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Sun, 05 Sep 2004

To buy one Apple product may be viewed as misfortune...

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Mmmm... iPod... After a year or so of watching my bank balance move monotonically in one direction (the wrong one), I now have an income again. I celebrated this fact by splashing out on a 20GB fourth gen iPod. It arrived on Wednesday, and on the whole I've been impressed. The design of the thing is, of course, fantastic. Not only does the iPod itself seem to be getting neater and simpler with each generation (without sacrificing functionality), but all the little touches (like the fold-out packaging) cement the impression of a product into which real thought has been invested. I particularly like the power adaptor - it's just a transformer with a 6-pin FireWire port in it. As I said, simple.

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Wed, 07 Jan 2004

Spot The Difference

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To celebrate the 20 years of the Macintosh, Apple have released a very slightly different version of everyone's favourite Superbowl commercial.

Mon, 05 Jan 2004

Small but Useful

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Raging Menace has a bunch of little Mac OS X programs by Alex Harper, and very useful they are too. SideTrack is a replacement driver that lets iBook and PowerBook users reconfigure the trackpad to provide scrolling areas, tap-to-right-click and on. MenuMeters provides a set of neat meters for memory, CPU usage and so on, that don't take up much screen real estate; I've found it particularly useful to confirm that it is indeed more memory that I need, not a faster processor (when the paging indicator goes off the scale, that's a hint). I'll probably have a look at SleepTight at some point too. It gives Jaguar the Panther-like functionality to lock the screen when the machine sleeps. Handy when you're carting the machine round, but I'm only using the iBook at home at the moment, so I don't really need it just yet.

Sun, 28 Sep 2003

Mmm... Blowfish...

After looking for ages, I've recently found SSHKeychain, an Aqua-integrated ssh-agent thaat works the way I want it to. Other agents have done the job adequately, but SSHKeychain has a bunch of little features that make it stand out from the crowd. It'll run in the menubar (so it doesn't take up space in the dock), but more importantly it makes use of the Keychain. Not only can you store your passphrases in there, but the agent can forget keys when the machine sleeps, and ask you for the (Keychain) passphrase on wake, or the next time the agent is accessed.

Now I just need to get round to sorting out an on-demand wrapper for SSH tunnels...

Mon, 10 Mar 2003

Yikes

Follow the links in a MacSlash story about web badges, I ended up skimming Apple's Guidlines for Using Apple Trademarks and Copyrights, and noticed the following, fairly broad, prohibition:

3. Variations, Takeoffs or Abbreviations: You may not use an image of a real apple or other variation of the Apple logo for any purpose.

"Any purpose". Thousand's of unimaginative still-life painters must be quaking in their boots.

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