I finally took some time this weekend to do a couple of technology upgrades around the house. Saturday afternoon I upgraded the operating system in my Powerbook from Panther (10.3) to Tiger (10.4) and I am well aware of the fact that I am over a year late to this party. However, until recently I really never had the need to make the upgrade despite having the disk sitting in my cabinet for a few months now. What changed? well, I have noticed more and more applications required 10.4 as the host operating system and I also wanted the benefits of Safari 2 and the new Mail.app.

The upgrade went without a problem and I chose to do a simple upgrade over my current OS despite recommendations to follow the archive & installation method. I never had any problems with the previous version so I chose to use the simplest method to upgrade and things appear to be working just fine.

I also changed the wireless router for our home network since my parent’s gave me a new one for my birthday. We are moving up the wireless spectrum and have made the change to a 802.11g/b router from Linksys, the WRTSL54GS to be more specific. My powerbook can now benefit from the higher speeds available on the 802.11g mode, while still supporting our older laptop and the tivo through the 802.11b mode.

The best part about this router is the ability to share USB-attached storage throughout the network. So we can finally have a shared-folder without having to share it through a specific PC. I will have to write more this feature later on since I didn’t have a spare hard-drive to connect to the router. I am planning on moving our iTunes library and photo collections to this drive so we can access them all of our computers around the house.

I actually spent time away from the pc over the weekend in case you were wondering. We were invited to dinner by our neighbors upstairs and we had a great evening with them, specially after three bottles of red wine!. Today, we made the best of the cool weather and went hiking around Pinnacle Peak park but not before having a great breakfast at home which was a great surprise to wake up to.