Sillybean

As if the hosting disaster weren’t bad enough, my laptop is increasingly unstable. For months, it’s been refusing to shut all the way down, failing on Time Machine backups, and generally being flaky. Today it’s suddenly much worse. It has stopped recognizing my USB hub, and now Numbers and Excel are both crashing on startup. [...]

The lost data was not recovered, but MAMP was persuaded to cough up its database connections, and Time Machine is now ticking merrily along — although, since it has over a month’s worth of stuff to back up, it’s taking a rather long time. If your Time Machine gets stuck near the end of its [...]

I’ve spent the last two days setting up virtual hosts with MAMP on two different Macs, one Tiger and one Leopard. I’m posting this so the next person doesn’t have to spend two days at it.

Setting up virtual hosts is really pretty straightforward, once you find a good set of instructions. (I had done this [...]

Stacks and the Dock

Prevent Stacks from changing docked folder icons (when alphabetized) Prevent Stacks from changing docked folder icons (when sorted by date) One way to put Stacks to good use — group applications into folders and use the Dock as a launcher. Clever. How to tweak the Dock’s color Get the app indicator triangles back Dock Doctor widget lets [...]

Well. The honeymoon is over; the words no longer come easily, and we are definitely in the “don’ wanna” stage. And one of the other books is bouncing on its toes for my attention.

New words: 908
Reason for stopping: snooze time
Sustenance: Raspberry tea, sweet green grapes
Exercise: wrestling grocery carts
Teaching the spell-check to spell: munchies
Mean things: tantrums
Time [...]

I think I finally have titles I like for all four of these books. Of course, whether I write all four of them is anybody’s guess.

New words: 863, plus 575 elsewhere
Reason for stopping: quota, tired
Sustenance: leftover soda from the road trip (mmm, sweetened acid in a styrofoam cup. Yummy.)
Exercise: nothing that really counts
Mean things: Earworm.
Time [...]

The old PowerBook having been pronounced not worth fixing by a genuine Apple Genius Bar employee over the weekend — remind me to tell you sometime about the “authorized reseller” that does repairs locally — and no new laptops having been announced at the Expo this morning, we took deep breaths and put two MacBook [...]

The Unofficial Apple Weblog posted Why a Mac tablet from Apple doesn’t make sense earlier today. I commented briefly there, but this seems as good a time as any to spout my theory of the Apple tablet.

(I bored several of you with this in person a few months ago. If you’re one of those [...]

Thanks, all you crazy Apple rumor people. You’re doing great things to my stock performace. Keep it up.

So it turns out that in version 8, the latest, the wizards over at Adobe > Macromedia managed to completely, totally, utterly HOSE Dreamweaver’s WebDAV compatibility. On both platforms it fouls up the lock files, and on Macs it’s so slow as to be entirely unusable.

I’ve been a longtime fan of the integrated site [...]

So, the other Steph and I were kvetching earlier about the lousy Word HTML we have to clean up all day… and I remembered something. A long time ago, I’d tried to use AppleScript to make the Word Unmunger’s batch mode easier to use. At the time, AppleScript defeated me… but now it’s Automator, and [...]

I’ve found myself in several Mac vs. Windows discussions this week (and it’s only Tuesday; this does not bode well), so rather than type the same thing all over again, I’m posting it here…

I love Macs because I don’t have to upgrade my hardware every few months just to keep things running. I have three [...]

I don’t really need a database app on my Mac at the moment, but if I did, this would be really tempting.

Here’s the first party shuffle that came up on the new iTunes. Interesting. Clearly I need to rip more Stone Temple Pilots and Smashing Pumpkins and whatnot… two of these are from one of my yoga/tai chi routines. I’m very happy to see three Garbage songs… now if only they’d come out with a new [...]

The new iTunes (4.5), as others have noted, is less than perfect. Which is sad, because the previous version pretty much was. Thanks to the guys at the OS X LiveJournal community I managed to get 4.2 installed in place of 4.5…. but 4.5 changes the iTunes library format, so 4.2 can’t read it and [...]