Red kidney bean chili. With chocolate chip cookies, and salad with Japanese-style sesame-soy dressing. The latter comes in a bottle from the store, but it tastes good. Tonight (once the bowl is frozen enough) the ice cream maker is making cookies and cream.
And if that weren’t tasty enough, the plan for this coming weekend is to go binge-eating at local restaurants.
A while back, I complained about the lack of spell checker in Movable Type. I resolved to write one, and I think I’ve finally got it working. Readers can now check the spelling of comment previews on my weblog, and I can check the spelling of entry previews. Please let me know if there are any problems—if you can’t leave a comment, email me.
If you want to install this on your own Movable Type weblog, the MTSpeling module is available for download.
In other Movable Type news, a few weeks ago I installed Subscribe to Comments on my weblog, so you can sign up to receive email when comments are posted to an entry.
It turns out many of the things that Mail is missing can be simulated using judicious application of AppleScript, Perl and keyboard macros. I’ve made my scripts available for download if anyone else is interested in trying them.
Regular disclaimers apply, of course. Running these on your computer will delete your email, reformat your hard drive, post your most intimate secrets to Usenet, and dry-clean your shirts.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here before, but I’m looking for a job.
Now that Rescomp has an IMAP server, I finally took the opportunity to try out Mac OS X’s Mail application on my “real” mail—I’ve previously tried it a few times, but never with the same quantity and type of mail I actually receive. Normally, I use Mutt from a Unix terminal, but I’ve always liked the idea of using a graphical client, and Mail has always seemed pretty well-designed and feature-complete to me.
I had expected Mail to work slightly differently than how I was used to reading mail, and I was prepared to change my behavior slightly to accommodate it. But within the first hour, I had identified three major issues that seriously cramped my ability to read mail:
He took away our Expanded Basic and now we just have Basic analog service. Turns out we’d only asked TiVo to record one non-broadcast program in the last few months anyway, so it seemed a waste of $25 (soon to be $35) a month to have thirty extra channels we never watched.So goodbye MTV, AMC, TNT and Nickelodeon! Goodbye CNN, CNBC, The Learning Channel, ESPN2 and ESPN! Goodbye Fox News Channel, FX, ABC Family, CNN Headline News and Lifetime! Goodbye TNN, Shop at Home, The Weather Channel and Disney! Goodbye A&E and Animal Planet!On the plus side, Charter turns out to be too cheap to install the right filter on our cable line (I’ve always found it a little amusing how it costs the cable company more—not including license fees—to provide basic analog service than extended), so we get USA, Fox Sports Midwest, TV Land, Comedy Central, MTV2, The History Channel, VH1, E!, MSNBC, Court TV, the Cartoon Network and the Food Network for “free.”
(If I were really bored, all of those networks would have had links attached to them. But now that the cable guy has come and gone, I can finally leave the apartment. So I will. Those who really need to find the MSNBC Web page can use Google.)
This week’s dinner menu: mashed potatoes with sour cream and chives, green beans vinaigrette, and deviled eggs. This week’s lunch features tuna salad with store-bought bread, and generally so far the cooking has seemed less of a hassle than last weekend.
No, I don’t understand the title reference, and I used it! It does seem that we’ve made a dinner completely out of side dishes, though. Yum.
This morning, I took the last of the meatloaf and gravy and scrambled it up with some eggs. Pretty tasty. Yesterday, I put some into an omelet with cheese. Mmm. We finished the spinach and potatoes on Friday. Too bad. They were good. I think we ate enough cream this week to supply a small army, though. Strangely, there’s still some ice cream left from two weeks ago.
Everybody seems to be comparing Apple’s new 12″ PowerBook to the iBook and the PowerBook Duo 210, including Apple. It’s smaller in every dimension than the iBook, but heavier (4.6 pounds vs. 4.2) and deeper (8.6″ vs. 8.5″) than the Duo. Okay, but why is everyone ignoring the PowerBook 2400? It’s lighter than the new PowerBook (4.4 pounds), and remains the narrowest laptop Apple has ever made—10.5″ wide vs. the 10.9″ of the Duo or 12″ PowerBook.
I’ve always had a bit of an affinity for the PowerBook 2400, even though I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. I think it’s because the PowerBook 2400 is based on the Alchemy motherboard, just like my PowerBase 180. I have a fondness for the Power Mac 5400 and 6400 (the 6400/180 being nearly identical to my PowerBase, except with an Apple case) for the same reason.
By the way, in case there was any doubt that the 17″ PowerBook has enough room for a full-sized keyboard with numeric keypad, consider this: The new PowerBook is nearly a quarter of an inch wider than the Macintosh Portable, the 16-pound “luggable” Apple introduced in 1989, which came complete with a full-sized numeric keypad.
But what?
How are spell checkers supposed to be effective when things like “calender” are real words?
I dug out my USB-serial adapter, installed Palm Desktop 4.0 on my iMac, and set up iSync. A little more complicated then it needed to be, but eventually I got it to work—by the way, why isn’t there a USB device class for serial adapters? It seems a pretty glaring omission. Luckily, mine has a driver for Mac OS X. Overall, iSync works pretty well, although it’s rather slow (this is probably due to my datebook having an average of at least one entry per day, dating back to the purchase of my first PalmPilot in 1997) and doesn’t synchronize some Address Book fields with my Palm.
I was very disappointed with iCal, though. Whoever designed it doesn’t appear to have had me in mind; that is, someone who doesn’t work regular days and for whom one-word calendar descriptions aren’t enough. I sent feedback to Apple; maybe a future version will be usable for me. It’s a very pretty application.
In the meantime, I could turn off iCal synchronization, but unchecking “Calendars” in iSync doesn’t make things any quicker, and as long as the iSync conduit is active in HotSync Manager, Palm Desktop’s datebook doesn’t get synced (is there any way to do both? I’d like to use its address book and Mac OS X’s, also), so I guess I’ll leave it on for now. Maybe I’ll go sign up for .Mac and publish my calendar on the Web.
He must have spent twenty minutes showing us the new themes in iDVD 3 and Keynote. I was a little bored. Other than that, though, the MacWorld Expo keynote was pretty impressive. The updates to iPhoto and iMovie look nice, and I’m happy that they’ll be free downloads.
The new PowerBooks are definitely impressive. I’m a little dubious about the worth of a 17″ screen on a laptop (will it even fit on a coach-sized airplane seat-back tray?), but the 12″ PowerBook is something I’ve been wanting for a while. A G4 processor, SuperDrive, and built-in Bluetooth in a tiny under-five-pounds case. Wow. I want one.
Apple also introduced a new Web browser, Safari. I’m using the beta to write this, and while it’s nice, it doesn’t impress me all that much. Some of the unique features are nice, like the bookmark management and use of Cocoa spell-checking for forms, but it’s missing enough features I’m used to in Mozilla and Chimera (like tabs), that I don’t plan to switch anytime soon. Steve claimed Safari was fast, but Chimera still feels faster to me.
I’m also a little disappointed that they chose to use KHTML as the basis for Safari’s HTML rendering, and not Gecko. They’ve done a pretty good job, but I like Gecko better, and regardless of technical plusses or minuses, I would have rather have seen Apple’s development efforts benefit Mozilla instead of KDE!
It’s off to Memphis now, where hopefully Dell will fix it. Even more hopefully, but much less likely, they will charge me somewhat less than an arm and a leg. At least this time they didn’t make me ship the laptop myself (when we moved, I conveniently threw out all the laptop shipping boxes I had from last time, which means I’d have to spend another $30 to let the UPS Store put the laptop into a box). They sent the Airborne Express driver out with a box. I was pretty impressed with this part of the service—I called Airborne Express around 2:30pm, right after I got off the phone with Dell, and they were able to arrange for same-day pickup, bringing a box and everything. I have always been impressed with Airborne’s service, unlike other carriers I could name.
It’s too bad I can’t say the same for Dell. I called their tech support number to set up the repair, and after an interminable wait, I was finally connected to a call center employee who I doubt worked for Dell, and I doubt was even in the country. He was friendly and tried to help, but didn’t know much about my problem, wasn’t able to tell me how much my repairs might cost, forgot to tell me some information about how the Dell repair process works (luckily, I’ve done it before), and the phone call took forever. At least he believed me when I told him the PC Card slots were broken. The last time this happened, they made me go through all sorts of hassle before just letting me send the darned thing in.
This will be the third time this laptop has visited Dell Repair, and the second time I will have had to pay for it. Tip: If you’re buying a Dell laptop, get as extensive a warranty as you can afford.