Don’t besmirch my beautiful MacBook. It appears that at least some white MacBooks turn orange after 2-3 weeks of use. As cool as a colour-change laptop might be, it would be nice to have the choice. I hope not to update you on this story later.
It's not all caviar and baby wipes, mate
Monthly Archives: June 2006
Something about perspective
I suspect the picture attached to this story at the BBC could be the basis of one of those cheesy inspirational posters. Something about the fighyt not always going to the strong, or the slenderest bough holding in times of need.
Balance
This weekend we discovered that a pipe buried inside the kitchen wall has developed a leak, just 5 days before we officially hand over the house. On the upside, I had to slow down while cycling in to work this morning so that I didn’t disturb the deer crossing the path in front of me.
Slogans
I used to work in a clothing factory. One of the items we made was a child’s t-shirt with a couple of eskimos rubbing their noses together on it. And by that I mean it was a picture of two eskimos, not two actual eskimos stapled to it. And they weren’t rubbing their noses on the t-shirt, but rather on each other.
Anyway, in case anyone was unclear about what the picture represented (like you probably are by now) it said “Kissing Eskimo’s” on it. Behold the power of the apostrophe – I asked management what part of the eskimo was being kissed, or perhaps what possession, but they didn’t know. I think they were too busy looking at the contract to see who was liable for the mistake.
Note: Eskimo is often considered an offensive term, but while checking whether I should be putting an ‘e’ near the end I find that it’s actually a reasonably accurate, inclusive term that the allegedly more acceptable term ‘Inuit’ doesn’t match. All Inuit are Eskimos, as are all Inupiaq, and all Yupik, but the reverse does not hold. In any case, this was all back before we did respect to foreigners. Like we do now.
Moving the Dock
Once I’ve setup Quicksilver the next thing to do is to move the dock. By default the dock is centered at the bottom of the screen. On a widescreen like the MacBook has (and my iMac) I prefer it on the right side of the screen, but the standard setting available in OS X again centers the dock on the right side. This makes dragging things to the dock difficult; the position of the trash varies depending on how many items are on the dock.
Enter Tinkertoy. This is a great piece of donationware that, among many other things, lets you move the dock with greater control than OS X allows. A couple of clicks and the dock is pinned to the bottom right corner, and I know that mousing to the corner will get me to the trash every time.
Combining this change with Quicksilver, I can take everything off my dock (except for the Finder icon, I’m still working on that) and easily see what’s running (because only running items are shown). It ends up looking like this (Safari is shown because I’m writing this blog entry – I know it’s actually running because it’s in the dock):
The dock is often criticized, with some justification, but with this setup launching is easy (Quicksilver, no dock required) and the dock actually provides useful, easily understandable feedback and an easily usable trash.