I used to have a home made anti-stress ball, consisting of a flour filled balloon; it was made for me by one of the French students currently on industrial placement at work. I say used to as one of my colleagues managed to break it, which at least proved it really was a balloon filled with flour. Which is a shame as I was rather fond of it.
Emacs is almost infinately customisable; a fact I didn't really get to grips with this fact untill I found myself on a Fedora Core box a while back with a net connection but without my favourite set of keyboard short cuts. This really brought home how just a few simple customisations can come to be relied upon.
Determined never to be caught short in such a manner again I decided to make my .emacs permanently available, providing I have a net connection that is.
After running with Fire as my primary IM app for the best part of a year, its finally been usurped by Adium. After running the two in parallel I found I liked the cleaner interface of Adium over that of Fire. I'd tried Adium in the past and found I couldn't take an app with a cute little duck as a mascot seriously, but Adium just seems more polished than Fire and seems to be vastly more customisable.
We've had a cactus plant sitting on our kitchen window-sill for the last three or so years; it hasn't done much apart from growing a bit occasionally. But after so much inactivity our unassuming cactus has decided to produce not one but three spectacular flowers. Based on past inactivity we probably won't see anymore for a few more years so a photo seemed to be in order. Sunday was a slow day.
I've swapped themes, at least for the time being, to the very customisable, visually gorgeous and almost perfect Regulus theme, written by Ben Gillbanks at Binary Moon.
Almost perfect? Well it does cause the W3C validator to barf slightly on the sidebar. No worry though, a small hack to sidebar.php and all was well again. The diff is available for those who are interested in this sort of thing.
I've just downloaded and installed the latest update for OS X via the Software Update utility. The update requires a system restart which isn't unexpected. What was unexpected was the second restart in the middle of the reboot sequence.
After my heart resumed something approaching its' normal rate I did what I should have done in the first place and read the update documentation. If I'd done this I should have spotted the key phrase:
With the Mac OS X 10.4.6 system software update, PowerPC-based Macs will restart twice, instead of once, after the initial installation.
No explanation as to why this was neccessary though.
This was also spotted, with similar cardiac effects, by todays edition of The Register.
I get spam email; so does everyone I know with an email address. My mail client of choice is currently Apple's Mail.app and this includes a Bayesian junk mail filtering system which, after a bit of training, is very effective.
First there was the paperless office which was going to free us from the drudgery of sheets of paper. That was first mooted as an idea in 1975 and my desk is still covered in the stuff. Hmm.
Then there was wifi which was going to liberate us from wires and turn us all into wireless road warriors. A quick rummage through the contents of the laptop bag I carry with me each day does tend to disprove that idea somewhat.
There used to be a time when, if you were driving on a motorway or dual carriageway, you looked in your rear view mirror and you would see, approaching rapidly, very rapidly, a Bedford Astramax van. You would be safe to make at least one of the following assumptions about this van.
A lot of blogs have lists of essential things and sheep like, I've done the same for my take on apps, one list for the Mac and another for Windows.
Which is all fine and good.
But it's nice when you see a different take on this sort of list genre and these two lists caught my eye and attention today:
