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- Politics 2005
- May - April - March - February - January
2004
- December - November - October - August - July - June - May - April - March - February - January
2003
- December - November - October - August - July - June - May - April - March - February - January
2002
- December - November - TidBITS - Apple - Macintouch laptop battery report - Apple - Tinderbox Community Forum (not official) - WhatIsMyIP - Wherever you are, there you are... - TinyURL - Turn big ugly URLs into cute little ones... - rob at whiterabbits.com - rmchuff - Eudora - Fire - BBEdit - Mozilla - Internet Explorer - Transmit - iTunes - VNCthing - Terminal
MNJ RSS
MNJ Politics RSS Here is a collection of link to sites maintained by people who have mentioned that they read MNJ:
- Dan Hon - An imaginary place in a reactionary time - dws
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All about Safari Everything You Wanted to Know About Safari RSS, Part 1 - Safari 2.0 stands tall among the Tiger highlights. In this three-part series, you'll learn everything you need to know to customize this browser for newsreading. Plus, you'll explore the technologies that power Safari RSS beneath that beautiful UI. [O'Reilly MacDevCenter.com] Alas, I still switch back and forth between using the latest nightly version of Firefox and OmniWeb. I have had Safari open by accident a few times since installing Tiger, but that's it for me - especially since Safari doesn't work at all from behind the firewall at work while the other two browser do.
Apple posts security update for QuickTime Apple: QT7 Security Update - Apple posts QuickTime 7.0.1, which addresses a vulnerability to malicious Quartz Composer objects. [MacInTouch]
On planning for the perfect shot Doug Plummer writes about composing the best possible shot and how shooting with a digital camera can help you make the most of what is left after all that planning meets all of the real-life variables.
Seattle Times on the Olympus Evolt digital SLR Linda Knapp writes glowingly about the Evolt-300 digital SLR.
What a way to spend the weekend I really know how to spend a three-day weekend - taking it easy at home while I fight a bug. I've got the whole nine yards. Stuffy head, sore throat and low grade fever. I picked up the same bug that Natalie brought home last weekend from her trip to Washington, D.C. 
Regardless, I still took the time to enjoy the outdoors a little today. I spent 30 minutes or so taking photos of some of the seven or eight Painted Lady butterflies feeding on a flowing bush alongside our front porch. Starting yesterday it became obvious that the northward migration of Painted Ladies that lepidopterists in California and Oregon noted earlier this year had made it here. I even saw a Painted Lady in downtown Tacoma - one who wasn't looking for paying customers, that is...
How Podcasting works Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire fame points to a useful article about how Podcasting works:
A closer look at Spotlight A Closer Look at Spotlight - Spotlight integration with Tiger and its apps tilts the scales back toward Safari, Address Book, iCal, and Mail for your core applications. Matthew Russell shows you how this intelligent technology enables you to find just about anything, anywhere, regardless of where you are at that moment. [O'Reilly MacDevCenter.com] Unfortuntely, for all of its possiblity, Spotlight will ultimately be a failure if all it accomplishes is to encourage everyone to use Apple's built-in entry-level programs instead of exploring the wealth of alternatives.
Keynote update fixes hole Apple fixes hole in Keynote- Patch mends flaw that could let an attacker get hold of data. [CNET News.com]
Sometimes, missing the Apple silliness is not so bad In the last year that I have been working for the City of Tacoma, one of the bigger changes has been that I no longer catch the latest wave of controversy or intrigue about Apple's twists and turns on the first moment they hit the Mac Web. Sometimes I miss out on something significant, but most of the time I simply find out about the latest silly tempest in a teapot after a few of the most ludicrous story lines have melted away. That's the case today with all of the "news" about Apple courting Intel.
Amazing. CNN on unlocking Archimedes' ancient text Imagine revealing a copy of the text that Archimedes wrote nearly 2000 years ago on such topics as mathematics, the physics of flotation and gravity. It is being done right now, and CNN has an interesting story about it tonight...
Positive reinforcement on Birding Washington This weekend I am home from our normal birding adventures, and while it rains outside I am sitting and listening to episodes of BirdNote - a syndicated National Public Radio show and podcast from the Seattle Audubon Society. I just finished listening to a clip about Mountain Bluebirds and Mt. St. Helens, and I was excited to see that the page on the Seattle Audubon Web site for this show served an ad for the Birding Washington book that Natalie and I wrote in 2003 and was pubished in 2004. There is nothing better than bringing together the work that Audubon chapters do to save critical habitat and to encourage people to get out into nature and treasure what we have around us along with promotion of our book. Sweet!
Macintouch's tips for making more of Spotlight If you are using Tiger, you should read through the report on Macintouch about making the most of Spotlight...
Tracking reviews of the LifeDrive Sometimes it feels like I may be the last PDA user in town, but despite this fact, I am reading recent reviews of Pa1mOne's LifeDrive with interest. Digit Online News offers one example...
On the value of backups Today's Seattle Times has an article from a tech writer who, against her own advice, neglected to keep good backups of her data. The inevitable happened. Read about her lesson, and do your part to avoid the same situation.
Waiting for the thrill from Dashboard It looks like I am not the only one who finds Apple's Dashboard program lacking:
Much as I felt with many previous eye candy add-ons to Mac OS X, Dashboard is just window dressing to me - so much so that I have stopped running the program.
If you use Tinderbox to blog, Tiger is your ticket Tiger + Transmit + Tinderbox - Transmit 3.2 supports Automator actions, one of which is "synchronize from your Mac to a remote server." This makes updating a Tinderbox site like this easy as cake. Use Tinderbox to export the files and run then run the workflow - Automator will tell Transmit to connect, synchronize, and then disconnect. I'd written an Applescript to do pretty much the same thing many moons ago, but the recent releases of Transmit broke the "quit at the end" portion. This is much slicker. [Tinctoris.com]
Apple issues recall for some PowerBook, iBook batteries Apple issued a recall notice today for some iBook and PowerBook batteries. MacCentral has the story, including the serial numbers to check to see if your a lucky winner of a new battery. I am not...
To clean install or not? NetNewsWire creator Brent Simmons answers this query with a simple sentence: "Doubt is a parasite that lives in computers." Read his thoughts... In the interest of full disclosure, I did the lazy man's upgrade to Tiger - a simple upgrade after doing a full back up on my PowerBook. So far Tiger is behaving pretty well, except that I continue to have issues working through the firewall at my job at the City of Tacoma. No joy with iTunes or with the browser in NetNewsWire. OmniWeb and Firefox work fine, however, and I can once again download newsfeeds through NetNewsWire while at work. You win some, you lose some... |
Tiger's migration assistant Tiger's Powerful Migration Assistant - Although Mac OS X engineers have written a reliable, robust migration tool, it's important to keep in mind the limitations of the file transferring process. By Francois Joseph de Kermadec, O'Reilly Network [myapplemenu]
Apple releases first Tiger update According to MacUpdate, Apple has released a new update for Tiger that is meant to fix some problems with the first release of Mac OS X 10.4. Check MacUpdate for more. I will add more to this post tonight, when I get out from behind the firewall at work that I cannot get through with many applications under the first release of Mac OS X 10.4... Update: I installed the update on my PowerBook, and so far things are working. The real test will be when I take the laptop into work tomorrow. Here are the release notes for this update from Apple:
Sure enough..I spoke too soon on Tiger Last night I installed Tiger and today I ran into my first fatal - OK, only annoying - flaw. The issue appears to be a common one: Tiger doesn't like to work behind Microsoft firewalls with the same proxy settings that worked under Panther. Hopefully Apple fixes the issue soon. Essentially it means that I can browse the Web just fine, but I can't listen to streaming radio through iTunes at work. Now I will have to listen to NPR on my Windows desktop... |
Another successful Tiger installation Although I may be jinxing myself by saying so, it appears that upgrading my 12-inch PowerBook G4 to Tiger tonight has come off without a hitch. My applications continue to work - after downloading an update here and there. The biggest surpise - it seems that the fan is running a little less than under Panther, and for some reason I am seeing much better AirPort reception - a full four bars while I work in the living room compared to the three bars I have always seen since I started using this PowerBook more than two years ago. Bonus!
Mac mini as a multimedia appliance, running Linux The Mac mini as a stand-alone Linux multimedia appliance - The Mac mini is an ideal low-cost, high-performance PowerPC development platform for numerous applications. This article shows you how to install Linux, configure the networking and audio subsystems, and install and configure a simple Web server. You will also set up an FTP server that will let you get multimedia content onto the hard disk remotely. Future articles will add the software required to make it into a stand-alone multimedia appliance. [MacMerc]
Apple DVD Player 4.6 available Apple DVD Player 4.6 now available - Apple has released DVD Player 4.6, a new version of it's DVD software included as part of Mac OS 10.4 Tiger, as noted by MacCentral... [MacMinute.com]
birdPod can help identify birds by their songs Given my combination of interests, I can't go through the day without mentioning a new product that combines bird songs and an iPod to create an identification tool for bird watchers - birdPod. The product offers a one-stop solution for folks who want to start identifying birds they hear in the field or in their back yard, and with a little ingenuity it could easily be extended into a tool to play bird songs through a speaker, as some birders do to call birds to them. I should mention that there are other tools for doing this. I have used my 12-inch PowerBook G4 for playing back bird songs and for playing the audio in the field to try and get a response from birds on some rare occassions. It is good to see a company marketing a bird identification tool specifically with the iPod. Such tools already exist for PDAs such as the Palm PDA that I carry with me everywhere...
Dashboard widgets as an invitation to malware A number of Web sites over the weekend noted that the combination of Dashboard in the new Tiger version of OS X and the default settings in the newest version of Safari offer one of the easiest ways yet to open up the Mac to malware. Macintouch offers some quick advice... On the humorous side, the MacDevCenter offers this:
A Tinderbox CSS tutorial Just what I needed...another reminder that my Tinderbox-based sites are less than state of the art design. This should be a good read:
MacCentral gives glowing review of Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT Review: Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT
iView MediaPro 2.6.4 update released for Tiger iView MediaPro 2.6.4 was released earlier today. The Mac OS X version brings updates that support Tiger...
Getting started with Automator Actions Write Your Own Automator Actions - Tiger introduces Automator, which lets users string together preinstalled script steps--called Actions--into a workflow that can be run and saved. For developer types, these Actions are a convenient way to distribute scripts. And in this tutorial, Matt Neuburg shows you how to write your own. [O'Reilly MacDevCenter.com]
Apple Security Update 2005-005 Apple has rolled out another security update that is recommended for all users. Since I am still running Panther on my 12-inch PowerBook G4, this update weighs in at 6.4MB. Here are the details from Apple:
So, how is it working for you? |
MacWindows on network apps broken by Tiger MacWindows offers a different perspective on the Tiger upgrade experience for people who need to work with VPN clients under the new OS. It looks like many VPN clients are broken under Tiger, and there are no easy fixes or workarounds juts yet...
Mark follows up on Tinderbox and Tiger discussions Tinderbox creator Mark Bernstein follows up on the discussions of how the information manager works under Tiger.
Outlining task managers Ted Goranson's excellent series on outlining and outliners digs into task manager that offer some outliner features this month on About This Particular Macintosh. Useful stuff, as usual!
Tiger tips from real users Macintouch has a new reader report with useful tips about installing Tiger from real users...
On Tinderbox and Tiger Doug Miller writes about Tinderbox and how it might work under Tiger. Like me, Doug is waiting on Tiger, but it sounds like he has a bigger itch to get going with the system. Doug echoes some interesting questions uttered by Jeffrey Radcliffe regarding whether Spotlight will work well with Tinderbox. Jeffrey's post is also worth reading for his insight into Tiger: Tiger Tales
One of the main reasons I am waiting With all of the other things I need to do right now, stories like the on below continue to make me think twice about leaping to Tiger:
Still waiting on Tiger I am debating running out to find a local computer store that still carries Mac software and buying a copy of Tiger today, but for some reason I am having a hard time getting excited about the big cat. I guess I am not the only one...
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