Today marks a year since my MacBook arrived at my door thanks to the UPS man.

It’s seen a lot of usage, has my MacBook over this past year. Since it shipped with 10.4.8, it has been through several revisions of Tiger, the Leopard upgrade recently and with any luck, should see some more OS X upgrades to come.

I really don’t have any complaints about the machine, other than the minor issue of the fact that there should be (at least) one more USB port, because two isn’t always enough, and the odd minor annoyance here and there.

To be honest, the most worrying thing now is that there are only two years left on my AppleCare.

So, I guess it’s happy birthday MacBook.

UPDATE: This still is fine for 2.0.0.x, but UnPlug does not run properly on Firefox 3 and later, so if you’re on 3.0, this unfortunately will not work.

Firefox extension UnPlug is a very useful tool for extracting embedded video from all sorts of websites.

It can be a bit alien to work out how to use at first though, so I’ve put together a quick video of just over a minute that walks you through the process. It assumes you’ve already got UnPlug installed and loaded into Firefox.

… is the little Time Machine icon in the menu bar. It saves a Dock space as I can access everything I need to do with Time Machine in a much more compact way.

The new Stacks stuff is nice, but while I use Stacks, I don’t use it for collections of enough items to warrant using the new list view.

One thing I might like back, though, is the ability to put an icon for my home folder on the right side of the Dock that with one click opens ~ in Finder. Yes, I know, I could click the Finder icon at the left, but that works ever so slightly differently; it might focus an existing Finder window.

Did anyone else notice the TM backup done straight after 10.5.2 took ages to ‘prepare’? I understand why, because there were a lot of individual files that changed in the update, and it had to query the FSEvents database to list all those changes, but I wonder if anyone else experienced that step taking 20 minutes or more.

I was pleasantly surprised to read that The Times Magazine for the 9th February includes a section on the latest internet meme of FAIL (page 12, left hand box if you’re interested).

I was not so pleasantly surprised to notice that half way down, you are invited to “Visit timesonline.co.uk/microtrends for an epic shipment of fail”.

Why? Well, in my opinion, FAIL is subject to special grammar requirements. It should have been “a shipment of epic fail”, not “an epic shipment of fail”.

The lack of capitalisation also concerns me, but it might be a little harsh to be critical on that point as well – and the capitalisation of the word isn’t necessarily a set-in-stone rule, either.

You can read the article that appears in print over on their site.