I have Tiger, hear me roar

30 April 2005

So I installed Tiger this morning. Lots of backup, and then Archive & Install.

It’s pretty nifty. Unfortunately, because my Hard Disk is “full of crap” Spotlight is taking ages to index it. And lots of processor cycles. To the point that when I tried to copy my “Previous Systems” folder off my main disk to my big fat external Firewire disk (at 4gb, should take ~ 4 minutes, right?) it offered me an approximate time of 12 hours.

Also, my fan is permanently on. I’m currently blaming Spotlight for this, too – even if I put the machine to sleep, the fan comes back on the moment I open it. Only about 40 minutes left, apparently, for Spotlight, so there is hope yet.

What I do know is this: it’s better than 10.2.8, that’s for sure. And Mail.app is lots better, though it may not look much nicer.

That’s my Mac Tax paid for the year, anyways.

Update: well, problems are arising. Not many, but they’re darn annoying. First: every time I sleep or restart the machine, it forgets what the wireless network is called. I have to type it in by hand – even though it’s in the list of favourites! Secondly, lots of fan action; turns off eventually, but it’s really inconvenient. I blame Spotlight. Hoping these things will be fixed by a point release ASAP. If anyone finds this via Google and has any suggestions… comment away!

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New Statesman on blogs, circa 1999

28 April 2005

Whilst digging around at work today, I chanced upon this New Statesman piece on weblogs written in October 1999. A little ahead of the bell-curve, then. And what a last paragraph:

“Blogs are never going to be big business and they’re not the future of the web, either. But I find that I visit them more and more because in the blogs you can still find that educated, anarchic spirit – rather as I imagine medieval universities to have been, full of wandering scholars – which once seemed the natural atmosphere of the whole World Wide Web.“

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Mock Duck

28 April 2005

Mock Duck – “a delicious assortment of thrift-store cookbooks“. If you’ve ever wondered how, following the apocalypse, you will pull off a swanky 60s-style dinner party with only tinned food, you could do better than some of this lot. You might get bored of luncheon meat and baked beans, no matter how cleverly disguised, though…

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Blockies interfacing with Google Maps

27 April 2005

More Google Maps hackery: Blockies allows users to tag photos by location, but even better, it then displays the locations of any photos tagged appropriately on this page, which hacks Google Maps to great effect. I’m kind of in love with Blockies, conceptually, and really want a London version… (I mentioned Blockies a few days ago).

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If Nintendo were publishers

26 April 2005

Stonking huge quotation from Steven Berlin Johnson (and his new book, Everything Good Is Bad For You in his post on what might have happened had videogames come before books: “While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children.“.

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A pair of interesting screenwriting links

26 April 2005

A pair of interesting screenwriting links, today. First, the weblog of John August, who wrote Go, Charlie’s Angels, and Big Fish. From there I found the site for celtx, a free cross-platform screenwriting program based upon (of all things) Firefox. celtx is pretty good – a bit clunky and it takes a while to get used to, but not half bad. John August is great; lots of interesting posts and he really likes to engage with his readers.

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General relativity is your high-school girlfriend all grown up

25 April 2005

McSweeney’s lists: Physical theories as women. Delightful, and oh so true. “4. General relativity is your high-school girlfriend all grown up. Man, she is amazing. You sort of regret not keeping in touch. She hates quantum mechanics for obscure reasons“.

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Better typography

21 April 2005

Five simple steps to better typography – a really interesting and well presented guide by Mark Boulton. It manages to explain concepts founded in print but with an eye to how they may work online. Useful stuff, a bookmark to come back to.

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Phatduck

20 April 2005

Phatduck – the blog of an American chef on a two month stage at Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck – recently voted #1 restaurant in the world in the Restaurant magazine awards. It’s fabulous; really personal, really interesting, and oh the food. Do subscribe.

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Annotate the planet! More!

19 April 2005

Blockies lets you annotate the planet even more than you have done already. You take a photo on your cameraphone, put a sticker with a unique code where you took the pic, send it to blockies.com with the code appended in a message. Now anyone passing just needs to message blockies, GET your unique code… and they get the photo. “Photo graffiti”, they call it. Now, to batch upload to both Blockies and Flickr… [via We make money not art]

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earlier posts for this month