Fortune Cookies
Muppet of the day: Grover is bitter
My favorite Terminal.app, iTerm, now produces those old Unix fortune cookies, thanks to a macosxhint. Since the instructions there aren’t all that clear, here’s how you do it:
- Use fink to install the cookies. Type the following at the command line in Terminal.app or iTerm: fink install fortune-mod
- Call it from your .login or .profile file. Create the file in a plain text editor - emacs, pico, whatever - or use cat. See the macosxhint if you need instructions on using pico. If you don’t know which file you need (.login is for tcsh, .profile for bash), just make both of them. All the file has to contain is the line /sw/bin/fortune
Now whenever you open a Terminal window or an iTerm tab, you’ll get your fortune cookie. If you don’t have fink, see the macosxhint for a build of the fortune program.
I noticed that Earthlink now has an OSX version of their accelerator (part of Total Access 2004). I’m usually on a dialup, so I considered installing it. But I know how these thing work - mainly by compressing images and aggressive caching - and how they go wrong. I already get enough aggressive caching from Safari. I don’t need it happening on a proxy server at Earthlink’s end.
I think I’m going to go with PithHelmet instead. I figure the real slowdown in browsing is the stuff I don’t want to see - ads. Instead of accelerating the ads on their way to me, PithHelmet will quash any outgoing ad requests before they outgo. I used to use privoxy to block ads, but privoxy didn’t make it onto the new mac. I had the feeling that running a local proxy was too much work for my tired old mac. PithHelmet is the new, Safari-specific, approach - I’m hoping it will be a bit quicker, since it’s a browser-level hack. Proxies, local or not, are a bad idea.