"My iPhone can tell me where I am, tell me where the sun is and the moon will be, put watermarks on my images, stitch panos, apply tilt-and-shift-like effect, email them or send them directly to places I want them, and much, much more. My US$7999 D3x can't do any of those things. Doesn't anyone else find something wrong with this picture?" The whole thing piece (collection, really) is long, but well worth reading if you're interested in cameras, customisation, and computing.

"Snow Leopard has broken «Creator code» file associations." Oh. Thanks. Hey, Mac OS X? I was *using* those. Sigh. (How come Siracusa missed that bit?)

As mentioned in the previous link: "In Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard, storage capacity is displayed as per product specifications (base 10). A 200 GB drive show 200 GB capacity" even though it's actually only 186.2 GiB. I'm not sure I like this. When will Windows follow suit?

This is very funny. I could pull out huge chunks of it as quotes, but I don't think I could stay in the 1000 character limit, and anyway, the whole thing - on Wolfram Alpha, interfaces, usability, AI, compsci, and MySpace - is worth reading.

As ssp notes, this really should be built into Mac OS X just like it was in the classic Mac OS (and System software before that). I mean, how hard would it be for the Finder to run lsof? (This is exactly the sort of missing feature the 10.6 Cocoa rewrite probably isn't going to fix. Sigh.)

"Almost all user facing applications in Mac OS X are written in Cocoa with the exception of a select few. Finder, one of the oldest Carbon applications in the system, is being transitioned to Cocoa for SnowLeopard and much progress has been made in this seed. Please report any issues you find with the new Cocoa pieces of Finder." Much as I want them to FTFF, I very much doubt this will have any useful UI changes.

This is doing the rounds, but I agree with the comments: a bit of attribution (for both the text and map) wouldn't have gone amiss. On the other hand, I'm one of the freaks who could name five London rivers anyway, so it's not really for me.

It's nice to know other people share my bugbears, even after all this time of Windows incomers diluting the Mac-ishness of the UI. I wish he'd expanded his point about Safari (which I still use without tabs on the Mac, damnit).

Intriguing idea; a custom keymap that uses caps lock (and then shift + caps lock) as new modifiers to bring typographic characters out of obscurity.

An Automator action to allow you to run a Python script. Worth a look at some point, although I tend to just use AppleScript or another OSA method rather than Automator, which has a nasty habit of getting in my way.

A nice rant about non-standard Mac installers, in particular Adobe's one. I have a bit of a rant about Adobe Updater in the comments.

I should have a good look at this and see if the safe files are related at all to the xattr settings discussed earlier.

A good piece on the friendlyness of natural sort vs ascibetical sort. I'm amazed anyone defends the latter, but they do. If EBCDIC had won, would they defend numbers after letters (as opposed to ASCII, which is the other way round)?

A useful alternative to abovelondon; it covers many more cities and gives you much more advance warning, but there's no indication of brightness.

A good discussion on what Safe Sleep is, why you might not want it, how to disable it, and why Apple should have provided such a method themselves.

A rather alarmist headline when what they really mean is "Apple makes a really bad decision on how to enable music syncing for the iPhone", but it is still a bit odd that they don't allow manual syncing.

Today's 4th of July link: the US uses more petrol than the next twenty countries combines. As ssp says though, per-capita petrol consumption would be interesting. (I'm guessing Canada and Australia would do really badly.)

Some notes: you can restore some (but not all) metadata by manually importing the XML file (but it's not automatic); as ssp says, metadata is not all; and ID3 metadata shouldn't have been lost (so his "tweaks to albums" should be there).

"I wouldn't put a person within 15 years of a computer unless I was absolutely sure it was a kind of bike for them"

Bit rambling, but this is interesting: "Three in particular were responsible for OpenDoc integration. Not surprisingly, the following week the three engineers were recruited by Microsoft. Result: no OpenDoc support in ClarisWorks 5.0."

"more than 70 fares, governed by 776 validity conditions, on 111 A4-sized pages"

for future reference

Call me a stinking commie, but this looks bad. Also: Flash kills SVG, or SVG gets decent plugin? Vote now!

Can you trust Nokia (or Google or MS) to be your memory bank?