It has occurred to me over my several days of using Leopard at work that it looks a lot more professional than the older versions of Mac OS X. Everything is cleaner and sharper (with the exception of that ridiculous dock), less cartoony.
Contrast this with Windows, in which the default theme has become more and more overwrought and cartoony with each release.
My sister recently purchased a new MacBook, and I’ve been trying to do a video iChat with her for the last few days. It worked once and mysteriously stopped. I know that my router works, because I use it with Amanda. I had to turn on UPnP for it to work reliably, but
I finally got things working today. I had turned on UPnP on her router, but things still weren’t working. It turns out that there was some “secure” vs. “open” NAT option in the WAN set-up. Turning that option to “open” fixed the problem.
Hopefully this post will help someone else with the same problem.
As a scientist, I often read others’ scientific writing and work. Typically such written work includes plots and graphs — much more efficient and insightful ways of showing data than extensive tables. However, sometimes it’s important to extract more exact values from such plots. Traditionally this was done with a digitizer, a fancy mouse that worked on a special pad. You’d place a printed figure on the pad, and use the crosshairs on the mouse to pick out points. Then, using some scaling calibration, you’d derive values from points on the graph.
GraphClick does the same thing, but with digital figures. Typically, I use it with figures snapped directly from PDFs of papers, though it would work just as well with figures scanned from hard copies. Rather than explain more about how it works, I’ll direct you to the screencasted tour.
GraphiClick is a commercial, closed-source application, but it is available for free use with a limited feature set. I never found in using it that I needed any of the more advanced features. If you ever need to pull data from figures, and you’re a mac user, I highly recommend you try it out. I used it extensively for my soon-to-be-published paper, and I couldn’t have asked for anything better.
I’m something of a pioneer of on-the-go email checking. Maybe pioneer is too strong. Let’s say “early adopter”. I used to check my email using my WAP-enabled phone when I was on vacation. It was painful, but it worked. Eventually I graduated to a Treo 600 with Chattermail for always-on IMAP-push email notification (equivalent to Crackberry service, basically). This was before everyone and their cousin had a Crackberry.
On the Treo, when I get new mail, the little green light starts blinking rapidly instead of its normal once every two seconds or so. Over the last 2.5 years or so I’ve apparently developed a habit of glancing down at my belt holster, looking for that rapid flashing to see if I have mail.
Lately, people have been talking about the benefits of shutting down the auto-updates and instantaneous reminders. It seems like all the cool kids are doing it.
I’ve started trying it. The email on the phone is generally turned off. If I’ve been away for a while or I have time to kill (waiting in a long line or whatever), I’ll fire it up. At work I check email as a break after I’ve finished a major goal or a big block of little goals, and after lunch. I’m keeping it down to once or twice in the evenings at home. So far, it’s been mostly okay.
I find myself doing odd things. I look down at my phone, even though I know the email program is off. I bounce my mouse down to the dock in Mac OS X, looking for the little red circle with a number on the Mail icon to tell me I have mail. Occasionally I actually open the Mail app without that being my original intention. Hopefully after a week or two I’ll be able to break those habits.
How often do you check your email?
Did you (mac users) ever notice that the icons for the “Drafts” and “Sent” mailboxes are outlined (and partially folded) and folded paper airplanes, respectively?