Unswitch?

Tim Bray, working for Sun, is getting upset with Apple's new commitment to secrecy and litigation. He's talking about "unswitching."
In some cases I can understand him, but on the other hand, Apple and most of the applications rock.
I had the same trouble with Safari ("There were two things that drove me away from Safari. First, it’s recently started randomly doing intermittent spinning-beachball freeze-ups. I can’t spot a pattern.[...]") but now I switched back to firefox and I don't care that Apple does not fix the bugs in Safari as fast as possible.
And the secrecy Tim's talking about is not such a big problem for me. If they want to keep their secrets, I don't care.

Linux DAUs exploring OS X

Here we've got a Linux DAU trying to learn OS X. I hope this article was just a joke. If he really just played around with his Mac for about 4 hours and then comes to to the conclusion, that OS X is nothing for him - poor boy.
Even the fact that he thinks Darwin OS is some Linux flavor is reason enough to hit him hard with a stick.
(First read at #!/bin/blog.)

Rediscover that damn web

Because of bothering about buggy firefox versions the last week, today I installed fink - even I never wanted to do that again - and started to build my own version of firefox.
I used the build instructions provided by the Mozilla project and played around with the .mozconfig files, I found here and here.

And - finally - here is my optimized build of Firefox 1.0.2 for G4 7450 PPC CPUs, build on my iBook and tested with Mac OS X 10.3: Firefox-1.0.2-ppc7450.dmg
Use on your own risk and better backup your $HOME/Library/Application Support/Firefox folder before starting the application.

"We are open." ...again

Less than 48 hours after Apple repelled fair use activists, the iTunes Music Store can be again accessed from any platform, allowing customers to buy music unencumbered by DRM.
Now let's see how long it takes until Apple closes that hole again.

iBook - finally.

iBook
Originally uploaded by madhatter.

I promised to take a picture of my iBook when I wrote here about it. Now, after getting over the lost of my beloved G3 PowerBook, I did so.
Here it is! ...uhh, shiny, isn't it!?

The little black brick is my mobile. Thought it might be a nice contrast. I was wrong.

Browser issues

This is the third try of finding a bug-free firefox release for Mac. I started with the official versions, of course. A few weeks ago, I found a link at del.icio.us for optimized firefox releases for different PowerPC versions.
I checked the so-called stable release for new G4 processors and it really was faster while browsing the world wide web. But only a few days later I recognized, that some sites made him crash heavily. Switching back to the official release did not help. It was unable to handle that websites, too.
I then stumbled over a german version. It worked. Still does. But I hate those german menus. They sound awful and most are so long that you have larger windows.
Tonight I tried the unstable firefox build of March, 22nd.
That one worked fine for about two hours and then crashed at another site.
And no, I am not in the mood for checking if it works with the official, german or any other damn nightly-build release.

RSS Reader Decisions

Maybe some of you alread noticed that "Sub with bloglines" icon at the bottom right I added when I opened this blog. So most can guess, that I use bloglines as online rss reader. - Right, I do so. But sometimes I am not sure, if bloglines is the best choice. I tried to use some extra tools for OS X and checked out some other sites, that offer services like bloglines.

All rss readers for the OS of my esteem were not that satisfactiory. That's why I won't mention any of those here in detail. And one of the biggest disadvantages has been that I have to carry my iBook with me where the reader is installed to read my feeds when I'm not at home.
That's why I switched back to the online reader.

In February I searched out the Chameleon reader. Chameleon uses the bloglines service, but adds some features to keep track of all your feeds. Therefor Chameleon figures out which feeds are your favorites, using a few novel algorithms, and highlights them. It also identifies the top links in your feeds and shows you your usage scores based on the algorithms.
Those are neat features, but do I need stuff like that. I have to decide, if I may open that feed at first after logging in to the reader, because otherwise it will get above threshold. And it will take me a few days to get it out of my favorite feed list.
And when I would like to add a new feed to the reader, I have to go to bloglines again, to add the feed to my account. So why don't use bloglines anyway?

Last week I recovered feedtagger, which, like the name suggests, uses tags with your feeds. It is easy to start with feedtagger. Just export an OPML file from your subscribed feeds at bloglines and import it to feedtagger. Afterwards you add tags to every single feed. And that's where work begins. You have to think of significant tags for your subscriptions. But can you tell what every feed is all about? Maybe about Apple, but sometimes it's about music, too. Not very often, but it happens, they write about private stuff that does not belong to Apple or music. So, which tags to choose?

You have the same problem with del.icio.us, too, but I started with del.icio.us from scratch and did not import all my old bookmarks to it. My list of tags grew slowly and while you tag links in del.icio.us, most of them are about one special issue. That's why tagging at del.icio.us is much easier than tagging your feeds at feedtagger.
But the idea of feedtagger is nice. If it was easier to choose significant tags that hit all subject of a feed, you were able to read just feeds about "mac", "movies" or "music". (My interests seem mainly start with a m...)

While Chris of feedtagger fixes german umlauts for me, I will stick with feedtagger and try to make a few more suggestions to get my favorite rss reader. Meanwhile I have to think again about my tags.

Don't Panic: More Trailers

While there is just one trailer available on the official movie site, UGO has an exclusive one on their website.
More trailers, with the same contents, are available at the Moviebox.
Oh, I am talking about the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy flick.

GMail Journal

While searching for some new stuff I can do with my Gmail account, I stumbled over White's of Henry Lane. That guy had the idea to use a gmail account as some kind of private journal, which is easy acccessable by email and closed for public. He came up with some nice categories, even though I did not use all of them. But I like that "Yay Me!"-idea, he got from Slacker Manager. And this is even a bit cooler than creating just a local Yay-Me file, he came up with.