My local forecast:
New rainfall amounts between a tenth and quarter of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms.
In other words, “You’ll get a little rain, unless it’s really raining where you are, in which case you’ll get more.” Which I guess has the advantage of being accurate.
…turn a fishtank into a deep fryer. With the fish still in it. Also demonstrates how to blow up a glass of water.
…be certain that you’re hiring a good designer.
…create art from construction paper and OCD.
…treat your skull like a word processor. Or, as the case may be, a food processor.
…make the American South even more medieval for the women unfortunate enough to live there.
…have sex. No, really.
 Finally, incendiary device manufacturers have reached out to an untapped market.
I have a new hero. (And while it’s true that my laptop is named Starbuck, that’s actually a Battlestar Galactica reference, not a coffee reference.) Yes, I am aware of what’s going on in Dilbert this week, thank you very much. |
Apparently the NSA is claiming that it’s impossible to disable the iSight camera built into recent Macs. Not true. Potentially useful for DC-area folks who need to set foot into areas where cameras are verboten.
Replying to Brian’s post about taking adaptive measures to global warming. This was too long for a comment.
Let’s say that, for some reason, you find the editor of the Colorado Springs Gazette to be a more credible source than ninety-odd percent of climate researchers, and you decide that the best political course of action is to do nothing until the crisis is obvious. I’ll stipulate that at such time, we’ll have much more evidence than we do now, so it’s therefore likely that we will have a better set of possible solutions at that future date than we do today.
That leaves three problems.
1) I hope you’ll agree with me that there is some level of human suffering caused by climate change today. (Such as the inhabited island that is no longer above sea level.) Your argument can be rephrased as, “there is not enough suffering yet to call this problem a crisis, therefore we Americans (who will be among the last to suffer) will wait until the suffering and death has increased.” Do you have benchmark total in mind for how much suffering and death is required before we agree it’s crisis time?
2) You further presume that there is a linear progression into crisis; unfortunately, climate science tends to disagree with you on this point. You have tipping points, chaotic effects, and runaway processes, such that there are potential effects that outstrip our ability to respond, even presuming continued technological progress. How well would America and Europe respond if the impact is a Dust Bowl cutting off the food supply? Or if England gets dropped into a Siberian temperature zone? Or Boston and Seattle?
3) Finally, note that the same country that you expect to become levee-building ubermenschen is the one that built the levees in New Orleans. At what point do you expect our government to be blessed with such wonderful foresight, and how many cities do you expect to lose in the process?
On the bright side, it will probably be much more scenic to take a boat to Manhattan than the subways, and you’ll be able to get off right at the 34th floor, saving much elevator time.
I just realized that I never linked to my latest TidBITS article, Build Your Own 23-inch MacBook. Yes, I’m still using this setup. Man, it rocks.
Here’s a small but very useful trick if you’ve populated your AppleScript menu with dozens of useful doodads. Many of my scripts are more in the character of macros—quick procedures that duplicate a few manual steps so I don’t have to point-and-click in several places. The problem I had is that it briefly interrupts my workflow to mouse up to the AppleScript menu and then find the script I want hierarchically.
With Quicksilver or another launcher utility, of course, you can assign keystrokes to whatever you like, but that raises the problem of remembering which keystroke goes to what.
So I came up with this instead. I’ve assigned the following AppleScript to be a Quicksilver trigger (using Command-F12):
tell application “System Events”
tell process “SystemUIServer”
click at {1105, 11}
end tell
end tell
Â
If you’re wondering, {1105, 11} are the X/Y coordinates of my AppleScript menu. I’d be happy to tell you yours, but that depends on both the size of your monitor and where you’ve stashed the menu icon. The 11 coordinate—vertical distance from the top—is going to be the same on your Mac, at least until Leopard comes along and gives us resizable menu bars. You can find your horizontal coordinate the same way I found mine–fiddling with the X number and seeing what gets clicked on when you run the script.
So I hit Command-F12, and down comes the menu. Then I can use the keyboard to navigate; type a few letters to highlight a category, right-arrow for the script list, boom. If I’ve stashed a script in the Applications submenu (at the bottom in the picture above; these scripts live in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/exact_app_name instead of ~/Library/Scripts/Category_name/), then I can keyboard to them directly without a submenu.
Example: I want to run that Image scaling script, so I type Command-F12, “IM”, right-arrow. Or I want to Noguchi my Desktop (more on that in a later post), so that’s Command-F12, “NO”.
On my secondary G4, I only have about a half-dozen scripts total, so this is overkill there. But if you’ve more than that installed, then give this a shot.
One artifact of having been around for the start of the home computer business (back when we called them “microcomputers”) is that I have certain memory sizes stamped into my brain. 143K, 400K, 800K, 1.4M: the amount you could fit on various disks back in the days no one had hard drives.
I get a small dose of future shock whenever I see sustained Internet throughput at (one old disk) per second. Today I hit 800K downloading an Apple update, and I had this sudden image of a toaster-like device, with Apple and Comcast logos on it, firing 3.5″ floppies across the room while my laptop danced and pirouetted to catch them flawlessly.
I remember when downloading a 143K disk image was a “leave the computer on all night” endeavor. Now I’m wondering how long it will be before I get 800Kbps over a cell phone.