Back in August I wrote about how my iBook headphones port wasn’t working. Turns out, this has happened to other people. A fellow I know purchased an Apple computer some. time ago, and then had the exact same issue, with an Apple computer shipped from the factory set to output to the left channel.

My previous post, on Oregon Trail 5 and the Daleks, was resolved when a friend of mine warezed me the font I needed, then I had to unpack it with stuffit or whatever comes with OS X as opposed to . Good game, learning company.

Actually it isn’t that bad, I enjoyed the 30 minutes or so of Oregon Trail 5. The cartoons are weird in the same way they’re weird in Metroid Zero Mission; changing a game I enjoyed a long time ago with animated cutscenes.

I know this is a real UNIX system, yeah Apple, you paid for the rights to say that.

However, Terminal.app?

More like Terminal.crapp!

No tabbed windows, slow as molasses, come on already, you’re Apple. I know you want people to stop using the command line for many tasks, however it just isn’t happening. A large portion of my day is spent ssh’d into various servers around the globe. As nice as expose is it isn’t a replacement for tabbed windows when I’m connected to multiple machines.

At least update it for Jaguar or whatever the latest big cat naming scheme you’re using for your new version is. Then you’ll have all of us super nerds upgrading just for a new, more functional, Terminal!

I’ve tried iTerm, it is OK but all versions currently available are crashy/leaky. Their CVS binary build zip is also out of date. Pulling from their CVS and compiling (tonight) got me a version that randomly pinwheels. iTerm at least has tabs.

GLterm is fast at least, and has a pretty glowing cursor. No tabs though. It also doesn’t crash and leak like the year is 2010 and my RAM is recorded in the terabytes.

Maybe I’ll get lucky and the GLterm author will add tabs.

This was extremely disturbing, I fiddled for some time, noted that the speakers in the iBook itself was outputting in stereo, and continued having the same problem with many sets of headphones. However this problem didn’t happen when I plugged in a simple external amplifier.

Stumped, and never spending very long using my iBook for audio without working on something else at the same time, I continued to experience the issue and got frustrated. At one point I even contemplated sending the iBook in for service with the applecare plan I bought when I purchased the iBook (yes, I’m frustrated that the macbooks came out soon after I bought it).

You can probably tell by now what the mistake is.

So today I’m out buying some equipment to service my upcoming LinuxGames.com podcast (yeah everyone has a podcast, sue me), and other communications I do over Skype. I get home, plug it all into my iBook and go to set my iBook audio to output and input from the USB soundcard in a plastic shell (thanks to our friends from PPA, intl.)

So this is where I notice the Sound preference pane in System Preferences, with the Balance set all the way to the left.

The simple amp “solved” the problem by mixing both channels together, I think, and that combined with none of my headphones working was the logical jump which had made me believe that the problem was the headphone jack in the iBook.

I don’t think I need to explain anything else now, though obviously it all works fine at this point, and I’m left wondering how I missed the sound preferences panel every other time for the past five or six months.