Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Writing link of the day: What is Narrative, Anyway?

PantyCat was getting old, so I decided to get addicted to Go. It started with a slashdot article about man vs. machine games, which led to an old article about computer Go. I downloaded Goban for the Mac, read a pamphlet for beginners, found the controls for board size and handicap in the info drawer, and now I Go. Especially helpful is the wiki-based Sensei Library.

Thanks to Veronica’s cable modem, I’ve installed the last few oversized programs on my new mac. Today’s bunch: the MacOS 10.2.8 update (not Panther), the Java update, the iCal and iSync updates, the Apple X11 beta, and i-Installer (for TeX and Ghostscript 8). At the moment I’m downloading the NetNewsWire 1.0.6b1 beta because it fixes a problem I’ve seen on and off.

Panther (MacOS 10.3) has been announced for October 24th. It’s not clear whether recent Mac buyers like yours truly will get the upgrade cheap ($20) or at the usual price ($130). Rumors are flying at macrumors.com.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been experiencing heavy fan activity on the new Mac. I was expecting the 12″ model to run hot like the previous version did, but it’s not hot - it’s just fanning itself a lot. After a disappointing experiment with the flat-surface solution (putting the laptop on a flat table instead of my lap), I consulted Google, Font of All Knowledge.

Konfabulator turned out to be part of the problem, according to this helpful blog entry from Mac-Mike. Apparently it’s a CPU hog. Though it pained me greatly, I closed Konfabulator down. Fannage dropped immediately from the high-speed fan setting to the low-speed setting.

My next project will be dropping down from low-speed fan to no fan, without resorting to external fin solutions like the LapTopCooler.

[Update] That didn’t take long. The Apple Knowledge Base recommends sleeping the hard drive and reducing processor performance. My hard drive was already set to sleep, but setting processor performance to “reduced” nipped that fan in the bud.

I spoke too soon - it just powered up again.

I’m still busy geeking. I’ve moved on from updating the Konfabulator kitchenTimer widget for the latest Konfabulator edition to editing the game ChainShot (by MscapeSoftware) so that the scoring is more like that of the Yahoo!Game JT’s Blocks - or as Veronica calls it, PantyCat. (Don’t ask.)

Another important piece of housekeeping was retrieving my .emacs file from the old mac and getting fresh copies of my favorite Emacs modes, folding mode and html helper mode. The latter is what produces the timestamp at the bottom of the Repository page.

The new mac is still adorably cute. Though the screen is smaller than my previous 15″ PowerBook, the resolution is the same, so it feels sharper rather than more cramped. The fan has been on longer in the past few days than my old fan ran in the entirety of its four years of active duty. Maybe it needs some stylish radiator fins like a spaceship’s. (In the vacuum of space, the problem is getting rid of excess heat, not keeping it in.)

The WotF people were kind enough to email me upon my manuscript’s arrival:

This is to inform you that your manuscript has been received and entered in L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of The Future Contest, quarter-ending September 30th. Please allow up to 8-10 weeks after the quarter deadline for judging to finalize.  Best wishes, Contest Administrator

Pardon the lack of content - I’ve been busy learning to script Konfabulator. I also downloaded the Apple developers tools, installed the PHP Apache module, and built Emacs for MacOS X.

Mac rumor of the day: Panther goes gold master

I’m sure you’re dying to know what on my new dock. At the moment, the collection is: the Finder, Mail, iTerm, iChat, Safari, NetNewsWire (no longer lite), Address Book, iCal, and iTunes. I also have System Preferences and Preview open at the moment, (Programs without links were included with the OS.)

I just downloaded Konfabulator. Stuffit Expander 8 is supposed to have some problems, but I upgraded yesterday and haven’t encountered them yet.

This entry was posted with NetNewsWire.

Source: Endymion, Keats

In a surprise move, the Mac (a new 12″ Powerbook) appeared on my doorstep this morning at 9:30 a.m. I’ve been playing with it ever since. So far I’ve changed my desktop, set up iChat with some icons (it uses the Address book icons instead of AIM ones) and gotten Safari tabbing. I’m also calibrating my battery. Next, I plan to play with the DVD drive.

Late-breaking mac sighting: Anchorage, Alaska!

I’m still amazed by the idea of MailBucket. I was looking up RSS readers for Jerie and found that some Windows readers (eg., NewzCrawler) which can’t hold a candle to NetNewsWire, nevertheless do interesting non-RSS things like reading newsgroups or regular web pages. Add the MailBucket email-to-RSS gateway and you can do virtually everything with an RSS reader.

But if you really wanted to do everything, you’d use emacs, wouldn’t you?

Wired has a nice article about Virginia Tech’s G5 supercomputer, which was also slashdotted earlier this week. The original images were mirrored after the slashdotting, but seem to be back up now.

Those 1,100 dual 2GHz G5 towers sure look cute together. I’m guessing that’s 1064 PowerMacs for computing and 36 spares for playing iTunes. (That’s the only explanation for ordering the macs from the iTunes store.)

I should have bought my PowerBook there - my estimated ship date has been postponed from today to 10/3/2003. Virginia Tech gets 1,100 G5’s, and I get Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf:

I’m not sure what the refund is for, since they haven’t charged my credit card yet. And I thought I was the Apple Computer consumer. Alas, not yet.

Three-day word count: 2,500

My printer arrived ahead of the as-yet-unshipped mac, so I’ve been printing away merrily. Printers are evil incarnate. The PDF looks perfect in Acrobat Reader, but by the time it comes out of the printer, the margins are too big.

The first munge was page margins. My initial searches turned up several suggestions to uncheck the “fit to page” checkbox. However, there was no “fit to page” checkbox for me to uncheck. Extensive google research led me to upgrade to a newer version of Acrobat Reader (5.1) which did have the checkbox.

Acrobat Reader is huge, by the way, and takes an hour to download over dialup. But I did, and I unchecked the checkbox and printed my PDF. The margins came out too .

I suspected my homegrown PDF files, so I followed the instructions on the otherwise useless Adobe troubleshooting page. I tried printing an entirely different PDF, namely, the $99 rebate form for my printer. The margins were too . I’m still going to use it to get my rebate, for that you should be paying me for using this plastic paperweight of a printer effect.

Somewhere in google groups I’d read that the native OSX Preview program did this same margin munging, so I hadn’t bothered trying it. Now I was desperate, though, with a backlog of PDFs and no way to print them. So I ran one through Preview and presto–perfect margins!

Preview did have its own peculiarities, however. The font came out darker (perhaps because Adobe wasn’t shrinking the text down to increase the margins), and it was also missing all superscript numbers above 3. In some cases a little smudge showed up where the number was supposed to be. I figured this was a font problem, so I changed the font of all my superscripts. At long last, my file printed properly.

My little HP inkjet doesn’t compare to the big HP laser printer at school that required the user to sacrifice a text file before it would print a PS file. It’s more of a print imp than a print daemon, but I foresee hours of amusement in my printing future.