This is one that’s really only going to interest people who use the bash command shell. You may already know how to use filename completion in bash, but this package adds much more flexible argument completion.
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I have a love/hate relationship with Dashboard widgets.

I think the basic idea is pretty cool. I hate the fact that Apple forces you to use them in a separate space from the rest of your desktop. Widgest overlaid on my desktop would be useful to me. Widgets that I have to stop working in order to use are not so useful. Fortunately there’s a program called Amnesty which solves this problem. I’ll write about Amnesty in another post.

I find most widgets to be toys… but once in a while there’s a really useful one, like AppUpdate. (more…)

I’ve done some small improvements to Shiny Things; mostly adding some Wordpress plugins and fixing some problems.

You can now explore Shiny Things by using tags. (more…)

Ever since I saw these on Slashfood, I’ve sworn I’d never have them in my house, but they’ve never left my mind. A few days ago I ran across them… perhaps sought them out… at the local food coop. I was horrified… perhaps gratified… to find them.

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I’m working on cleaning up Shiny Things… as part of this, I’m fixing some old articles, and I’m migrating the tags from the way I’d been embedding them to a better solution using Ultimate Tag Warrior for Wordpress. So you may see some old articles showing up on the feeds… sorry for the reruns. I should be done in a day or two.

Amazon today unveiled their new video download service: Unbox, rumored for several months. Apple is expected to announce the iTunes Movie Store on September 12th; I imagine that Amazon wanted to beat them to it by at least a few days.

The service is built on Microsoft’s Media Player architecture, and utilizes Microsoft’s DRM (Digital Rights Management). Some of the consequences of this are:

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In the course of working on the Apocablog, I needed to debug some very messy HTML that Wordpress was generating. The sidebar looked awful, and it was a huge tangle of nested UL elements. I ran across tidy, an HTML prettifier… it’ll give you a list of errors it finds in the HTML and also format it, captalize it, indent it… make it readable. Very helpful. And it was already installed under OS X, too!

You know those little icons that show up in the address bar of a web page? And then later stick around when you bookmark the page? Which Shiny Things doesn’t have (yet)? They’re called “favicons”. They were introduced by Microsoft to enhance the experience of using Internet Explorer.

Originally they were placed in the root folder of a web site; the browser would automatically look their for the icon. Nowadays there’s a special HTML tag that the site can use to tell the browser where to find the icon.

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