dria.org

So last week I upgrade to a MacBook Pro. It’s a nice fast machine with all the OS Xy goodness I know and love, and a few strange quirks. First off, the sound in iChat just vanishes at times. This is moderately inconvenient but not a deal breaker by any means. More troubling were the occasional clicks and pingpong sounds coming from the harddrive. Harddrive noises tend to be on the “very bad” side of the spectrum, so I did some searching and found this post.

A comment on that post suggests that installing “Mirror”, a completely unrelated Dashboard widget, would somehow magically make the noises stop. I gave it a shot.

It worked.

My question here is: why in the world would that work? It makes absolutely no sense to me at all. Weird.

I’m still going to make daily backups, deep magic bedamned.

If you have ever had pain in your mousing wrist/arm, I suggest you run (do not walk) and order yourself an Evoluent Vertical Mouse. Three buttons + scrollwheel/button + thumb button, nice and light, fast fast tracking, and fully programmable in OS X using USBOverdrive. It is so incredibly comfortable. Sadly the Canadian distributor I ordered through (ErgoCanada) erroneously sent me the black/black version rather than the super-sexy purple/black version, but I love it way too much already to bother sending it back.

I call mine FATMOUSE.

This video is pretty amusing if you’re a Mac user and paid any attention to the latest talk about all the “new” features Windows Vista is introducing.

Seriously, Macs do all this stuff already, and more. You should try one out.

Sony has launched yet another iPod “killer”, coincident with Apple’s launch of the new, ultra-hot, iPod nano. Here’s a picture of each:

Funnily, in this New York Times article about the new Walkman, I can’t find the actual name of the unit mentioned anywhere. The word “Walkman” appears 14 times, but “iPod” is used 19 times. That’s gotta sting.

Anyhow, I want a nano. Later. I guess they’re running out already. Teehee.

I’m in search of software that will allow me to quickly and easily post photos — with thumbnails, thumbnail pages, captions, and ideally a user-comment facility — to the web, only hosted on a private, self-administered server. Think “flickr” or “.mac + iPhoto”, only without having to entrust your photos to someone else.

How about (this would work, too) something like Pixelpost, only with catalogue pages that will display clickable thumbnails for a whole month. Something like that would be sweet. Like candy.

I’m starting to think I might just have to suck it up and build it myself, but if you happen to know of software that does stuff like this, please post a comment here. Note 1: I have a Mac desktop and a Linux server, so whatever it is has to run on that. Thanks! Note 2: If you happen to know of a WordPress plugin that does something roughly like what I’m describing here, please post a url.