Firehed’s Blog

And it works great :D Unfortunately, I’ve got 500MB of messages to download. And, oh god, the message count keeps going up. 8025 and counting. This may take a while.

I’m still working on getting the sent/trash/spam to funnel into the appropriate local folders (the setting is quite obvious on the iPhone; I’ve yet to find it in Leopard’s Mail 3.0).

Err… take that back. The help windows are awesome - especially the auto-highlighting-menu-item things. In Apple Mail, select the appropriate Gmail folder, and select the corresponding folder under Mailbox -> Use This Mailbox For. All of the “special” folders (drafts, sent, spam, trash) can be set up this way, so you don’t need to navigate to the folders in the specific account. Yeah, it doesn’t make much sense - just check out the screenshots after the jump.

Good stuff. If your Gmail hasn’t rolled over to IMAP yet… well, I can’t help you. I’ve been checking way too frequently since I heard it was starting, as I’ve been craving it for some time now.

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If you want to change the color of Leopard’s new dock, it turns out that it’s pretty easy - just replace the files that comprise the background. Thanks to a recent post that hit Digg, we know the location of the files and which ones specifically need replacing: in /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources. They provided a rather smoky glass replacement; I thought I’d go for something that has that more bluish-green look of normal glass. I didn’t nail the color dead-on - I’m no graphics designer nor do I really have an eye for colors - but I thought I’d post up the files for anyone who wants them.

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You’ve probably read the reviews, followed the hype, and drank the Kool-aid. Fantastic - now go out and buy your copy. I just wanted to point out something that I doubt too many people have discovered yet: exposéing spaces.

First, Spaces is the first virtual desktop manager that really works. Windows remember positions, you can easily rearrange windows between the different virtual areas. I started with the default four-up, but decided that I’d like a bit more space to work, as I’m on a laptop. I’m now running a 3×3 grid, giving me an effective 45″ screen on my Macbook Pro. Of course, it doesn’t have the same actual usability of a screen that would be so insanely large (you’re talking a resolution of 4320×2700 if it scaled!) - indeed, a screen that big on a computer would probably make chiropractors worldwide cry. But I digress.
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Wow, it’s been way too long since I’ve actually posted up my bit-tech POTM entries here. Well, critique and enjoy. As usual, anyone who wants desktop-res can contact me and I’ll be happy to provide one; also contact me if you’re interested in some sort of commercial use and we’ll work something out (I’m cheap!). Photos in the full post.
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I’m not sure about anyone else, but I’ve noticed in the last week or two that a lot of people I’ve never met in any sense of the word want to be my friend. To be honest, I’ve never really seen any value in the “friends” aspects of websites other than Facebook. I never use the features, and it seems that most people who do are being played to some extent. For quite some time, Digg had an unusually large proportion of it’s front-paged stories contributed by the top users. I thought the whole idea of this so-called social media was bringing democracy to the internet. Sure, you’ll find demographics that have similar interests, and that can bring some value to the idea of internet “friends”, but when one person has five thousand friends who blindly digg his submitted stories, hasn’t that defeated the whole purpose? Every single story that Kevin Rose has submitted to Digg has been front-paged. Every single one. Actually, two more than every one, somehow - as of writing, he’s submitted 305 stories, of which 307 have been made popular. Go figure.

Fine, he’s the founder of Digg. Free publicity and geeky respect. An anomaly. But what about the user Minley? Joined Digg yesterday, five stories dugg, two submissions (from the same domain, which is mentioned twice in his profile) and - get this - 965 friend additions. That, my friends, is blogspam. I’m not one to typically check out the profile pages, but I thought I’d investigate a bit for this clipping I’m putting before you. I’ve had four or five people befriend me in the past couple days on Digg, and at least one more on Twitter (whose username was the domain - not exactly subtle). Each showing a relatively short time of using the service, little participation, and an unfathomable number of friends. I only expect it to happen more often - at least until the point where they finally realize it doesn’t work.
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Absolutely fantastic stuff - one of few games (if any) in recent memory that actually lived up to the hype. Portal is amazing. Some enterprising hackers - bless them - have found some way to hack it into HL2 as well (I do hope this will become a more official mod - perhaps something along the lines of the Black Mesa mod, the HL1 reconstruction project). Talk about reinventing strategy for a game that lives on after it’s been played to death. And, of course, the game itself is awesome. Short, but appropriate - and the ending is quite rewarding. Episode 2, also fantastic. Easily the most challenging of the three HL2 games that exist so far for me, and the achievements add in some nice replay value beyond it just being awesome. And the ending… oh, the ending! Valve, be faster with Episode 3, or you’ll have riots outside the doors.

All I’ll say for now (bedtime!), but if you haven’t played it, you’re missing out. And if you haven’t played HL2 and HL2:E1, they’re also included - so play them first.
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But not my account yet… damn. Oh come on, Google! Then tweak it so I get PUSH service on my iPhone and my digital life will be complete.

In other news, I’m thrilled at how well the Airport Disk thing works on Apple’s Airport Extreme. Gigalan and USB disk and printer sharing are making me quite happy, not to mention the extra range. 3/4 to full strength through two floors and cabinet, where I was intermittently getting either nothing or 1/4. I can actually USE network shares over wireless now - both the ones off my fileserver and my USB backup disk. Yay - I can finally sync my iPhone again.

Oh, and happy sixth birthday, iPod.

About fourteen seconds after I’d hit the submit button to have finally bought Panic Software’s excellent Transmit FTP client, I get a new email announcing that the beta for Flow has just gone live. If nothing else, it would have saved me a great deal of irritation having to restart Transmit every five minutes until I’d bought it, and delayed me doing so a bit longer. But I’ve been using it long enough in the time-limited trial that it’s worth my money either way.

It’s almost as if the software world just wanted to spite me for hacking my iPhone. I finally made the attempt to migrate to 1.1.1 since Installer.app updated, and it went rather less smoothly than I’d have liked. Luckily I managed to get halfway there, SFTP in, and chop up random plist files until I got it in a properly working state again - basically, convince the old version of Installer I had to copy back over that no version existed at all, so I could properly redownload and reinstall the thing. Same went for the BSD subsystem and openssh. All over a wireless connection that’s been hideously flaky. Gah.

But it seems to be all good now, other than the fact that Customize doesn’t seem to work. And in truth, that’s really the sweetest app there - albeit the least practical.

Now all I need is the Amazon music store installed on it. I’m sure The Steve isn’t a big fan of the idea, but I rather like knowing that everything I buy is coming in a universally-compatible DRM-free format. Oh well, I can’t have everything. Like my custom ringtones, it seems. Sadness is devouring me, especially as I just made a nice fun one out of Portal’s ending theme by one Jonathan Coulton. Whatever, it’ll get there. I’d almost be willing to pay the buck just to simplify things, but it’s not even an option.

Sorry about the long delay since the last update. Moving - blah. Something like 300 boxes of stuff to unpack, plus I just started a new job this Monday (which is going well so far, in case you care). Given my past rants of extreme hatred towards SharePoint, it’s rather satisfying to be working for one of its direct competitors. But enough about me.

Soo… Leopard’s due in just over a week. I won’t be waiting in line as I have better things to do with my time, but I’ve played with the developers beta and found it to be excellent in terms of features, so I know how I’ll be spending the following morning. And lucky me - I get to split the cost of the family pack after having converted two of my resident household members to the dark side. So that works out to be around half off - and given the improvements, it’d easily be worth more than full price. There’s no one killer thing (that I found, at least), but the dozens and dozens of small improvements make for a much better overall experience.

And Steve finally told us what’s the deal with the iPhone SDK. February. Knowing him, the 29th (he just had to wait for a leap year…), but I’ll now stop my whining. I know what the deal is, have a vague idea of what to expect, and I know when it’ll be here. That’s all we wanted, Apple. I can’t see how it took three plus months just to get to the announcement, but I can’t change the past.
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