Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I’m an Emacs girl myself, but many mac users prefer BBEdit, now up to BBEdit 8.0. Daring Fireball explains the appeal of BBEdit.

Quicksilver is up to β29.

DivX is up to 5.2.

Bookpedia is up to version 1.1.3. If you’d rather not pay for software, there’s a free program that does the same thing (cataloging books), more or less: Books for MacOS X.

As the Apple Turns reports on a truly frightening nuclear scenario. I think it’s time to bring back the backyard bomb-shelter fad.

Slashdot can advise you on sheltering in style from that mysterious mushroom cloud over North Korea.

I heard about the new, faster DNS propagation at Slashdot, and I’m trying it out right now with another domain. (It applies to .com and .net, but not .org, apparently.) Just in the time I’ve been typing this entry, the new DNS info propagated far enough for me to see it at dnsreport, but it hasn’t reached my mac yet. I suspect my ISP is caching the DNS somewhere.

It’s not me caching, since I found this handy blog entry about flushing your DNS cache on OSX (lookupd -flushcache). Yet for the moment, I’m still using the DNS trick I blogged about a few weeks ago.

Ballot stuffer of the day: Diebold

Mac links, old and new:

• Did you know you can wall-mount that new G5 iMac? I’m still waiting for the rumored Tablet Mac, myself.
• Crazy Apple Rumors has a fun take on the Paris Expo.
• Skype has come to Mac OS X.
• Camino is up to version 0.8.1.

Codepoetry reveals the deep secrets of the Mac OSX color picker in The Colors! I’ve always wondered how to capture a pixel’s color (answer: with the magnifying glass) or get a color into the swatch list at the bottom of the color picker (answer: drag it from the swatch next to the magnifying glass). Note the link to HexColorPicker, exColor and Painter’s Picker.

Codepoetry also asks the eternal question: If I throw a cat out the car window, is it kitty litter? (one of the random quotes you get at the top of each page) and links to the cool tool LanOSD. I’m not sure what it does, but I’m sure it’s cool.

Math link of the day: a tribe who can’t count (thanks to Seema)

You may notice a subtle change in the blog design. I think I’ve finally tamed the wild, CPU-eating color switching script. It was especially slow on pages with lots of entries, like the category and monthly pages. Links are no longer colored.

Depending on your browser, it may take time or effort for the cached versions of the stylesheet and script to be replaced by their replacements. Color rotation should happen faster with the new version.

Crazy rumor of the day: Arlo Rose Working On Doomsday Widget

Here’s a link dump of the nifty and the novel in Mac software:

• ~stevenf describes CocoaBooklet, an app for printing booklets.
• Mac the Ripper, an all-in-one DVD ripping utility, is up to version 2.0.1.
• SafariSpeed will do that speeding-up-Safari hack for you.
• Bookpedia will catalog your books. (Well, you’ll catalog your books, unless you happen to have a bar code scanner handy.)
• Have you been waiting for the reincarnation of HyperCard? It’s no longer necessary to drink that poison Kool-Aid - HyperNext is here!
• iGetter is download manager for the Mac, for those of you who don’t use wget.
• Mike Matas has cool icons that come with a copy of his CatScan.

Weird link of the day: Innovation in India

I was waiting for a DNS entry to percolate down to my little mac, but then I thought, why wait? So I followed this macosxhint to get my mac to contact the one DNS server that already had a clue. It wasn’t really necessary, but it worked.

To check if a domain is having DNS troubles, try Quick Check. When Quick Check verified that the domain was one with the net again, I undid my DNS hack above. No harm done.

I love Quicksilver, but when it crashes, it drags the Finder down with it. Apparently I have it cataloguing too much; I followed the advice in this forum thread to turn off automatic rescanning of the catalog, and QS hasn’t crashed since.

Look-and-feel link of the day: Firefox - Switch

I was going to redecorate with pretty fonts (possibly Tengwar), as described in dynamic text rendering at A List Apart, but I ran out of web design energy. If you want to try it at home, here are some useful links I found in the comments:

• WATS.ca on relative image sizing
• Some advice on converting fonts in case you have trouble
• Nevel’s plan to eliminate the JavaScript component in favor of PHP

Freebie of the day: Westciv’s CSS Level 1 course

I’ve joined a few new writing mailing lists lately. As a result, the number of HTML emails I get in teeny weeny fonts has skyrocketed. I don’t know whether it’s AOL’s fault, Yahoo’s or the ever-culpable Microsoft’s, but tonight I got annoyed enough to do something about it.

Once again, macosxhints came through with a solution: using a local stylesheet to control Mail. Don’t follow the directions there without reading all the way through to the comment that shows the simplest way to do it. Or follow my summary here:

First, you need the stylesheet. Save the following in a plain text file called, say, mail.css:

font[size="1"] {
    font-size: 10pt;
}
font[size="2"] {
    font-size: 11pt;
}
font[size="3"] {
    font-size: 12pt;
}

Adjust the font sizes if they’re still too small. If you know CSS you can tweak to your heart’s content—put in a nice background watermark that says Munged by Microsoft, De-munged by WebKit, for example. I’ll skip that step, though.

Put your mail.css file in a safe place and note the path. For example: /Users/jemimap/Documents/mail.css

Quit Mail. Open the Terminal. Cut and paste the following line into the Terminal and hit return:

defaults write com.apple.Mail WebKitUserStyleSheetEnabledPreferenceKey -bool True

Cut and paste the next one the same way, but change the path to match where you put mail.css:

defaults write com.apple.Mail WebKitUserStyleSheetLocationPreferenceKey '/Users/jemimap/Documents/mail.css'

Terminal won’t give you any feedback when you hit return, but it’s now safe to quit the Terminal and open Mail. Your mail should now be de-munged.