Earth: Mostly Harmless

I received my new mouse today, a Logitech MX610. It’s very nice, and it Just Worked™ on my iMac with all features (except the LEDs) enabled, with no drivers or anything, which I wasn’t expecting.

Despite it being wireless, it somehow (through some technological jiggerypokery beyond my comprehension) is able to wake up the Mac from sleep. Very neat.

I’d highly recommend it.

I kinda missed this at the time, so here’s my attempt at catching up - and a very geeky trip down memory lane.

Linked below is the very talented John Siracusa’s article on the fifth anniversary of Mac OS X. I know exactly where I was on Mac OS X’s launch day of Saturday 24th March 2001, because I was working in the Scotsys AppleCentre Glasgow selling it.

I was fifteen at the time, and it was an exciting day. It heralded the effective end of a system that I’d grown up knowing in the most excruciating detail, but also some kind of new beginnings. It also represented a huge challenge, since as with everything Apple, troubleshooting and compatibility information was a bit thin on the ground before the launch. Also, none of us had a scooby about Unixes.

People I demoed it to on the launch day were very impressed, and when I look back on how far it’s come since then, I’m almost embarrassed. Yet it did establish a solid foundation for everything that was to come: iTunes, Quartz, the new versions of QuickTime, the Intel transition and countless architectural improvements.

Typical of Scotsys (and Apple at the time that I worked with them), we didn’t have enough copies to sell. I think we had around one hundred, but most had been set aside for pre-orders. In any case, we sold out.

Scotsys has been taken over since I worked for them, but I heard various things at the time regarding an Apple Store in Glasgow. There was supposedly a three-year agreement between Apple and Scotsys not to open stores in Scotland until they had time to restructure their business.

I left Scotsys in March 2003.

I’m just saying…

Five years of Mac OS X:

Mac OS X is five years old. John Siracusa takes a look at the road behind as he ponders the critical role the OS has played in Apple’s revitalization. From closing the book on the original Mac to practically inventing a new platform overnight, OS X changed Apple and its users in ways that worthy of a birthday reflection.

Mac OS X 10.0 was the end of many things. First and foremost, it was the end of one of the most drawn-out, heart-wrenching death spirals in the history of the technology sector. Historians (and Wall Street) may say that it was the iMac, with its fresh, daring industrial design, that marked the turning point for Apple. But that iMac was merely a stay of execution at best, and a last, desperate gasp at worst. By the turn of the century, Apple needed a new OS, and it needed one badly.

(Via Ars Technica).

This is so incredibly cool. I’ve been looking for a Mac ROM file from the System 7 era in order to set up an emulator for a while, but this tutorial makes it dead easy.

It has a great geeky nostalgia for me as System 7.0.1, the version used in the tutorial, was the first version of the Mac OS that I used, and started off the whole computer thing for me. Oddly enough, the first time I tried 7.0.1 was on a Mac Plus, though my first proper system was an LCII (one of the pizza-box Macs).

You can now get every system version up until 7.5 or thereabouts for free from the Apple software download site. Also, versions of MacPaint and MacDraw are available from a site linked to the tutorial.

Here are some screenshots from my installation. Click for full-size versions.

The old-fashtioned shut down dialogue box, with the cool speaky dude!

the Map control panel running (I never really understood its purpose, though it was cool at the time). Also visible - the About This Macintosh window.

Mac System 7.0.1 on your keychain:

Filed under: Hacks, How-tos, OS

I’ve been using portable Firefox with my keychain flash device for a little while now, and today reader Dimitri has pointed out the Mac-on-a-stick project. Basically, it allows you to put a completely functional version of the Macintosh operating system (in this case, system 7.0.1) onto a USB flash memory device.

To accomplish this feat, you’ll need:

• The Mini vMac emulator
• A ROM image
• A disk image to act as the flash device’s "hard disk"
• Older Macintosh system software
• A USB flash key device (32MB will do the job)

Check out the website for instructions on how to put it all together. I’m definitely going to check this one out.

Thanks, Dimitri!
 

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(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)).

Worth a look. The blogging client is especially nice.

Flock: First Look:

Flock is a new collaborative browser built on top of open source Firefox code. It integrates with del.icio.us, with blogging, with RSS management and with Flickr. It’s also very pretty.

I spent several hours yesterday exploring the new Flock beta release and mostly crashing it. Fortunately, Paul Stamatiou had more luck.

He has an extensive review of the browser, complete with tons of screen shots.

Flock: Under those Feathers [Paul Stamatiou]

(Via Lifehacker).

Vienna is a really nice GPL-ed RSS and Atom newsreader, which I’ve started to use quite a lot. The only thing which was stopping me switching from NetNewsWire completely was the lack of any ability to send things over to MarsEdit. But, behold, Daryl Manning and the Vienna web site came to the rescue with a neat little AppleScript. Only thing was it didn’t allow for any blockquoting or source attribution (like the (Via: ) string I always have after syndicated articles).

So after a little re-learning of my limited AppleScript skillz, I’ve produced my own version of the script, which quotes articles as follows:

Article link

Article body…. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Morbi quam libero, porta et, tincidunt a, viverra non, lacus. In eget lorem ut justo aliquam fringilla. Nullam quis lorem vitae elit hendrerit aliquam. Praesent lacinia leo. Aliquam semper orci. Nulla euismod faucibus nunc. Phasellus aliquet turpis quis justo. Maecenas vel mi. Phasellus vitae purus. Ut aliquet condimentum felis. Quisque elit. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Aliquam nunc. Ut faucibus metus ut mi. Etiam et nisi. Proin quis metus. Duis molestie pellentesque lorem. Nulla facilisi.

(Via Feed home page link).

Obviously it doesn’t include any of the graphical or CSS stuff you see above, it just blockquotes and paragraphs the article. Another caveat is that it only works if you’re viewing a single feed - not a folder or smart feed, as yet.

Download the script here (ZIP file, 3,858 bytes). The original was freeware AFAIK, so do as you wish with it, and please fix the bugs!. Bear in mind that Daryl’s work is still under his copyright though.

TUAW reports on a new UNIX for newbies eBook, available as a free PDF download. But it’s different from anything else I’ve seen - this one uses the euphemism of magic and spells for commands - something I thought might get quite tiresome after the first few pages but seems to really carry through due to the author’s skills of explanation and analogy. It contains one of the best explanations of relative and absolute paths I’ve ever seen:

Paths

Let’s discuss paths a bit more. Paths are just that: paths. In a forest, we walk along paths so we don’t get lost. In the Tower, we follow paths to different rooms. Filesystem paths are no different; they will lead you to different directories and files.

There are two types of paths to know about: absolute and relative. An absolute path is from the root to your destination. It’s like being at the front door of your house and walking to the kitchen. You are starting from the very beginning of your house. The same is true with a filesystem path — it starts from root ( / ). So any path you see that starts with a slash is an absolute path:

/mudroom/hallway/kitchen

A relative path is from your current location to your destination. For example, if you were in your
hallway and wanted to go to your bedroom closet, that is a relative path. You’re not starting at your
front door since you’re already in your house.

bedroom/closet

Relative paths do not start with a slash — which is a very easy way to tell the difference between absolute and relative paths!
Now, say you’re in your bedroom, but you wanted to leave and go to the kitchen.

../hallway/kitchen

Notice the dot dot ( .. ). That is a special thing in Unix that says “I am leaving my current room”.
Now that you understand paths better, let’s start walking around the Tower of Nix.

Here’s TUAW’s take on it.

Unix for the Beginning Mage:

Filed under: Terminal Tips, Humor, UNIX / BSD

If you want to learn the OS X command line, but find the available books intimidating, bristle at the thought you should read anything for “dummies,” or just worry that you may by eaten by a grue while plumbing the depths of /dev/random, Unix for the Beginning Mage may be just what you’re looking for. The book, available as a free PDF download, takes a humorous approach to learning some basic features of the unix shell and environment. The premise is that you are a mage in some D&D inspired world learning to cast “spells” from the command line. The better your spellcasting becomes, the farther you advance through the “Tower of Nix.” Best of all, the example commands are all executed in the OS X Terminal.app, although it’s basic enough the examples should work without too much effort on other unices as well. So if you’ve been avoiding the command line, you’re officially out of excuses; drop by and read this very, very gentle introduction to Unix the Unix Mages have put together.

Just keep a Scroll of Kill -9 ready and watch out for that grue.

[thanks Scott!]

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(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

This is a pretty interesting plug-in for iPhoto which makes the link between ‘the world’s greatest photo management software and the world’s favorite blogging platforms’, according to maker Daikini Software. I’ve made a couple of test posts here and it seems to work pretty well with WordPress. Daikini claims it also works with Movable Type™, TypePad™ and Blojsom.

The only bug I’ve discovered means that it doesn’t scale photos in a manner which respects their proportions. Still it’s only at version 1.1.1, and you can’t really complain for free.

It certainly speeds things up when photoblogging. Perhaps I’ll use this when travelling in the future.

Screenshot:
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Well, I am rather pleased with myself at the moment as I just got the Fink Project’s distribution of GNOME running on my Mac.

It looks really promising so far. I’m using Apple’s X11.app implementation just now but as far as I can see you can also use the Xdarwin X11 system or compile your own (should you be a sadomasochist). GNOME is a bit flaky in terms of error handling when running apps from the the Terminal, but I suppose you can’t expect it to be perfect.

GNOME has always bugged me in one small, but eternally annoying way: text sizes are incredibly variable between programs and different user interface elements. Maybe it uses a different DPI setting for certain things, but it’s rather irritating when you need to go back to the Gnome Control Center and change your application text size because the app you’ve just launched is barely readable. Perhaps there’s a command-line switch to set it before the app launches, but as the installed GNOME executables don’t have man pages, it’s impossible to tell. If anyone can enlighten me, please do.

Ramblings on server-admin
It would be great if Apple would come up with some way to log in to a Mac remotely using a graphical interface. I know that you can use VNC, Timbuktu or Apple Remote Desktop but they’re hardly the most bandwidth-efficient solutions: they are effectively streaming video servers. I know that the Mac OS X window manager (the Quartz display manager/rendering system) is far removed from Xwindows but it would be really nice if there were some way to pipe graphics instructions, rather than the resulting images, over to another system, Xwindows-style.