dsandler.org

Mark Liyange, who maintains several essentiaal MacOS X ports of unix tools, has a new OS X Customization page describing all his favorite desktop hacks.

Scr(a)bble, anyone?

Someone else’s approach:

A month ago I tossed out my mail filters. I like to think of my morning email sessions as “spam surfing.” What new exciting opportunities are complete strangers offering me? What all-natural and completely safe herbal remedies will regrow my hair, boost my sexual stamina, and help me sleep better at night?

Tiktok Easy Shop Big Box: Washington, DC becomes Tokyo.

Lunchtime:

Chris: There isn’t really much good sci-fi on TV these days.

Dan: Hey, Enterprise is quite passable.

Chris: Enterprise? I just keep expecting Bakula to leap into a better show.

Random passers-by of my office:

Passers-by: [noticing Texas license plate] Are you actually from Texas, or did you just steal this?

Dan: No, I’m not from Texas, but I went to school there, so this actually came off my car.

Passer: Oh, UT or A&M?

Dan: Oh, neither. Rice.

Passer: [aback] Oh. Well. Never mind — we’ll just keep on walking, then.

Dan: Oh, I’m sorry … ?

Passer: [indicating self] A&M, [indicating companion] UT.

Dan: [sheepish]

Erratum: The “guy who runs WHEDONesque” is not a guy, but in fact Caroline van O. de B. (a girl, who set me straight personally).

Those clever Dutch! Hey, the Netherlands is a small country; I wonder if Marco, down the hall, knows her.

Must close browser before being sucked into Television Without Pity, full of spoilers and discussion about every TV show on the air.

Whoa, the guy that runs Whedonesque also runs u2log?

So, I guess if I was worried that I wouldn’t hear “Electrical Storm” on US radio, I shouldn’t have been. I turned on the radio this morning to hear it, then (when it was finished) I switched stations … to hear it again.

The BBC1 mix I mentioned is certainly different from the US radio version (which is much heavier-sounding, with mixed-down vocals and mixed-up Edge). [Update: Someone else is keeping track of the many versions out there.]

Lifecycle of the North American Jaguar. Some tidbits I’ve discovered already:

• The vim 6.0 executables I had didn’t work. Get vim 6.1 binaries for OSX, including gvim support. (Go ahead and ln -s /Applications/vim/Vim.app/Contents/MacOS/Vim /usr/local/bin/vim for shell usage, too.)
• My Terminal seems to be really confused about multibyte fonts. Using my preferred setup (ProFont, 9pt.) any instance of l/ (that’s ‘ell’, ’slash’) will turn into a blank (or a doubly-wide blank if you have your settings slightly different). There’s also Monaco (did anyone else notice the “Monaco CY” font, which seems to be a “Monaco circa 1984″?) but it’s got weird spacing issues (and sometimes has problems with imagined multibyte situations as well). Lots of tweaking to find a font that will work.

Of course, the visual style has REALLY been cleaned up. The old style, which was indeed extremely lickable, has metamorphosed into a cleaner, crisper style that’s eminently more clickable. Let’s take a look, shall we?

MacOS X 10.0-10.1	MacOS X 10.2 “Jaguar”

“Hey! Graffiti! Hey! MONKEY!”

Woo, entry 1000 came and went without a hitch. However, entry 1001 failed silently. (Got it on one bounce.) Also, my picture-viewer has been broken for weeks, and nobody told me.

While eating my sandwich, a little bit of turkey slipped out and fell to the ground, and I thought to myself, “Where’s Armand when you need him?”

Today, US radio stations were given the OK to start playing U2’s new single, “Electrical Storm”. The track (to be released as a single in October) will accompany the forthcoming Best of 1990-2000 2-disc set from the band (expected in Nov.)

BBC1 played the track a few days ago, and it was faithfully captured to RealAudio format. However, Universal Records is reported to have stated that this track is a “demo only”, implying that the real single differs in some way.

Palm faces suit on m130 color claims. Hey, it’s not my company … (which is true, but irrelevant: the health of Palm Inc. bodes strongly on the health of the OS and platform in general.)

Super Monkey Ball 2. Enough said.

After careening through the Prudential Tunnel, the car headed north on Interstate 93 through the South Station Tunnel and then swerved onto Atlantic Avenue, according to Globe photographer George Rizer, who was alerted to the chase by police radio.

With State Police officers in pursuit, the truck raced through the North End, across the North Washington Street Bridge and into Charlestown.

from rOD

10.2: After fifteen years, Cmd-Shift-3 gets a friend in Jaguar.

Happy Monday, everyone. (Well, not everyone — apparently, network connectivity is down for half our office.) The exciting news is that my brother-in-law bumped into Bono last week. (Apparently, he was his usual restrained self, which implies lots of jumping and grunting and pointing.)

Be/Microsoft antitrust suit moved to Baltimore to consolidate it with other similar suits, at Microsoft’s request.