Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Contest of the day: win Star Trek: Voyager season 1 at startrek.com

I was going to do the index card plot outlining thing (50,000 words late) for NaNoEdMo, but then I thought why copy everything into a dying medium like paper when I already have plot summary comments attached to all my scenes? There had to be a more high-tech way.

So I searched for just the right program to simulate index cards with scene and character notes on them. I thought fondly of Hypercard. I googled at length. I read up on the history of mac outliner software. Nothing seemed quite the thing.

In the end, I came back to OmniGraffle, a sort of lightweight Visio for the Mac. I used grep to get the scene summaries out of my story file, then imported them into OmniOutliner (by opening the text file), then imported the OmniOutliner file into OmniGraffle (by opening the file). I got both programs free with my PowerBook, so this wasn’t my usual open-source approach. (OmniDictionary is free, though.)

After the import, I had about 50 little squares for my 50 or so scenes. I started coloring them in and sliding them around (because the story needs some serious rearrangement), and a great cat-vacuuming time was had by all. I think it’s been more helpful than index cards, though I was only going for a reasonable approximation of index card functionality.

Quote of the day: It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. –Thomas Jefferson

I’m still typing slowly on the Dvorak keyboard, but I did have one breakthrough. My text editor emacs uses lots of control characters which moved around with the rest of my scrambled keys and are now harder to reach. I could just use the standard mac keys instead, but the command key isn’t all that well-placed, either.

Oh for the days when I had my own (abandoned) sun sparc with the control key where the caps lock usually is! There’s a useless key taking up far too much real estate on non-Suns. SHOUTING IS NEVER NECESSARY.

But then I remembed that all things are possible to those who use macs. The answer to misplaced control keys is uControl. My keyboard is now optimally configured; it’s just the typist who’s behind the times.

[P.S.] I ended up doing the mac keys as well, and they’re very convenient. Finally, command-C and command-V in emacs, not to mention command-W and command-Z! The full instructions are at webweavertech.

Shell of the day: bash

I’ve been playing with mac fractal freeware for years, and Mandelbrot on Cocoa is far and away the coolest program I’ve seen yet. Don’t even try to read the instructions - they’re pretty much still in the original Japanese. Just select an area with the mouse, then hit “run.” OS 10.2 is required.

Free software of the day: GNU typist

Late last week I figured out that tomorrow, and not today, was the first of March, meaning that I had the whole weekend to finish a couple of sci-fi contest entries due then. The stories are more or less done, though my revisions were interrupted when I re-read the rules and realized that I needed to get my name off the submission. That little technical hurdle has now been jumped.

NaNoEdMo starts tomorrow, and I’m not ready to face my November Disaster yet. It’s only an hour a day, though, so maybe I’ll do it this year. Last NaNoEdMo was a complete wash for me.

On the Stargate side, I finally saw “Chimera” and enjoyed it, though, again, there wasn’t nearly enough Jack. I don’t know why everyone was upset about Sam telling all to Pete - obviously she wouldn’t give out classified information without clearance right in the infirmary under the security cameras. Pete was cuter than the screenshots led me to believe, although still kind of chubby in the suit. Was it just me, or did Sam look guilty when he said “It’s nice to know that people still stay together no matter what, isn’t it?” I certainly felt guilty on her hussy behalf, although otherwise they were just too happy together for me to feel the typical Ex-JetCer In The Hands Of The Cruel PTB anger. I almost feel guilty plotting to break them up in fanfic…almost.

I’ve decided to go back to the Dvorak keyboard, since my typing is only getting worse in my old age. I need a keyboard that was designed to help people type fast, not impede them. Most sites about it are too old to cover MacOS X, for which there are two Dvorak keyboard options available from the International System Preferences pane under the Input Menu tab. Be sure to check the box for “Show input menu in menu bar” so you can switch back and forth easily. For a typing tutor, I downloaded and built gtypist (link above) without any difficulty, though it’s possible you might have to grab ncurses with fink if you don’t have it installed already. I’ll make a note of it when the first Dvorak-typed blog entry appears.

Jade was having IE problems, so I downloaded FireFox in solidarity with her. I noticed it colors my XML links as html links, wiping out the pretty colors from my XML CSS stylesheet. I hope the new Camino, coming soon, doesn’t do the same. I really wish Safari could handle XML links, no matter how it colored them.

Jade also complained about my dark salmon background, so I added a style shutoff at the top of the sidebar: Turn Style Off. It’s a javascript link that I’d like to include on all my pages, but I’m not sure where I’d put it. At the moment it isn’t persistent, either - you’ll have to turn the style off whenever you visit, if you want it off. The function itself (OffCSS) is simple; you can get the code by viewing the source for this page.

Security Fence of the Day: in Saudi Arabia.

I’ve never had much use for AppleScript, but a couple of MacOSXHints today used it and one intrigued me: dumbing the clipboard down to plain text. With that script, if I’m reading something in a Really Big Purple Font in Safari and want to cut and paste it into iChat, I can turn it into plain black text and it will come out the normal size. There was also a clunky script to toggle image loading in Safari. Other scripts in the Apple Safari AppleScript collection are more appealing - window-resizing ones like the javascript bookmarklets I mentioned a few posts back, and my personal favorite, Combine Windows, a script that takes all your open Safari windows and merges them into one window with tabs. It’s very handy for sites that insist on opening links in new windows.

The AppleScript menu isn’t on by default, but this page makes it easy to set up. Some of the Safari scripts require that you turn on GUI scripting, which as far as I can tell just means checking the “Enable access for assistive devices” checkbox in the Universal Access system preference pane. You can download collections of AppleScripts for other scriptable programs from Apple.

While I’m geeking, I should mention some other Mac links I’ve come across lately:

• SideTrack, a trackpad driver that adds scrolling to your trackpad - I’m using just the vertical scrolling and I haven’t had a kernel panic yet
• A MacDevCenter article on doing backups without commercial backup software
• MacDevCenter on building your own browser with WebKit
• MacDevCenter on LaTeX for MacOS X
• HandBrake, DVD ripping software for the Mac - see also the latest DivX macosxhint
• Folding@home for the Mac

Birthday of the day: Happy Birthday, Rocky!

Since the sudden and unexpected demise of my Baby Ben alarm clock, I’ve been wondering whether the ever-versatile Mac could replace yet another home appliance. Apparently, it can. The simplest way to do it is to use Schedule tab of the Energy Saver preferences to set the Mac to start up at a certain time. There are certain disadvantages to this approach, though: you have to shut the mac down if you want to start it up again (and if you need to reboot your computer every day, you may as well be running Windows), and the actual behavior of the mac on starting up depends on how you have it configured. I have my login screen on, so the most I get from starting up in the morning is the startup tone. On the other hand, if you log in automatically and allow Quicktime to autorun, you can play an mp3 or some such. Detailed instructions for this approach are at Low End Mac.

Making an alarm clock that will wake your mac from sleep in order to wake you from sleep is harder. Like people, macs normally require an external stimulus to wake up - keyboard input, a phone call, administrative access by ethernet, etc. Alarm clock programs work around this difficulty by either requiring you to keep your mac awake the whole time (Alarm Clock S.E., iRooster), or by using the BSD subsystem to wake the mac up from sleep (Alarm Clock Pro). The latter is apparently what the shareware program iAlarm does as well, though details are scarce - iAlarm may just be feigning sleep.

Judging from the flaky interface of Alarm Clock Pro’s Wake from Sleep menu item, and the flakiness rumors about iAlarm, I’d say that using the BSD subsystem to wake from sleep is an iffy venture at best. I’ll see how it works out.

Mac link of the day: Ready to leave your Baby Bell? Try Voice over IP.

I prefer to read text in a narrow column - it’s much easier to read that way. I hate websites that fix the page width, preventing the text from wrapping in a smaller browser window. I’ve gotten annoyed lately because I’m always resizing the Safari window: if someone’s text runneth over, it’s easy enough to go for the green button and expand Safari, but going back to my preferred window size is often a more manual operation (although a second click of the green button works in many circumstances).

I’ve never had much success with bookmarklets (bookmarks that do cool JavaScript things), but today’s macosxhint worked so well for me that I decided to make my own, that would push Safari right and make it skinny: w||i.outerHeight>h){s.moveTo(0,0);s.resizeTo(w,h)};if(m){s.moveTo(m==1?0:screen.availWidth-w,0);};s.resizeTo(w,h);};rsz(self,window,600,screen.availHeight,2);”>600xFull, w||i.outerHeight>h){s.moveTo(0,0);s.resizeTo(w,h)};if(m){s.moveTo(m==1?0:screen.availWidth-w,0);};s.resizeTo(w,h);};rsz(self,window,700,screen.availHeight,2);”>700xFull.

Give them a click - they may work in less cool browsers. Safari doesn’t go under my Dock, which is also on the right, when I click - very, very nice. You can also drag a bookmarklet link to the start of your bookmark bar and use command-1 to run it (or click on it, of course, but I keep my bookmark bar hidden most of the time).

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:

1. Use fink to install the cookies. Type the following at the command line in Terminal.app or iTerm: fink install fortune-mod
2. 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.

FAQ of the day: The Mac DVD Resource FAQ
Kernel hack of the day: PowerBook fan fix

I’m up to Season 4 of Stargate, which, thanks to Veronica, I have on DVD. This is the most action my mac’s built-in DVD player has seen since I borrowed Contact from Dr. Deb. Even though I have no foreign region DVD’s, I’ve begun to wonder about nasty built-in DVD annoyances, like the FBI warning and trailers you can’t fast-forward past - just because I’m a geek. I also wanted to take a couple of screenshots for the Repository, but the OS disables Grab (the mac screen capper) when the DVD player is running.

There are software and firmware hacks out there to nullify or reset the region code on a mac. The best way I discovered to skip the FBI warning or take a screenshot, however, was with VLC. VLC avoids the normal DVD hardware restrictions by reading and decoding the DVD at the software level. Presto, screenshots!

The only trouble is, it may be illegal in the US. I own the Stargate DVD’s and the mac and the mac’s DVD player, and I’m not selling, ripping, or pirating anything, or making any money. And yet, VLC comes with a warning that using the decoding library may be a violation of the DMCA. So without doing a single thing that any reasonable person would consider wrong, immoral or fattening, I could have broken a law by downloading and running VLC, provided I did so. Nothing in this blog entry should be taken as an admission of guilt.

When I took a Peter Pan bus to an undisclosed location in Connecticut, the driver said that smoking was prohibited by federal law and that cell phones should be used only in an emergency. What constituted an emergency - say, the bus going off an overpass - was not specified. When I took the Bonanza bus to and from Fall River to see Mom, the driver firmly declared that smoking, drinking (alcoholic beverages), and cell phoning were absolutely forbidden on the bus. There are only two or three places in all of Massachusetts where it’s legal to smoke, so that law was familiar to the patrons. It was Bonanza, not Greyhound, so the likelihood of people getting drunk on the bus was low to begin with. The likelihood of people cell-phoning despite the absolute cell-phone ban was about the likelihood of people cell-phoning in the absence of cell-phone bans. I overheard a lengthy conversation in Portuguese as well as several other shameless cell calls.

The point being that when you make a law that’s extreme (people need to make cell phone calls from the bus to tell people they’re arriving - you don’t want to spend one extra minute hanging around the bus station in Fall River, believe me), senseless (I could converse with Veronica when she was with me, so why shouldn’t I be able to do it over the cell as well?) and impossible to obey (people have a Pavlovian drive to answer their cell phones), all you do is destroy what respect they may have had for the rule of law. When you make one law to be broken, all laws suffer. Next thing you know, they’ll be drinking beer on the bus, just because the driver forbade it in the same sentence as he did cell phones (and not nearly as emphatically).

There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted ñ and you create a nation of law-breakers ñ and then you cash in on guilt. –Atlas Shrugged

Word count: 3300

If you have the OS X Developers Tools installed, you can go wide in NetNewsWire or NNW Lite. Just follow the instructions at rentzsch.com. If you’re using NNW Lite, the main window is in the MainMenu.nib file, not the file mentioned there. Also, “open the inspector” means do “Show Info” from the tools menu. I’m already enjoying the non-scrolling action.

Also, here are some short and sweet instructions for making favicons with GraphicConverter. And the iMac has grown.