Next up is Airport Base Station Update 2008-002, which

includes general fixes and compatibility updates for the following applications:

- AirPort Utility
- AirPort Base Station Agent”

As to what these fixes and compatibility updates actually are, we certainly won’t know from Software Update. It doesn’t even link to a Knowledge Base article on the Apple website. (We’ll look it up for you.)

The update will fix what’s pertinent to your system. In the Doodler’s case it just updated Airport Utility to Version 5.3.2, a 10.5mb download.

Scenes from the past two episodes of the BBC’s Doctor Who seem to confirm what we’ve all suspected all along - that the Doctor uses a Mac, as seen in the screengrab above from yesterday’s show, Forest of The Dead, the second and concluding part of the Library storyline. That’s obviously the thin aluminum Mac keyboard, which was even more clearly shown in the previous episode, Silence in The Library. Logical for the flamboyant, eccentric Time Lord to be using a Mac, right?

Actually, this Mac connect is just an excuse for me to rave about the new Doctor Who episodes, which have been even more brilliant in an already bright starfield of great TV. Steven Moffat, who wrote the two-parter, will be the head writer and producer of the next season, and there isn’t any better—judging from his previous work, like last season’s episode Blink, which is about the creepiest and scariest hour of scifi TV ever made. (And I love how Brit TV bylines the episode titles in the credits, as if writers were the most important things; we never get enough credit these days.)

There’s something to be said for a sci-fi show episode that actually brought a tear to my eye—twice! The  episode also features some of the funniest lines of dialogue in recent shows. After being told the grave news that her entire existence is an imaginary Matrix-like construct, character Donna Noble goes off, incensed: “You mean this isn’t the real me? This isn’t my real body? But I’ve been dieting!”

Sorry for the tenuous Mac digression, but I couldn’t resist. Hey, who knows? Maybe we’ll find out in a future episode that the TARDIS runs on Mac OS XCVIII.

Don’t we all love it when a shipper delivers a box to our doorstep?

Well, some folk down under are beside themselves this weekend.

Australian Mac Community forum site MacTalk reports that they received a sealed box from Apple yesterday that is marked “Subject to terms of NDA. Do not open until Tuesday June 10th 2008.”

They suspect it’s a promotional iPhone 2.0 unit for display until supply actually becomes available. Other resellers across Australia (and presumably around the world) have received similar boxes under the same Non-Disclosure Agreement. This means the phone might not actually be available for purchase immediately after the WWDC announcement as initially hoped, at least outside the United States. Sigh.

(If it were me with the box, I don’t know if I’d have the restraint. Especially because I didn’t sign no stinkin’ NDA.)

Patience, patience. As they say in my country: dalawang tulog na lang.

Don’t look now, but some units of the Macbook Air being sold on the gray market come with non-American keyboards, specifically Western Spanish ones which confound users because of its strange and unfamiliar physical layout and even more confusing keyboard assignments—pressing a key is always an adventure. I know this first hand because I procured one such Macbook Air for one of my bosses.

The sealed box looked typical for all intents and purposes, until we opened it up. The sparse documentation was all in Spanish, and the keyboard looked very odd and things quickly went downhill when we started typing on it. To our consternation a lot of the non-alphabetical characters that came out on the bright screen were totally different from the ones we pressed, going by what was printed on the keytop. Us Filipinos used to a US layout were in immediate trouble. Talk about lost in translation.

Strangely, info on alternative keyboard layouts were sparse. It took a while but we eventually found a solution for the key mismatching. From the outset it was obviously a matter of changing keyboard profiles—but which one?

For Macbooks, Macbook Pros and Airs with a Western Spanish keyboard, just go to System Preferences/International/Input Menu and select Spanish - ISO. If you don’t have it in your list of choices, you’ll have to dig out your install discs and load up the Spanish language choices so Spanish - ISO pops up as an option. After this, your keys won’t lie to you anymore; what you press is what you’ll get.

Now you’ll just have to live with the odd placement of keys, but that’s a whole lot better than the guessing game you had before. If you find other odd keyboard layouts, not just on Macs but on external keyboards from Apple, you can just use this method to pin down the right input menu profile.

Many Mac users have been hoping for safer, faster Solid State Drives in their lappies ever since the Air was launched with the option. In fact, many secretly pray that SSDs become (cheaply) available with all new Macbooks, hopefully to be announced at the WWDC Jobs keynote in a few days, cost, capacity and availability notwithstanding.

But what about us with existing clunky and primitive old Macbooks and Macbook Pros? Will we be doomed to be forever looking from the sidelines, laboring under the slower, power-hungry and easily damaged old-fashioned harddrive?

Never fear, ExperCom is here!

ExperCom is offering a service that does SSD upgrades for both new and old Macbooks or Macbook Pros, at prices ranging from US$550 to US$899. Or you can buy preconfigured units directly from them at US$1649 for a white Macbook with a 60gb SSD or a Macbook Pro with a 120gb SSD at US$2649. No word if they’d do it for your tangerine toilet seat iBook G3, though.

Check out the site here. It even includes charts and explanations why SSDs will cure cancer and bring about world peace. That is, if you’re one of the few still sitting on the fence, mind-fogged by the black propropaganda being spread around by traditional harddrive manufactures that SSDs are fragile, low-capacity, expensive cr@p.

The temptation is great, but think I’ll hold off until they offer higher-capacity and cheaper SSDs - or upgrade to some future Mac altogether.

But it is something to think about, isn’t it?