Celsius1414

Among the activities I haven’t done on a computer in nigh on a decade now: Rebuilding the Desktop. (You don’t have do it on OS X.) I had to look up how.

You can rebuild the Desktop manually by holding down the Option and Command (Apple) keys while the computer starts up.[…] Click OK when you see the message “Are you sure you want to rebuild the Desktop file on the disk “your disk”? Comments in info windows will be lost.

Nowadays of course, we have the more-advanced “Repair Permissions” as placebo technique for whatever ails your Mac. ;)

Ten arbitrary and somewhat random favorites (click to view at Amazon):

• Tron
• Trainspotting and Trainspotting #2
• Blade Runner
• Passion: The Last Temptation of Christ
• Romeo+Juliet
• The Royal Tenenbaums
• The Terminator
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show
• Run Lola Run
• Thirty two short films about Glenn Gould

Honorable Mentions:

1. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (no album ever released, but an awesome set of songs).
2. Twin Peaks (Angelo Badalamenti, TV).
3. Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City, San Andreas, and IV.

Project hosted on Google Code, bringing the venerable text editor into the 21st Century of Mac.

MacVim is a port of the text editor Vim to Mac OS X that is meant to look better and integrate more seamlessly with the Mac than the existing Carbon port of Vim. Here is a list of some of its features:

• Safari style tabs, Multiple windows, Toolbar, Transparent backgrounds
• GUI Dialogs
• Multibyte
• Keyboard bindings to standard Mac OS X short-keys (such as Cmd-z, Cmd-g, Cmd-o, etc.)
• Extensive help files
• Font panel: access to all of your fonts via the standard OS X font panel, proportional fonts render with fixed advancement
• Input Methods for non-English keyboard input
• Full-screen editing
• ODB Editor protocol support
• Client/Server: use the —remote switch on the command line to open files; script the server with remote_send() et al

Coding by Björn Winckler. See also the vim_mac Google Group.

Not to be confused with Mac Vim, the old Carbonized version.

A pair of stories on /. today hold a particular fascination for me, particularly when taken together:

“Linux Desktop Distro Shootout”

“War Brewing on the Inexpensive Laptop Front”

They point to a pair of stories:

Infoweek: “Linux Shootout: 7 Desktop Distros Compared”.

We tested openSUSE, Ubuntu 8.04, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva Linux One, Fedora, SimplyMEPIS, and CentOS 5.1. All performed well, and each had at least one truly outstanding feature.

(At the moment, I am veering toward Kubuntu.)

And The Christian Science Monitor: “More computer brands chase the ‘$100 laptop’”.

Bye bye, bulk. New lines of tiny PCs fit both in your purse and into third-world classrooms.

Taken together, I can see my near-future computing needs handled, particularly on the writing front.

I could have sworn I linked to these on the site before, but I couldn’t find it last night. Check out the old-school vibe in your terminal using Michael Hurwood’s Apple2Forever TrueType Fonts:

I like to remember those old days by using the various Apple Emulators that are available. Using these emulators involves working with “Disk Images” and I’ve written a few little utilities for myself to look at and manage those images.[…] Anyway, I sometimes I wanted/needed to view the images in their “natural” form, that is, in the Apple ][ Font. (Inverse text was a particular requirement.) So I created two fonts based on the Apple ][ screen display, called Apple2Forever, and Apple2Forever80.