Ahem:

A hearty Whoo-hoo! thanks to the 10.5.2 update.

Bonus and completely unrelated trivia for the day:

Both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on this date in 1809, the former in Hardin County, Kentucky, and the latter in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. Happy birthday Abe and Chuck! Not too shabby of a duo!

Back in the days of NeXT, there was a bundled application called Digital Librarian. And as AppleInsider describes in this article, “Road to Mac OS X Leopard: Dictionary 2.0”,

Included with the system were the complete works of Shakespeare, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Thesaurus.

With the new Dictionary.app, you have the ability to view other dictionaries, as well as all of Wikipedia — I’ve already been using this capability a ton. Combined with using the keyboard shortcuts under the “Search” menu, searching multiple places is very easy and quick.

An item that might go overlooked is in the “Go” menu — “Front/Back Matter.” Choosing that while the Dictionary is selected reveals various meta items like the people associated with making the included New Oxford American Dictionary, prefaces, introductions, etc. But there’s actually a massive amount of additional resources here. Check it out:

• American Voices by William A.Kretzschmar, Jr.
• How to Read an Etymology by Anatoly Liberman
• Key to the Pronunciations
• Key to the Abbreviations

Ready Reference

• Language Guide
  • Rules of English: Understanding Grammar
  • Guide to Spelling
  • Guide to Capitalization and Punctuation
  • Words: Making the Right Choices
  • Clichés
  • Proofreader’s Marks
• The History of English
  • Timeline
• States of the United States of America
• Presidents of the United States of America
• Declaration of Independence
• Constitution of the United States of America
• Countries of the World
• Chemical Elements
• Standard Weights and Measures with Metric Equivalents and Conversions
• Metric Weights and Measures with Standard Equivalents and Conversions
• Alphabets

Of course, in our always-online culture nowadays, all of this stuff is available via your favorite web browser. But if you happen to be offline (horror of horrors), these could be very useful.

Browsing through the features and technology of the fast-approaching Leopard, I happened across the UNIX page and a mention of “Terminal 2,” an updated version of the bundled term application. Here’s the spiel:

The Terminal application in Leopard takes advantage of the operating system’s native text and graphics capabilities, using Input Manager and CoreText to fully support non-English languages. The updated layout engine provides very fast rendering of ASCII, ISO, and Unicode text, and a new user interface gives users around the world the ability to harness the power of UNIX. A simplified inspector and integrated settings pane make it easy to change the look and feel of Terminal.

New user interface, eh?

Now, I spend a lot of time in the CLI environment, although it’s currently shifted over to iTerm due in large part to its tabbed windows. Lo and behold, check out the top of Terminal 2’s window:

kGTD is pissing me off. :)

Generally speaking, it has done a serviceable job during my recent experiments, even if it has (understandably) slowed down as dozens of projects and scores of actions are added.

But where it’s beginning to fail is on the recurring actions. There’s some sort of screwy thing going on during syncing where random recurring items are either “completed” out of repetition (and thus existence) or are kept moving to the next day.

This is not acceptable for a system that is supposed to be trusted; unfortunately, since kGTD is apparently not going to be updated with the still-unscheduled appearance of OmniFocus, I am forced to look at other options.

I think I have three or so choices (which isn’t to say there aren’t others), not counting sticking with kGTD for now. None of them is ideal; all of them will be supplemented (and thus improved) by using Quicksilver as the main entry method.

1. Anticipating Leopard’s coming improvements, trying an iCal-only system even though its current slowness is a big drawback.
2. Cobbling together something with Remind, as I’m well-familiar with its syntax and could get back up to speed pretty quickly.
3. Switching over to the quickly evolving iGTD.
4. Some combination thereof, e.g. using Rem2ics and iCal to Remind.

More later. It’s time to get my muffins prepped for baking. :)

I have had occasion in the past to fall in love with the CLI email client “mutt” — last year, in fact, it wound up being a great resource while I made various server consolidation and administration moves and was spending a lot of time in term windows.

There are several guides out there for setting up mutt, but it’s always nice to find a newly updated one with the latest info. Via an article on macosxhints comes this great linsec.ca guide: “Using mutt on OS X” by vdanen. He covers everything from installation, building/compiling, and the usual setup stuff, then moves on to what have been deal-killers for folks in the past — Address Book integration, attachment handling, improved threading, and other coolness. Definitely recommended.

Myself, I’m holding out to see how Leopard’s improvements work out. “Stationery” and a “media browser” don’t bode well. ;) Notes and to-dos are intriguing, however.