Atomic Playboy

These are links I found interesting for January 25th through January 26th:

• Applescript support in Adium 1.2 and later — AppleScript reference for hooks in Adium.
• AppleScript Language Guide: Introduction to AppleScript Language Guide — This document is a guide to the AppleScript language—its lexical conventions, syntax, keywords, and other elements. It is intended primarily for use with AppleScript 2.0 or later and Mac OS X version 10.5 or later.
• Matt Legend Gemmell – MGTwitterEngine – Twitter from Cocoa — MGTwitterEngine is an Objective-C class which lets you integrate Twitter support into your Cocoa application, by making use of the Twitter API. The entire API is covered, and appropriate data is returned as simple native Cocoa objects.
• The Raw Story | Whistleblower: NSA spied on everyone, targeted journalists — “The National Security Agency had access to all Americans communications – faxes phone calls and their computer communications” Tice claimed. “It didn’t matter whether you were in Kansas in the middle of the country and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications.”
• RedBedlam Boss Says Gold Farming “Inevitable” | Rock, Paper, Shotgun — The boss of virtual world tech company RedBedlam, Kerry Fraser-Robinson, has said that companies must find a way to bring virtual currency trading into their games. The must, he argued, accept that virtual currency trading will take place in games that have an economy. “Trying to stop that happening is literally like telling the tide not to come in – you will fail.”
• Key binding in L4D — Brief tutorial on how to bind keys in Left 4 Dead, including a list of Vocalize commands.
• GreaseKit – User Scripting for all WebKit applications — GreaseKit is a SIMBL plugin, that adds user scripting to Safari, Mailplane, Diet Pibb.app and all WebKit applications.

To their credit, if that’s the right word, you can now purchase some music from the iTunes store that is unencrypted and plays anywhere. Apple calls these songs “iTunes Plus”, because it sounds so much better than calling everything else “iTunes Minus.” Mark Pilgrim

Today I got my iPod mini, and Magnus got his Mac mini. It was probably the same TNT guy who delivered them.

After putting it in my pants and taking a picture, just like Magnus did (yes, that’s an insider joke), I proceeded to plug it in.

So here are the steps required to install an iPod under Windows.

• Eagerly unwrap the iPod and the dock.
• Optional: put it in your pants and take a picture.
• Plug the Firewire cable into the PC and connect the dock, and put the iPod in the dock.
• Wait while nothing happens.
• Unpack the USB cable, and plug it straight into the iPod.
• Wait while nothing happens.
• Spot the “Install software before connecting iPod” sticker.
• Install software.
• Do the mandatory Windows™ reboot.
• Yay, is working! Format it, copy a few songs to it.
• Sigh at the crappy USB 1.1 on your motherboard.
• Put the iPod back in the Firewire-connected dock.
• Wait while nothing happens.
• Wonder if dock is broken.
• Realize that you need to push the iPod into the dock with holy crap, did I break it? force.
• Do the mandatory Windows™ reboot, since Windows needs to reinstall drivers every time you put external hardware in a port it hasn’t been connected to before. Roll eyes, think degrading thoughts about Gates, all that.
• All is well with the world.

The dock does look a bit flimsy and plastic, but it has some nice weight to it, is quite sturdy, and has a rubber bottom to prevent it from sliding around.

So I finally ordered that iPod mini I’ve been drooling about. I was hoping that Steve would pull a new iPod mini model out of a body orifice during Macworld, but sadly he didn’t. So it appears that me and the rest of the world said “screw it” and ordered an iPod mini at the very same time.

Today I got the email that said they’ve shipped it. 8-9 days delivery time.

8-9 days?

Do they walk across the Alps with it? Through the Mines of Moria, into the fiery lands of Mordor where shadows rule, to cast it not into the fires of Mount Doom, but into my eager hands?

I can understand that it takes time to produce it, especially when there’s very high demand right after Macworld, and I had custom laser etching (for free, no less). But 8-9 days to deliver? Do Apple not use the same postal services as the rest of us mortals?

I’ll instruct my Uruk-Hai hordes to keep an eye out for iPod mini-wearing hobbits. If they spot one, grab him, tie him up, toss him over the shoulder and run through the Darkmere straight to my apartment. Should be faster.

I just need an impressive beard, then I can do a mean Saruman impression. Already got the hair part done.

Someone at Apple must like Front 242. Can you spot it?

Answer: The headlines. “Lock the Target,” “Spread the Net,” and “Catch the Man” are lyrics from Headhunter by Front 242.

iTunes for Windows is released. Get it from Apple or grab it via this torrent (BitTorrent download)

First impressions: Ctrl-W closes the entire application. This is bad. In OS X, it just closes the window and keeps iTunes running and playing. This means I have to keep it in the activity field while running. Slightly annoying.

I’ll toy around a bit with the music sharing; tomorrow I’ll set up an SSH tunnel from school to home and see if I can access my music that way. iTunes only allows music sharing on local subnets; but an SSH tunnel is considered local for all intents and purposes.

Update: Some more impressions.

• iTunes quits if I right-click the close button. Broken behavior, no Windows applications do that.
• No always on top. Windows is (duh) windows focused as opposed to the application focus on a Mac; I want always on top for the mini-mode. It iTunes had only used the default Windows widgets instead of the OS X brushed metal appearance, I could use the nVidia drivers to force a window to be always on top.

For something that calls itself “the best Windows app ever” (Apple.com front page as of writing this), it sure is inconsistent with every other Windows app in existence…

More update: I’ve tried the Rendezvous sharing now. It rocks.

I have a Mac here too, and I used to mount my music collection via SMB to access it from my Mac. Now I just need to have iTunes running on my Windows machine, and the Mac sees the entire collection at once via the Rendezvous shared playlist. Rock on.

I want more Rendezvous/Zeroconf applications for Windows!

Looks sweet. Works on my G3 233MHz, albeit it won’t be breaking any speed records. But at least it’s up and running. Netnewswire Lite is the news aggregator for OSX, although it doesn’t appear to want to import OPML data.

The mail client looks really good. I’ll be using it for a while instead of my procmail/spamprobe/mutt routine and see how it works out.

Bought a 233MHz G3 plus monitor from the school today. Cost: 500 SEK.

…so. Now I have a Mac. Any idea what I should do with it? It runs OS 8.5 at the moment. I force fed it with 256MB of additional memory, so now there’s a total of 320MB.

MindControl is a nice application launcher. Sure beats fumbling around with Finder and Last applications.

Any other utilities I should know about? Still looking for an RSS aggregator. Netnewswire is for OS X. Haven’t managed to install it yet — will be interesting to see what it thinks about 233MHz…

Today Astrid and Robert have their birthday. Yay you.

The more I think about it, the more I want an iBook. It’s just so cute! The hardware is very decent for the price: G3 at 700 or 800 MHz depending on model (guess which one I want?). 14,1″ screen, 1024×768 display. Internal Firewire, USB and 10/100 networking. I doubt I’d play many games on it, but it should be a decent gaming platform as well.

I wonder when Apple will ditch the G3 for their iBook line and replace it with G4 CPUs. I’m thinking hard about methods to finance an iBook. Most likely it will wait until I’m employed. The model I’m looking at could be mine for 18,085 SEK (slightly less than 1,800 USD). Ah well…

I’ve promised myself to finish a new layout this week. Don’t hurt me too much when I cross the deadline.

God Module makes great music. The first times I heard them I didn’t think they were anything special — OK, but not great. Their latest EP, Perception, has really grown on me, though, and I’ve found a new liking for their older songs as well. Perception is good enough for me to buy it. I’ll keep an eye out for it.

Tom Shear of Assemblage 23 has a European tour planned for February together with Norwegian Icon of Coil. I’m a big fan of A23, so it will be great news if he plays in Stockholm.

Christmas is coming up. Buy me something from this list and I’ll be happy for at least six months.

• Apple iPod. This is easily the best MP3 player on the market. Sure, you can get portable players with more storage for less than the cost of an iPod, but they’re simply not as nice as an iPod. Or as small as an iPod. Or as cute.
• Apple iBook. I really want a good laptop, and I’m very curious about Mac OS X. I can kill two birds with one stone and get an iBook. My current laptop is an old Cyrix 100MHz that’s little more than a glorified SSH terminal that I mostly use to IRC from my bed. It runs Debian Linux in text-mode only.
• Digital camera. It would be great if I could take pictures whenever I felt like it and put them in the gallery.

Uh. Well, that was all that I could think of at the moment. Not exactly cheap toys. But I’ll probably buy the iPod within a few months. I also need to buy a Firewire card, since my motherboard doesn’t have Firewire ports…