Dock porn.
Pinned bottom left. Low magnification.
Finder, Apple Mail, Safari, iTunes, Photoshop, SubEthaEdit, Address Book, Sherlock, Quicktime Player, Terminal | Home Folder, Downloads Folder, Trash
I actually do most of my app launching from the Terminal, thanks to this tip.
After playing around with VoodooPad, which I quite like, I decided I’d register it and start using it as my personal organizer, so to speak. Then I thought a bit more and realized that, no matter how much I liked the app, that wasn’t going to work out very well. I don’t have a PowerBook (sob), and I’m primarily limited to Windows machines at work, and if I end up going mobile with a Hiptop or some other PDA then it’s inaccessible there, too. Then I realized — I have a webserver!
I looked at Alex King’s Tasks, which looks really good. But really, it’s not really the sort of thing I’d really use. I need something more freeform — I don’t really need all the alarms and “project 50% done” indicators and all that. What I really need is a virtual scratchpad where I can record semi-random stuff:
and a million other of the trivial details that fill my life. I’d been using VoodooPad for these sort of things, but, as mentioned above, it doesn’t travel with me so I needed something web based. I’ve grown fairly comfortable with Wiki -style editing, and I definitely love being able to create new pages basically “at the flick of the wrist” (by joining wiki-words), so I started to think: Why not just configure some proper WikiWikiWeb software? I already have AwkiAwki installed to serve my FAQ pages, but it’s not exactly feature-ful. I tried PurpleWiki as well, but had some problems setting it up (adding Perl modules on OS X usually involves invoking dark forces.) MoinMoin is powerful enough to have served the Atom project, and it was dead simple to set up at work (praise Jebus for the FreeBSD ports system), where I’m evaluating it as a possible internal tech-support mechanism, so I decided to try it here. Frankly, the installation was a pain in the ass (mostly my fault), but I got it working.
Anyway, I get full text searching and an index and stuff “for free.” I can see myself using it as an idea scratchpad for long blog entries, for the book about absolutely nothing I may write someday, and whatever else.
I’ve restricted it by IP address for now (Google, world, and dog don’t need my grocery list), so I can reach it from home, the office, and I figure any other place I might need to have access from in the future is just a SSH session away.
You don’t have to tell me that normal people don’t do this. Well, duh… Proudly without a life since at least 1985…
New for me, out-of-date for you…
Dell’s FugliPod (a/k/a :the Digital Jukebox) via 2lmc, Sven, and Erik Barzeski. Still wondering how a computer company can take in billions of dollars in annual revenue and only divert about 50 cents worth of it into industrial design. Savages.Oh my. Missy Elliot vs. Joy Division. This rocks with the power of a thousand suns. It’s a 22 MB Quicktime movie that you ought to grab before the lawyers show up.
Morbus Iff (of Amphetadesk fame) has stirringly (and convincingly) argued that the name of the Pie/Echo/Necho/Atom syndication project is and should remain Atom. I think this is a wondrous idea — it stops a lot of sniping and pre-empts a lot of FUD, and it’s an acknowledgement of the de-facto state of affairs: namely this technology is Atom now, for better or for worse, and we should roll with it.
“NameFinalVote has already been done by the community, and they have chosen Atom.”
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I’ve been marinating in the new OutKast 2-CD set for most of the day and for the most part I’m really enjoying it. At 39 songs (two hours and fifteen minutes), it’s doubtlessly too long for its own good, but the stronger tracks are completely fantastic. You’ve probably already heard “Hey Ya”, which is pretty much a shoo-in for single of the year, at least in the alternate universe where I hand out all of the Grammies. I’m finding I’m enjoying the set best when I let iTunes scramble the tracks so that the Big Boi and André 3000 tracks jumble together in a freeform fashion.
You can find videos here. They’re pretty good.
…not coherent enough to be a proper entry.
Tonight I had dinner with Jamie and his sister Margot. Somehow emacs came up, and since Margo is not that heavily involved with computers we had to explain what it was. Once we were done she said “I’m not a computer person, but even I can tell that’s stupid.”
from Louis’ Ramblings
<meta http-equiv="refresh"> hack to refresh themselves every (x) minutes. Kinda obnoxious, don’t you think? I just noticed a certain not-to-be-named blog reloading itself in one of my tabs a few seconds ago. I’ve got a reload button in my browser and I know how to use it — let me choose when to take that (admittedly small, but present) CPU/bandwidth hit, mmmm-kay?Whenever I’m browsing on a Wiki, “Jam On It” by Newcleus starts going through my head.
I was reading an entry on the Blosxom mailing list and I realized something (funny? embarassing?) about myself. I go out of my way to make certain technical tasks more difficult than they strictly need to be.
Here’s the post that started me thinking in this direction. Two listmembers immediately and helpfully posted links to plugins which will automagically handle graphic linking and sizing. Fine, I thought, I suppose I could use those plugins too, to simplify adding graphics to new posts… and then I stopped. I don’t want to use those plugins to make marking up graphics easier. I actually enjoy the process of:
<IMG> markup by hand, including the width, height, align and alt values, plus hspace and vspace, if necessary.
Now this is just crazy. I’m sitting in front of a Macintosh. I should be using Photoshop or GraphicConverter or whatever else to do this in 2.5 seconds. Instead, I’m busting out the man pages, typing command lines that sometimes wrap twice, and all the rest. Why on earth am I doing this? I’ve even got tools that will take closer-to-English wiki-ish and Textile markup and convert it to HTML automatically, yet here I sit in a text editor tagging this entry using no macros.
Why? Because, at some sad level, I like doing it this way. I can’t explain it. It makes no logical sense. I guess it’s some twisted reflection of the impulse that compels the fisherman to strike out to the lake at 5AM with a pole over his shoulder, rather than spending 2 minutes at the fish counter at the local market. Only the fisherman gets to spend time communing with nature, and I just end up making my wrists hurt a little more.
Of course I didn’t install the Blosxom automatic image plugins. That wouldn’t be sporting.
I’m contemplating a links sub-blog, or maybe a rolling b-link sidebar. Still playing with design ideas.
As a followup last week’s World’s Fair post, I stumbled across a home movie someone shot at the 1939 New York fair (think Trylon and Perisphere.) It comes from the Prelinger Archive, a huge archive of freely available video files hosted at the Internet Archive.
Ahoy, mateys! Today is Talk Like A Pirate Day, so ye scurvy dogs had best be honoring the event or I’ll keelhaul ye. Arrrrr!
There are a few more breathtaking images available from the Johnson Space Center (including a really high-res version of the picture to the right.) It’s so pretty from above, and such a bastard up close. Good luck to those of you on the U.S. east coast.
I may just be imagining this, but it seems that, since the blackout, the street lights in our area have been dialed back, just a bit. I have no way of objectively measuring this, but it seems that the street lights may be as much as 25% dimmer. In any event, the night sky has been much nicer in the neighborhood over the past few weeks. We’ve had decent views of Mars for pretty much the whole time, and last night / this morning I was able to count at least 5 stars in Orion’s scabbard. I’m used to seeing none at all there — we would generally only get the brightest outlining stars of that constellation. These are all naked-eye observations — I don’t have a telescope (yet.) I never bothered because our light pollution was so bad.
I sure hope this “kinder gentler” nighttime lighting is here to stay.
Looks like Ford is going to be doing something with Linux desktops (via the Reg and /.). I am actually drooling (drooling, I say!) when I think about the all the Ford-dependent Windows-based automotive suppliers in the Detroit area who are going to need some *nix-savvy consulting as this happens. cha-ching!
The Internet enables many different types of obsessions. Some of them are even healthy, or at least harmless. Perhaps the most rewarding of these is the ability to “drill down” into some field of knowledge of which you have only the slightest pre-existing familiarity. I went on one of those adventures this evening, and just for kicks I’ll share a bit of what I found. Today I learned about World’s Fairs.
Buffer Overrun In RPCSS Service Could Allow Code Execution (824146)
Originally posted: September 10, 2003
Who should read this bulletin: Users running Microsoft ® Windows ®
Impact of vulnerability: Three new vulnerabilities, the most serious of which could enable an attacker to run arbitrary code on a user’s system.
Maximum Severity Rating: Critical
Recommendation: System administrators should apply the security patch immediately
End User Bulletin:
An end user version of this bulletin is available at:http://www.microsoft.com/security/securi
ty_bulletins/ms03-039.asp.
Pretty freaking amazing Quicktime VR panoramas of an erupting volcano. My friend Jim and I played around with QTVR panoramas about 5 years or so ago, back when I was with RTS, and they’re a lot of fun to make, even with the very crude equipment and software we had to work with at the time. (This was back in the days when doing QTVR meant wrestling with MPW and some decidedly dodgy Applescripts.)
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