Schinckel.net

Typing Naracoorte into CityBrowser provides some interesting things to chuckle about:

Citybrowser reveals everything about a town! Naracoorte is located on the Keith to Mount Gambier Road, 350 km. Naracoorte was like over 200,000 years ago__. Naracoorte in the heart of the south-east of South Australia and provides visitors the opportunity to purchase direct from. Naracoorte will host. Naracoorte is situated in the south east of South Australia, wine lovers have become to know this popular area as the Limestone Coast region. Naracoorte was founded by Scotsman William MacIntosh in 1845. Naracoorte in the heart of the Limestone Coast. Naracoorte will lead you through to the next wine zone, Wrattonbully, a new wine district.

The one I like best is the one in red above: I thought someone might have been blogging about Naracoorte, and read it as “Naracoorte was, like, over 200,000 years ago”. But a quick Google produced a couple of pages about the Wonambi caves, and “…what Naracoorte was like over 200,000 years ago…” And apparently Naracoorte hosts the biggest tractor and engine rally in March. Might have to go home then… iTunes: Betterman from the album “Triple J Hottest 100 - Volume 9” by John Butler Trio

We spent the first part of the first day back at school watching a short video about a Chicago Fishmonger where they throw the fish around, and have heaps of fun. We had to relate that back to our own employment within a school. I’m not sure some of the members of my group took it completely seriously. The best thing we came up with was Curriculum is a Fish. Make of that what you will. iTunes: Take The Long Way Home from the album “Sunday 8pm” by Faithless

I know how fantastic QE (the original, US version) is. I even watch it sometimes. And we are all waiting for the Australian version. Waiting to see just how many episodes they play before they pull the plug. For those Naracoortians watching who don’t get real TV, or aren’t aware, Ty Henschke, the fashion one, is an ex-Naracoorte boy. And I think we all knew he was gay back in high school, didn’t we…

Boing Boing: LA train wreck: the copycat effect:

Coleman describes the “copycat effect” as “what happens when the media makes an event into a ‘hot death story’ and then via behavior contagion, more deaths, suicides, murders, and more occur in a regularly predictive cycle.”

South Australia actually has a pretty nice ‘code of conduct’ where media outlets (by-and-large) do not report on suicides in general, and youth suicides in particular, since there is a definite copycat effect. And then the Advertiser went and put front page images of when a student at a particular high school killed himself, at school.

New Scientist Breaking News - Spherical robot provides rolling security cover: A spherical roving robot designed to detect and report intruders… Does it unfurl and stand up like those cool robots in the newer star wars movies?

Monkeys Pay to See Female Monkey Bottoms: …male monkeys will give up their juice rewards in order to ogle pictures of female monkey’s bottoms… Isn’t science great!

I really like the way Apple decided to ‘package’ applications, plugins and the like with MacOS X. It actually makes it easy to see how stuff works. Take basic applications, and most of them are just an executable, but it’s easy to add modularity, and replace GUI elements and so forth.

I’ve grown tired of Toast: it seems to fail more than half of the time when burning DVDs, and I know the media is good, because Disk Utility has no problems burning! I intended to make an AppleScript that burned the selected disk image to a DVD/CD, but found that Disk Utility was not scriptable.

But there is a CLI command called hdiutil that can do most of the stuff Disk Utility can (at least with disk images). The command to burn an image to a Recordable Drive is:

hdiutil burn <imagename>

All I need to be able to do is get this to happen as a contextual menu. As far as I can tell, it should be possible to do this from AppleScript, or python, or bash.

Even better, I should be able to automatically create the <Name>.plugin/* directory structure, and what the contents need to look like, as soon as I can find out exactly what needs to be where!

<rant> With the advent of two ‘new’ features to web-browsing/internet use, the idea of hyperlinks in web pages opening up in a new window is truly evil. Tabbed browsing is a godsend to users like me, who like to have a whole series of pages open at once. Being able to have the whole shebang in one window, and just choose between them as they load is magnificent. Probably more important in terms of alteration to browsing is the development of RSS news-readers, and the saturation of RSS feeds amongst web-sites and blogs. What annoys me now, since with every news site I read being viewed initially in NewsFire, and then in Camino if I want to read more, (I wish they would all have full text feeds, though!), I only ever look at one item at a time in Camino. That is, I don’t look at front pages of news sites. So when I click on a link, I want the page I’m viewing to be replaced by the link I’m clicking on. If I didn’t, I’d Command-Click on the link, and open it in a background tab. Yet some sites: such as MacDailyNews, and others, still insist on off-site links opening in a new window. And when I click on one of these links, I have to close the window it opened in, and then Command-Click on the link again. It’s really starting to annoy me! </rant>

Maybe I’ll just remove these sites from my feeds list…which is getting too long, anyway!

If you have installed SubEthaEdit and the command line tool, see, you can configure --help | see and SubEthaEdit will load up the piped text!

I had noticed my iMac 1.25 GHx slowing down. Here’s what sped it up most:

• Getting more RAM. I upgraded from 256 Mb to 768 Mb. Applications loaded faster, particularly when lots of them were already running. Especially noticeable when other users were still logged in.
• Cleaned Application cache. Using System Optimizer X I was able to do this, which while it makes each application pop up a dialog the first time it is run via a double-click on a document, fixes corruption in the Application Cache, enabling applications to load much faster. This includes the Finder, so it only takes seconds (instead of minutes) to log in.
• Update executable library prebindings. Since this too was done with SOX, I wasn’t able to tell which of these two made the biggest difference.

No, I’m not affiliated with SOX, and apparently it’s possible to do just about everything here with CLI commands, I just don’t know what they are yet…