All Forces

I love my tabbed Safari, Firefox, and Camino. Ever since Tiger came out I’ve been enjoying multiple sites in one window and it’s been spreading to other apps like my favorite text editor. SkEdit recently got the tab treatment amongst other things. Even iChat is tabbed now, although through a plugin. It’s a tabbed world and I am loving it. I am way more efficient and live with less clutter, a selected pet-peeve of mine. Now the last frontier would be the Finder. I really hope Apple develops this since I don’t know if this is something that is possible through a third party app.

Link: Tabbed finder mock up by Andy Budd
Link: Chax - iChat plugin

12 years ago I acquired this old Macintosh from Otis, the Art School I was attending to at the time. I used to work part time at the computer lab there and this little machine was sitting in a closet collecting dust until I asked to take it home. Since then I have never been able to use it for lack of an Operating System. It turns out, the OS, the applications and it’s documents all get saved to 400k floppies, something virtually impossible to find nowadays. And I was never really sure what model exactly this computer was since it just says Macintosh on it. I eventually gave up on the quest of finding floppies and the Mac was stored away in a closet. Going from apartment to apartment and finally to our current home’s garage. Last week I decided, after many years of retirement, it was time to open it up and see if I can pull a Serang by replacing the innards with that of an iMac SE and a flat display from an IBM ThinkPad.

To my surprise I found all these signatures inside the box and realized this was no ordinary vintage Mac, this was model M0001, the very first Macintosh model ever built. So now I have a dilemma, do I continue the original plan of hacking it? or do i restore it back to it’s 128k glory?

NOTE ADDED: When I say the very first Mac model I am saying the first generation of the Mac not the very first individual unit.

Got LOTS of pictures!
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Only six days for CSS Spring Reboot 2006! I just signed up and will be working on a long time overdue redesign of All Forces. So the challenge is out there for all of you to join in on the redesign.

Link: cssreboot.com

iCal Exchange - A free way to publish calendars online, public or private.
Project24 - Dynamically generated calendars for iCal
iAlertU Demo - Must see video of iAletU, the coolest application of motion detectors on Powerbooks. So far it only works on the new ones but development is in progress for other models
Learn To Program - A gentle introduction to programming (ruby)
Prototype Disected - Jonathan Snook’s awesome visual guide to Prototype’s methods and properties
PayPal Helper - Using Javascript to modify a PayPal shopping cart
Affiliate Marketing - Tips and Tricks of affiliate marketing
Mac Se/Cube - A Mac Cube inside a Mac SE
Mac SE/Mini - A Mac Mini inside a Mac SE
Mosaic Podcast - After much technical delays with compression issues, I finally launched the video podcast at Mosaic. A 45 minute clip was compressing at 300mb through the standard QuickTime to iPod video export. I finally found an app called Podner which allows me to do 2 pass encoding, has cropping and batch processing. The size of the files went down to around 120mb, a much more manageable size for both serving and downloading. I’m also using Lostify, an app that allows me to edit tags on video files for Video Podcasting.

The default interface for Mail signatures allows you to do rich text signatures using the fonts and colors palette. You can even drag an image into the compose signature window and it will be included in every email as an attachment. This is fine for most people, but attachments should be just that, an attachment of a file I am sending, not an image in my signature. So here’s an easy guide on how to do CSS signatures referencing images on an outside server and not as an attachment.
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What is Portable Apps? They are applications that save their data in the drive they reside in, not in the host computer they are running in. This mean I can run Firefox from my iPod and all of it’s preferences, bookmarks, history and extensions will stay on my iPod and not in my computer. This allows me to run my app in any computer without leaving any of this info on the actual computer. Freesmug has a small list of open source apps, but it covers the basics (browser, email, ftp, cha,t etc). It has been rumored for a while that Apple is working on a iPod portable home folder but nothing has been released yet from Cupertino. But in the meantime, there’s Freesmug.

Link: freesmug.org/portableapps

My Powerbook has been lagging for a while now. Mostly due to the fact that my 100 GB drive is down to 1 GB of available space. I started the process of archiving to my external drive some projects I was done with and I was able to bring it up to 15.3 GB. I then remembered reading about an application that strips all extra languages that come with Mac OS X and all it’s applications. The worst thing that can happen is that I have to reinstall the OS, no big deal. I gave Monolingual a try and was highly impressed. Not only does it strip superfluous languages (warning: make sure u don’t remove english and us english, they are two separate options) I would never need but it also removes architecture specific parts of apps like the code for the new intel macs. These new universal applications include the application for both the powerpc and intel architecture but this is precious space I want back for my ever expanding 50 GB iTunes library, my 20 GB iPhoto library and oh yes, my work, I forgot that’s why I originally got the computer for.

I shaved off 2 gigs of languages and intel code.

Link: monolingual.sourceforge.net

Saturday night our friends Scott and Amy came for BBQ, Firepit, and a night of gaming. For the board game, we chose the game that first got us into german board games, The Settlers of Catan. Settlers is a famous game amongst gamers. I has won numerous awards including game of the year. It also has gained an expansion set for more players and variations of the game like Seafarers of Catan and a Catan travel edition. Settlers plays in about an hour, it simpler than Puerto Rico, more complex than Carcassonne and very, very addictive.

Link: Buy from Amazon .com .uk .de

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