A reliable source has told MacRumors that the new iMacs are coming within a few weeks, with 15′”, 17″ and 19″ screens. I’m not sure I believe the 19″ story, since Apple has no 19″ item in its cinema display line. Also, 17″ is on the large side for the little half-sphere base - 19″ would be too much of a good thing.
The news from this pretty Mac rumor site is that new iMacs with the swingy arms [insert arm swinging motion here] are coming out soon, perhaps as early as next week. They’ll look the same, but pack more of a processor punch. Prices are rumored to be going down as well.
This means I’ll have to put off my mac shopping for a few weeks yet.
Ad of the day: New big and Powerbooks from Apple
I think my Bryce demo is old - Bryce 5 is supposed to be native to OS X already. I guess that’s what I get for scraping the bottom of the Internet looking for free stuff. The hottest new free stuff is the beta browser Safari for OS X.2, which broke Apple’s all-time record for downloads today - 300,000 in 24 hours. (And you thought no one used Macs…) Safari is even faster than Chimera. My browser did pretty well against the other competition - IE whatever (I never open the thing myself) and Netscape 7. It was nice to see that I’m not the only hopeless Mac geek using Chimera. Mozilla wasn’t even mentioned per se. Safari is based on Konqueror, an open-source browser about which I’ve heard great things but have never used myself. I still won’t get to use it, though, because Safari requires X.2, which is 0.5 more operating system than I have on my trusty old powerbook.
I need to upgrade, and if I get a new Mac, the new OS comes free. (Shopping logic - you have to love it.) I’ve been thinking 17″ flat-panel iMac, but then there’s that new 17″ Powerbook. Yes, you could buy three or four PC notebooks for that kind of money, but then you’d have to use a PC, wouldn’t you? My Powerbook (a 333MHz G3, also known as Lombard or Bronze for the bronze keyboard) has been so handy over the years that I don’t think I could go back to being chained to a desk - certainly not if the same display is now in a Powerbook. Then again, the swinging iMac arm is very cool.
That’s the trouble with Macs - you want to buy them for looks alone, and once you have one it refuses to die even when the whole black-and-bronze thing is three years out of style. I don’t need a 17″ display to write stories, but there’s this little voice in my head saying save the economy - buy a Mac.
I was too busy to install Bryce this weekend, but now it’s up and running. So far, it’s been annoying. It’s not native MacOS X, so it’s running the Classic environment. I never run that cow - it’s for people who live in the Mac past. I doubt I’ll end up forking out the big bucks for an official copy. My mac is also an antique at 333MHz, so despite the ample memory Bryce is rendering rather slowly.
My ongoing experiments in 3D software (POV-ray after this) are intended to help me visualize alien planetary landscapes. Yes, I do it all for the fic. I’m hoping to illustrate some fanfic, too, before my 30-day trial expires. Watch this space for practice images.
Time passes…
I made this one following the Bryce tutorial - things were much easier once I booted into OS 9 directly. 
Last night, I had my first serious Mac problem in my three and a quarter years with the Powerbook. It was entirely my fault for clicking on DNSTrans when they said it was supposed to be a command-line application. The Mac asked me what program I wanted to open the program with, and I chose the Terminal app. That coaxed the command-line help information out of DNSTrans, giving me enough clues that I could run it from the command line myself.
For a while, everything seemed ok. Then I closed some apps and came home, and when I tried to open iTunes and listen to Filk Radio, the Terminal app opened instead. I tried some other programs, and all the icons opened Terminal. I could still open apps by roundabout methods, such as clicking on an html file to open the browser, and then clicking on a mailto link in the browser to open Mail. A few programs still ran from their icons, possibly because they didn’t have the .app extension.
So I searched Google for the solution to my application woes. I found one guy on Google Groups who’d had the same problem (with TextEdit instead of Terminal), but no one had answered his post. I found out about the three files you can delete on OS X to do what rebuilding your desktop database will do for pre-X macs. The files were LSApplications, LSClaimedTypes, and LSSchemes, which are all in the ~/Library/Preferences directory. (The ~ means under your Home directory.) I deleted them, but my problem didn’t go away. It did mutate slightly - instead of everything opening Terminal, my icons all opened Sherlock.
That’s when I started worrying, but it was late so I went to bed. At work today I searched some more - finding the proper search term for my apps are all trying to open themselves with Terminal.app was hard. I’m not sure how I finally found these troubleshooting tips, which mentioned the three files above and also the real culprit, com.apple.LaunchServices.plist. I deleted that one, and my Mac is all better now.
While I was puttering around Mac sites looking for help, I found an application I used to run under OS 8.6: DragThing. Many’s the hour I wasted configuring DragThing with snazzy colors and exhaustive app icons back then. Now, the OS X Dock does some of the same things. I downloaded DragThing, but there were too many buttons I couldn’t click without registering first, and I have no patience for picking the perfect Bondi colors and backgrounds anymore. I decided the Dock was good enough for me, but not before I read up on how to disable the Dock in order to use DragThing’s process dock instead.
So here it is, Death to the Dock (from Google Groups):
Word count: 22,439
I was going to answer the religion Friday Five, but Chimera 0.6 crashed again in the middle of my MT entry. So I’m back to Chimera 0.5, which, although lacking 0.1, is much more stable. I could check the bug tracking over at mozilla.org to see whether the issue has been fixed in the code, then build from source myself, but I get enough gcc at work, thanks. I bought a mac so I could have a low-maintenance computer at home to offset all those high-maintenance Windows and Solaris boxes at work. My job has changed since I got my Powerbook G3 way back when, but the high-maintenance Windows and Solaris boxes remain the same. Honestly, how many times can one Sun Fire need to be fscked? Next thing you know, I’ll be buying it jewelry.
I don’t think I’m going to make my NaNoWriMo goal tonight because I have an article due tomorrow. I haven’t started that either, though I do know what I’m going to say. I’ll have to NaNo more over the weekend to compensate. No rest for the bloggy, I tell you.
No new words yet - I just got home from a Buffy marathon. All I can say is Depresso-ep! And that line should have been 33.33% of the Legion of Doom were flayed alive the last time they were in Sunnydale. Maybe that was an intentional mistake.
So, the geeking - there’s a new release of Chimera, the Cocoa Mozilla browser for MacOs X. I downloaded it this weekend, and it’s been crashing up a storm. I’m hoping it’s broken itself in now. The last version rarely crashed for me, so if this one keeps it up I’m going to have to downgrade.
For NaNoWriMo, I’ve decided on a new daily word count of 2,000 to counterbalance the upcoming holiday and my bad habit of getting behind. I may slack off tonight and just round myself up to 20,000.
Word count: 1729
I’m still behind on my novel, but I have an excuse. Yesterday as I was happily novelizing I also downloaded some updates for my Mac - because it asked so nicely and did it all by itself. Apparently the updates broke Emacs (Fatal error (4). Illegal instruction., if you’re curious). All I could find about the problem was this similar situation from somebody using the Hurd. He said recompiling solved the problem, so I rebuilt Emacs and that solved the problem.
My mac is past three years old now, and it doesn’t build Emacs for Mac OS X as fast as a shiny new TiBook would, so it took me a while to recompile, which is my excuse for my word count still being so low. I did notice this nice Mac Emacs FAQ while I was waiting, though.
Whenever I balance my checkbook lately (usually on the T), I wonder why I bother. In fifteen years I’ve never caught a bank in a mistake - my arithmetic skills only get worse, and the banks’ better. I may as well give up and take their word for it. They must have really good software.
But I digress. Mozilla has been called a web-designer’s browser, a slow car on the information superhighway, and a toy for geeks who just can’t get over Netscape 2.0. (That last one is me.) My mac is old, so Mozilla was extra slow for me.
But not anymore! I downloaded Chimera, a version of Mozilla with native OSX widgets and other geeky things. And, of course, Tabbed Browsing. You’re nobody if you don’t have tabs.
Speaking of tabs, a new beta of Opera for Mac is out. I’m over Opera, myself, but if buggy open-source betas make you nervous for your Mac, you might want to try a buggy commercial
beta of Opera instead.
Yesterday was Bring My Mac To Work day, so I took the opportunity to download the emacs source tree from
gnu.org and build Emacs for OSX according to the directions kindly provided by the prince of Emacs for Mac, Andrew Choi. I owe him my last three Emacs builds and a few binaries, too. I now have a bleeding-edge Emacs.
Confused? Emacs is a text editor, the way The Lord of the Rings is a fantasy. One you’ve known Emacs, you’ll never go back to vi or Notepad or whatever pale shadow of a text editor you’ve been using. There’s even a wiki devoted to the text editor to end all text editors. If you’d like to try the latest OSX version,
drop me a note and I’ll build an installer for you.
I’ve been using a shareware newsreader for Mac OS X called Thoth. It was nice enough, but it wasn’t MTNewswatcher, the lovely program I used to use with OS 8.6. Today, Thoth decided to stop sharing, because I hadn’t coughed up the $25 despite our month-long relationship. Yes, the hieroglyphic Thoth icon is cute, but it’s not $25 worth of cute. Nevertheless, alt.startrek.creative is in the throes of the ASC Awards - I needed a newsreader, and I needed it now.
Fortunately, whilst I was suffering the annoyware annoyances of Thoth, MTNewswatcher had gotten ported to OS X. Like Newswatcher, the program all Mac newsreaders seem to be based upon, MTNewswatcher is freeware. Freeware is the best ware. Free fic is the best fic. (See, that was all relevant…)