I have QuartzExtreme support. But the biggest problem of the cube is its default SLOW-SLOW-SLOW hard drive. It is a 20 GB Maxtor (I still curse Apple for using that particular drive) and when I put an 80 GB disk in there for a week last year, the OS was OBVIOUSLY much more responsive. I am thinking of buying a new drive and put it in there and move Cube’s 20 GB on a Linux machine somewhere (I have a Duron 1.3 GHz and an AthlonXP 1600+).

What I love from the 450 Mhz Cube (1 MB L3) is that it runs multimedia better and faster than my *dual* Celeron 533 Mhz (2×128 KB L2) and XP which is still my main machine (it works extremely stable for what I do, no reason to upgrade it). Doing normal things in the Cube like resizing windows or scrolling is still a pain in the a$$ though and it takes away an otherwise great media/visual performance.