November 2007

From the BBC:

The consumer watchdog Which? has uncovered an ex-nurse illegally advertising Botox parties on eBay.
By posing as a potential customer, a Which? researcher heard how the ex-nurse had injected drunken customers with the facial treatment.

Sounds like a fun night out!

How many more times are we going to have to endure this kind of crap?
It’s really starting to grate on me.

Amusingly, according to Macworld:

The ad was created by Omnicom Group’s TBWA\Media Arts Lab, but unfortunately has caused some browsers to crash, leading some sites to pull the ad from their online properties.

No mention of which browsers crashed though……

Apple REALLY need to stop doing this.

Cool use for the Wii remote.

Help feed the poor while brushing up on your vocabulary.
Freerice.com is a website that does just that by giving you a word and suggesting four possible definitions. For each one you get right, they donate 10 grains of rice to the World Food Program (WFP).
Rice is paid for by advertisers, including Apple and Toshiba. It’s a cool idea and one that should be suppported.

There’s been a lot of press about the hits and misses in Leopard. But my two fave features seem to be quite low on the list!

1: Airport in the menu bar.
Yes I know it’s been there forever, but it sucked before, and now it doesn’t! Proper realtime updating of available networks, including security status. It should have been sorted a long time ago. Thankfully, now it is!

2: Finder and mounted shares.
This was my most loathed part of all previous incarnations of OS X. Mount a remote volume, put your Mac to sleep and wander to another location. Open it up and watch and wait for the spinning beachball of doom to do it’s thing.
If you’re lucky, you may get a “volume disconnected” message, albeit eventually. You may however have to forcefully reboot your machine to sort it.
This behaviour is now no more, and it’s a joy! In fact, I really like the way Leopard deals with remote servers. Authenticate to the machine, and you instantly have access to all the shares on the machine. No more multiple ‘Command-K’ing to connect to the same server.

It may seem like small fry against the behemoth Time Machine or the instantly cool Quick Look, but in terms of usability, it’s the little things that make all the difference.

I really hate reviews that misinform, and while the Macworld review of Leopard is mostly accurate, there are some gross inaccuracies!

First, if the Dock is on the bottom of the screen (where a lot of people tend to keep it), a stack will display as a curving column of icons or as a rectangular grid, depending on how many items are in the folder.

While this is true of the default behavior, it is easily rectified with a right click -> view as -> grid. Problem solved.
Interestingly, this choice is not available if the dock is positioned on the side. It’s grid or nothing!

For folders where the number of items changes regularly (such as Downloads), you never know which display you’re going to get.

Wrong again. Once again, right click invoked context menu has the answer, which happens to be the same as above!

Furthermore, stacks displayed as columns sort items alphabetically beginning at the bottom of the stack, while stacks displaying as a grid sort items alphabetically beginning at the top left.

Someone really ought to invest in a two button mouse. Context menus are a wonderful thing.

You open a Finder window in Cover Flow mode, then drag the lower-right corner of the window down to see more files. Oops! Watch instead as the Cover Flow icons grow to gargantuan size while the list of files you’re actually trying to expand remains the same size.

And you can then reduce the size of the icons by dragging the bar below them up, thus revealing more icons.

For those who are a couple of generations behind in their hardware, the prospect of a Leopard world is bleak. For one, any Mac with a G3 chip is automatically left out. This includes all of the original translucent iMacs; you know, the ones that helped get Apple back on its feet.

Do what now?!

Other G4s that Leopard doesn’t support include Quicksilver and earlier Power Macs and Cubes released before January 2002; eMacs sold before October 2003; Titanium PowerBooks older than November 2002.

So, machines about as old as G3 hardware then…..

We were able to get an unsupported mini working that way, albeit slowly.

Which is possibly why they’re considered “unsupported”?

There are always going to be casualties in the bleeding edge market. Dropping support for the G3 was an inevitability. It struggled to run Tiger without loads of ram, and Leopard is a whole ‘nother beast.

Dan “Bjorn Turoque” Crane on the Air Guitar!

I consider the air guitar to be the ne plus ultra of both high and low tech, and thus find myself subservient to its power.

The oddest directions I’ve ever had.

Through the gate, left down the dirt track, third chicken shed on the right.

From the BBC Website

Prince has threatened to take legal action against fan-run websites unless they remove photographs of him.
A fan group, Prince Fans United, claims the star is trying to “stifle all critical commentary” and he is in “violation of the freedom of speech”.
But Web Sheriff, the UK firm the pop star has hired to enforce the ban, said it was “not an attack on fans”.

In September, Prince took action against video sharing website YouTube to remove clips of his London concerts.

Whatever about the Youtube thing. I think it’s stupid but hey…..
But this latest row is simply nonsense!