…Book-a-Minute SF/F (ultra-condensed sci-fi and fantasy books). See especially the extra-condensed Collected Work of Marion Zimmer Bradley, Collected Work of Stephen King and Collected Work of H. P. Lovecraft.
The tablet mac has been rumored since about the time of the Lisa, but now there’s finally hard evidence in the form of a US Design Patent No. D504,899.
If you haven’t gotten your fill of Enterprise-bashing, Haasim Mahanaim takes a final swipe at the show we loved to hate. He says:
Science fiction film and television typically does not aspire to be intelligent, instead there’s an entirely different mentality for sci-fi unlike any other genre. With science fiction there seems to be a campiness that is always present, permission to be goofy and immature.
I think he needs to watch BSG, but beyond that, camp is in the eye of the beholder. While I appreciate the classic camp of Trek, I think it was a symptom of the medium rather than of a different mentality. Rock creatures just don’t come off as well as cowboys on the small screen–but technology is catching up fast.
Here’s a break from my all-Tiger-all-the-time coverage: Longhorn has a new Red Screen of Death. It’s nice to see that Microsoft is giving so much attention to core Windows functionality by sprucing up the traditional Blue Screen of Death. How will Tiger compete with this vaporware, should it ever come out?
Pantycat is now a Dashboard widget called Maki. I orce wrote my own Konfabulator widget just to play the game, so I suspect that more addiction is in my near future. Plus some hacking…
There’s also a Wiki Widget that I skipped and some useful ones I downloaded. (If a widget doesn’t install automatically, toss it into /Library/Widgets.) I’m also thinking of turning the color wheel into a color widget after I read the Dashboard tutorial.
It seems that iTunes was just the beginning of Apple’s Windows invasion. Bonjour, the software formerly known as Rendezvous, is now available for Windows. It’s not really end-user software, but it’s an interesting sign of Things To Come.
I was shopping at a local bookstore (which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty) today. Among my haul of [genre deleted] books that I really don’t need more of I got one that that was marked “not for sale in the USA.” It wasn’t anything new or special, just a trade paperback edition of an old [genre deleted] classic.
It’s beyond me why it’s banned in the US. I should have checked my British Stargate novels for a similar proscription; now they’re out there in the midwest somewhere, circulating illegally! And here I thought my crimes were limited to educational video…
Brain of the day: His Brain, Her Brain
Daring Fireball has a page of cool Tiger details including one that I can’t wait to see in action: modify the modifier keys. This will put uControl out of business (it was free) and hopefully clear up that pesky uControl problem of caps-lock turning into control-lock on sleep.
Soon the whole world will realize THAT CAPS LOCK ISN’T DOING ANYONE ANY GOOD AND IT OUGHT TO BE A CONTROL KEY.
My Tiger is in the mail, but Slashdot already links some reviews of tomorrow’s MacOS, including a David Pogue review in the New York Times. (I used the BugMeNot FireFox extension to read it.)
Color wheel user Jim wrote in to say that he was having trouble with the transparent shading square in both FireFox 1.0.2 and Internet Explorer 6. I couldn’t replicate the FireFox problem, but my IE at work is doing the same thing. More breakage from the perpetually broken browser is frustrating, to say the least, but you can still use the shading box without the color background (while you’re waiting for a real browser to download).
So if you want the geeky explanation, here it is: I use a directX thingamajig (DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader filter) to get around IE’s fundamental brokenness as it manifests itself in PNG transparency. The latest service pack (SP2) seems to have turned off directX stuff for some people, which is, I suppose, what I get for using stupid proprietary extensions to broken browsers.
If you’re interested in stupid proprietary extensions for your antique broken browser, here are some other links about PNG alpha transparency support:
Or just use FireFox.