One nice feature that the Powerbook has over the iBook is support for screen spanning: you can connect an external monitor to the laptop and ‘extend’ the desktop to the new monitor. For some inexplicable reason (save maybe another ’selling point’ of the Powerbook), iBooks don’t ship with this feature. Instead, they only support screen ‘mirroring’, which is pretty worthless since the laptop goes to sleep with the lid closed.
Here’s a simple hack to enable screen spanning on most recent iBooks. Just run the installer script, and it works. I’ve had no problems, but of course some people have complained that the hack broke their iBook, killed their dog, and ran away with their mothers.
Macservers.org has a nice article on how to configure the built-in Apache webserver, and how to install and configure MySQL and phpMyAdmin on OSX.
Some of the information in the Macservers article is out of date. I recommend getting the updated Mac OSX PHP 5.0 installer package from here. The newest MySQL package includes an installer for the OSX startup item script, so you won’t need to install the Entropy.ch one.
While I was in line at Microcenter tonight, I witnessed just how bad at security most people are.
Microcenter cashiers pump you for information. It’s a given. They ask for as much info as you’ll give them. There was a pretty twenty-something girl in line in front of me (I was buying Half-Life 2, of course). The cashier asked her for her address, and the girl answered. The cashier then called her by her last name, and asked her for her phone number, which the girl glady gave. Finally, the girl gave out her email address.
What if I had been a stalker? It’s not an unreasonable assumption — it is Microcenter. For the most part, information thieves are just data pickpockets, but the risks to single women are even greater. An overheard street address could have the nearest Peeping Tom hiding in your bushes a few hours later.
This person gave out a major portion of her personal information to a total stranger, in public, where anyone could and did overhear. And she didn’t even get a free widget! At least at Linens & Things they bribe you with free dish soap.
I thought about mentioning how dangerous her unconcern for the security of her own personal information was, but I didn’t, because she probably would’ve maced me.
In certain cases, some Microsoft mail clients will encode mail attachments as a MIME type of “application/ms-tnef”. These attachments show up as ‘winmail.dat’, and are invariably unusable.
TNEF’s Enough is a free app that extracts files from TNEF stream files, which is pretty handy for Mac users in Windows office environments.
My sister says this is a true story about me, when I was a little kid:
“Dad ran into a lady the other day who taught Bible School one summer. She said she would never forget you, because, at the end of the School, when they asked who would like to lead the prayer, you volunteered.
“You said, “I’m going to say the kittycat prayer: ‘Meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow. Amen.’”
“Of course all the kids had to say their own animal noise prayer — it was a disaster.”
Delicious Monster’s Delicious Library app is supposed to be released today, and I’ve been counting down the minutes. What does this app do?
What doesn’t it do?
“Delicious Library’s digital shelves act as a visual card-catalog of your books, movies, music and video games.” It’ll scan in these items using your Apple iSight camera to read the bar code. No, really.
And of course, it has all the other good stuff you’d expect from a library-type app, including voice-activated catalog searches, iPod-synced catalog lists, user ratings, and recommendations.
Vaporware? We’ll know today.
