Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

In the news (/., MacRumors): yet another attempt at malware for your mac. This one’s being touted as a virus but seems to be just a trojan.

Nevertheless, I briefly considered some advice in the MacRumors comments to stop running as an admin user. (See also the explanation of admin user powers in this informative thread.) But I consider myself geeky enough not to double-click something dangerous, so I’ll wait until a real virus starts circulating before I do anything that inconvenient in the name of security.

On the positive side, today I stumbled across HyperJeff’s catalog of OS X Apps while surfing. It’s a huge, unwieldy list, but handy if you want to look up all the mac sudoku apps.

I didn’t get to use that beta long: Camino 1.0 has been released. It’s even a Universal Binary, for that one guy whose new MacBook has been delivered.

Camino (the OS X web browser formerly known as Chimera) is back with a beta of the long-awaited version 1.0.

I tend to use Safari for my day-to-day browsing, but for the weird stuff like XML (raw or with xlinking) and sites that need BugMeNot, I use a Mozilla browser. Lately, since Camino seemed mired in version 0.8, I’ve been using Firefox, but no more! It’s back to the good old days for me.

I suppose I need an iPod category. My iPod had a psychotic break last week, in which the 5 dots permanently replaced my track times and volume. I thought the dots were the chapters of audiobooks because I use my iPod to listen to audiobooks a lot and I’d only happened to see them during the audiobooks when I was clicking the middle wheel to get to the bookmarky thing–so I thought everything on my iPod had turned into an audiobook. (Note that I still haven’t read the manual to figure out what the bookmarky thing is called.)

In my defense, I’d like to say I had just done a bunch of stuff like updating iTunes and synching some wacky stuff through iCal onto my iPod, so I thought I’d caused the psychotic break somewhere in there. Plus, none of the buttons work right when you’re in 5-dot mode, except for the volume. They turn into jumpy, audiobookmarky things. Try it, you’ll see.

Veronica told me the five dots were the ratings system, which was reassuring, but I still couldn’t turn them off because I thought you had to hold down the middle button, which didn’t do squat. But I was reassured that I wasn’t the only totally clueless iPod user out there:
this guy had the same problem.

Maybe it’s time to read the manual.

My desktop manager demo at work (i.e., on Evil!Windows) finally expired, after several betas, new versions, a record 18 days of Windows uptime, and other tricks to keep it going. I considered paying the shareware fee, but I didn’t like the looks of the e-store, and it didn’t like the looks of my PayPal information. So I uninstalled and went looking for more.

I found zillions of them listed at TimelyWeb. I had to cut-and-paste to get to the product websites, to check whether they looked legit or like spyware. I decided on enable Virtual Desktop, which has the same functionality as my last desktop manager, more or less, a nice, if busy, preference pane interface, and a 30-day free trial. If I get addicted to it, I may even brave another e-store.

As of this morning in California, Intel is officially inside the new macs. I don’t care for the name “MacBook Pro,” but I’m a New Englander so I was doomed to go on calling it a Powerbook for at least another five years–no harm done.

My free audiobooks were all mp3s, so they didn’t do the cool audiobook bookmarking thing. But I found the solution at iPod Hacks:

In the info for a track (command-i), under the Options tab, there’s a checkbox for Remember playback position. Check it.

That’s it. I haven’t field-tested it on the iPod yet, but it works in iTunes. I’ll try to report back later today.

I have a little iPod that needs filling, so I’ve been downloading free filks and free audiobooks. Why pay more?

From the NaNoWriMo forums: Writing aids for Mac OS X. Personally, I don’t use any of them, but I did download SideNote and GraphViz to give them a try. Most of my “notes” are actually links, so sidenote may clean up my desktop a bit.

I had no idea there were Sudoku Dashboard Widgets out there. It’s the perfect NaNo break…