So I finally got Transmit. And now Cyberduck supports S3. Oh well.

I need to start posting again. Stuff of substance. In the meantime, my thoughts on the new MacBook Pro that replaced my MacBook.

It's excellent. I like it a lot. Leopard is a worthy upgrade. But you can read all about the good stuff elsewhere; I'll just list my complaints...

An unknon percentage of MBPs have been affected by a squeaky spacebar... inluding mine. Right on the spot where my right thumb hits the key. The keyboard is otherwise nice to use and key presses have a good feel.

The screen doesn't tilt back far enough. The screen is better than the glossy screen of the MacBook, but colours still change a little when looking down from above. Noticeably, the drop shadow on the active window turns from grey to white. I find myself wishing I was shorter, as I'm not always looking at the screen from the best angle.

The Wi-Fi/networking implementation is screwy. It thinks the wireless LAN at work is encrypted with WEP or WPA (it's not), and it either won't connect automatically, or it will connect and choose its own IP address, instead of authenticating like it had been told. Grrr.

Fetchmail wants to deliver email to localhost:25, but there is no longer a mail server running, and with Leopard being comparitively new, I've not yet found good information on enabling one. Interestingly, when I was playing with this the other day, localhost resolved to some uknown SMTP server's IP address and fetchmail was trying to give my mail away...

Time Machine seems to be just what the doctor ordered, but not exactly what I want. Since I already do a full disk backup with SuperDuper, what I really want is to select a few folders for backup by Time Machine, instead of backing up everything and choosing folders to exclude.

Unrelated to Apple, some third party developers need to think harder about their application icons. SuperDuper and YummyFTP, for example, have icons that are harder to pick out, since they are mostly grey and have fine detail that is not clear unless you're looking at a big version. Some of the best icons on my Dock: Opera, Safari, Firefox (vivid colours make it easy to pick out a particular browser); Coda and Transmit (Panic are known for design); iView, CaptureOne, Miro (yes, it looks like an M&M), Adium, TaskPaper and WriteRoom. Hmm, most apps have good icons, actually.

Australian English: grey or gray?

Waiting for the conclusion of Microsoft's Yahoo! takeover is like sitting in the eye of a cyclone.

Any suggestions or a good screenshot app for MacOS?

For most things I do, I've found excellent Mac software, but not screen capture. Requirements:
- Ability to save as PNG, JPEG or GIF.
- Capture a window or an area. I like to be able to get it pixel perfect.

My role model is the excellent freeware app, MWSnap for Windows. Really nice.

I love IMAP. More to the point, I love having access to all my mail from multiple computers.

However, little differnces between implementations can be annoying. When my ISP changed its mail server software, all my folders suddenly became sub-folders of INBOX, which meant that I had to download mail for all the subfolders again.

And now that I've moved from Tiger to Leopard, I find that there are slight differences between versions in the way MacOS Mail handles folders. It complained that I didn't have the INBOX prefix in my prefs as specified by the server. It should have been a simple change, but it then seemed to think that all the folders were different, so it had to go and re-download all my mail.

Downloading 250Mb of data is normally not something that takes hours, but individually requesting each of 4000+ messages takes a lot longer.

And then I have to upload all that email to my backup space on rsync.net - twice, in fact, because I have a separate weekly backup and I'm too lazy to set it up to make use of the files from the daily backup.

Hopefully it will complete by the time I go home. Which is likely, as I have a lot to finish. :-(

Is "our AS Number is lower than your AS Number" a valid taunt? Or is it just silly and juvenille of me to equate network longevity with superiority?

I'd love to know what the developers of Picnik think of Adobe's new Photoshop Express. It doesn't have the flexibility of Picnik, but the design is excellent. In particular, the way it lines up variants to click on makes it very easy to see what you're going to get when you use tools like white balance, B&W, auto-correct, etc. I also like the way you can deselect changes you've made based on type, rather than having to go back with Undo in linear fashion.

No doubt Adobe will use Photoshop Express as a way to promote its paid applications.

I shouldn't be surprised, but the capacity of notebook hard disks has increased a lot since I last looked, and prices look good, too:

Samsung:
- 250Gb - $175
- 320Gb - $245

Seagate:
- 200Gb - $195 (7200rpm)

WD:
- 250Gb - $149
- 320Gb - $225

This means I can make my next backup disk larger than the source disk, which in turn means that I won't have to buy two disks down the track when I eventually run out of room on the MacBook Pro.

Now just to figure out if one is better than the other. I don't have model numbers to go looking for reviews. Anyone have comments on Samsung vs. WD?

After a few months of having issues with my 3G iPod, it has finally died. I'm trying to reformat it now, but I think the hard disk is too corrupted for this to succeed. Yup - there's the failure message now.

Still, it has served me well for the four or so years I've had it.

And before you ask, I won't be upgrading to the iPod Touch - too expensive and not enough space. I quite like having all my music available. Maybe one day the more reliable flash memory will be cheap enough and large enough to replace hard disks, but for now, I'll stick with the iPod Classic while it still lasts.

Thanks Microsoft. Much better than making IE8, IE9, etc. behave like IE7 by default. Great news for the future of the web.