Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Dyslexic link of the day: ctue

Seema says I should be writing, so this is going to be a very short entry about some nice Terminal utilities I found at MacOSX Hints. The long story is at Improving Unix-Finder Interactions in OS X. I installed the fink version and then saved a new terminal .term file as directed, and now I can open the current Finder directory in the Terminal with just one click.

Some of the tricks at that site (like iTerm customization) won’t work for OS 10.1, but one commenter mentioned that anyone can type open . to open the local Terminal directory in the Finder. That alone, without any of the downloads, is a very useful hint.

Word count: 300

[Update 9/17] Seema gave it a shot and couldn’t find the Site Feed tab. I tried with my old Blogger account and had no luck either. So skip the instructions below and go straight to complaining to Blogger. Or get a real blog - the people from MovableType now host blogs at TypePad. All levels have RSS feeds (the XML Syndication in the TypePad feature table). [/update]

Now that BloggerPro features have been added to non-pro Blogger, you too can publish an RSS feed! All you need to do is follow these simple instructions at Blogger.com. I’d prefer it if you pick “full,” so I can read your whole entry in my RSS reader rather than just the summaries. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read the Blogger intro to site syndication.) If this doesn’t work, leave a comment but also bug the Blogger people. Even LJ has RSS feeds!

You should also link the RSS feed somewhere in your template, preferably using one of the cool buttons that are everywhere these days. Pick one out of the huge collection at gtmcknight (under feeds) or make your own with Kalsey’s button maker.

The rumors were true for once; there are new PowerBooks out today. I couldn’t resist - I ordered the 12″ Combo drive model. It’s supposed to ship by the 25th - the 15″ and 17″ PowerBooks are shipping sooner if you’re after immediate gratification.

Are you new to the Joy of OSX? You might want to look into MacMentors for switcher support. Concerned about shipping delays? Apple has a new spokesman to reassure you.

I was having trouble with an educational video kindly provided by Jerie. Nothing could get the sound to play until I stumbled across this QuickTime AC3 codec. It required a newer version of DivX than I had, so I downloaded DivX 5.0.7. The latter claims I won’t need to validate avi’s anymore before playing them. If true, it would be cool.

For more about playing avi’s on a mac, see my blog entry on DivX for OSX.

The iTunes store sold its ten-millionth song. It could have been me - I bought a song last week, too - but it wasn’t. There are also new iMacs and new iPods out, but no new PowerBooks.

In other news, Mars is still hanging around and four new Stargate drabbles have been added to my Stargate fic page.

Word count: 625

According to MacRumors, new G4 PowerBooks will be delayed at least another month, and G5 PowerBooks will be out around April 2004.

My poor G3 is over four years old now. Today it had one of its little speaker shorts, where the music turns to static. Battery life is just a memory and the CD drive is getting a little picky, but with luck I could make it till April 2004. We’ll see.

Word count: 167

I added several new tiles to the Tile Gallery in the Life section, and made a tile demo. The demo is the coolest part - if you click on any tile within the Tile Gallery, you’ll get a sample page with the tile tiled in the background. If you just open the demo page alone, you get a form asking for the URL of any image you want tiled. There’s also an option to add sample text on the demo page, and you can view the source.

A new Stargate drabble is up, Alien, in the Third Snakehead POV. I also posted my first link in Heliopolis, for This Worm a God.

Word count: 1050

Today’s Quest for Life was far more successful. The best Life out there by far is LifeLab for Mac OS 8.6 through X. It’s worth downloading for the Persian Rug pattern alone. (I stared at it for 1,000 generations.) You can use any RLE format file with LifeLab, but I found that it wouldn’t open foreign files unless I converted from DOS format to unix (where necessary), and changed the file type and creator to match the sample text patterns (not the PATT patterns). That was more work than I expected from a friendly mac app, but it comes with enough pattern samples that I didn’t need to do it. I was just obsessed. I even read up on the current status of Life research.

If you are sadly macless, you can play Life online or take the couch potato approach and watch animated Life gifs. Life32 is supposed to be a good Windows Life program, but I can’t vouch for serfware.

While browsing around, I found some other interesting toys, such as an The Brain Automata [sic] on-line, and a page of Mac Classic ALife programs. I spent yet more time in Classic mode fiddling with Tresvita, a 3D automata-generator. It’s a very cool program, considering its advanced age. I downloaded a few others from that page and wasn’t nearly as impressed. The Hexagonal CA wasn’t adjustable enough, for example.

Word count: 100

Another day, another drabble… Since I’m on vacation from Colony, I’ve been doing research for an original story or two. In the process, I stumbled across some weird sites, like this Virtual Pet Rock for Mac OS X (10.2), and other cool Mac software that I can’t run, like Avida. The Fractal Trees work fine, though.

Word count: 100

Instead of writing more than my daily drabble, I’ve been working on the site preference picker. So far it does everything - saves your preferences, displays your chosen style, etc., but only for the one demo page. Soon, though, it will work for all story pages.