Just noticed this:

The mark all as read and refresh links are now buttons. It’s a nice and subtle UI change, but it makes more sense. These are buttons that do actions, not links that take you somewhere.

It’s nice to see that Google Reader is always evolving.

Microsoft doesn’t want you to pirate their software, but if you must choose between illegally installing Windows or a competitor’s operating system, Microsoft would prefer that you choose them. While the company obviously won’t endorse the illegal use of software, it does believe that piracy can result in profit.

At the Morgan Stanley Technology conference last week in San Francisco, Microsoft business group president Jeff Raikes commented on the benefits of software counterfeiting. “If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else,” he said. “We understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the installed base of people who are using our products. What you hope to do over time is convert them to licensing the software.”

Nothing particularly groundbreaking about this – I just thought it was funny that they’re almost wanting you to pirate their software. 🙂

And apparently that having more market share is apparently more important than people using their software illegally.

*sigh*

[via Ars Technica]

UPDATE: references to the former Bird Site of short-form social media have been adjusted to avoid providing free publicity to something that is undeserving of such promotion. This is no longer how I feel about this website, but my historical feelings are to be preserved below, with the relevant site’s name obviously altered!

Just signed up to Bird Site. But you’ll have to be a friend on Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible before you can see any of my updates.

The coolest thing about Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible? Their 404 page:

Cute cat pictures will cure anyone’s annoyance at seeing a 404, I guess.

Sorry, another Mac post. Please skip over this if you’re not interested – things will return to a normal level once the novelty has worn off, I promise. 🙂

On OS X, make a file. Doesn’t matter what, just type some random stuff into TextEdit and save it as test.rtf in your home folder. Now load the terminal up:

$ mv test.rtf test:file.rtf

Now look in the Finder. It will be called test/file.rtf. But that’s not what we called it!!

HFS+ (the filesystem) uses colons (:) as directory separators, but Unix uses the forward slash (/). The Unix underneath OS X can’t handle a file with a / in the name, but HFS+ can’t handle a file with a : in the name.

So Mac OS X swaps them around when necessary.

Clever, huh?

Under Mac OS X, fonts everywhere look much crisper, cleaner and more refined I’ve found than on any other platform – even when it’s the same font. I don’t know what Apple are doing, but it’s good.

The one exception to that is Terminal. For some reason, out of the box, the fonts are configured without anti-aliasing, so for someone like me that spends a lot of time with the BSD underneath all the Aqua, it’s a bit annoying.

You won’t find the option when looking in Terminal’s Fonts panel (Command-T), but the functionality is still there, it’s just rather hidden.

From the Terminal menu, choose Window Settings. Pick Display in the pop-up menu and tick Anti-aliasing. Click Use Settings As Defaults and you should from now on have a nice, smoothed, Terminal experience.

Ah, that’s better. Now everything is just fine. 🙂

Not very practical given the size difference (13″ vs 19″), but still awesomely cool to do.

Dual monitor Hosted on Zooomr

If you’re anything like me, when writing long WordPress posts, you constantly press Save and Continue Editing so you can see the preview which appears below the editing area in the WP dashboard. It’s really nice to be able to see what the post will really look like when done, but the frame it’s put in is a bit small.

If you want a full browser window sized preview, then (in Firefox) right-click inside the frame and do This Frame > Open Frame in New Tab. Now, everytime you click that button, you can head over to this tab and reload it for a real-sized preview of what your post is going to look like when done.

I find it useful, anyway…

I just got a comment from someone called Jack (Dunford), on my last post. That’s not remarkable in itself – I get comments from people I don’t know fairly frequently.

Checking his blog, it looks like he also attended the West Quay Apple Store opening.

That’s a pretty unlikely coincidence, if you ask me. What’s even weirder though, is that he happened to take a photo of the queue, and I happened to be in that photo! Considering there were hundreds of people at the store opening, the likelihood of someone happening to have taken a picture with me in it is really really low.

That is one seriously weird coincidence. Weird, but cool.

Here’s the full photo, and I’ve cropped it a bit and pointed me out below.

There’s also a set of lots more photos from the opening here.

Really really strange coincidence.

Oh, and in response to the comment, the OLPC would be too low powered for my needs. Not quite a MacBook with my spec. 🙂 I want to see what they’re going to do with the interface though.

I took these and uploaded them to Zooomr this morning, but I didn’t get round to blogging it! The cause? A combination of still having to go to college, having a powercut which brought down the internet which then refused to come back up even after the power came back on, and then wondering why the LAN wouldn’t work because of an unplugged cable (wired LANs rule and suck at the same time). Don’t even ask.

» Read the rest of this post…

I got IE3 under Windows 95 to display my site. But I didn’t stop there.

After a quick trip around the web to find a copy of IE 5.5 SP2 (the last IE for Windows 95), I manage to grab it and get it installed on Windows 95. Not only does this modernise the browser a touch, but it also installs various DLLs we’ll need to run a much better browser. 🙂

Thumbnails are clickable to enlarge, by the way.

Now we have IE 5.5, albeit at a rather bad 16 colours (not 16-bit colour, 16 different colours).

After an install of VMware Tools, we have the drivers to ramp up the colour depth to a respectable 65,536 different colours (that’s 16-bit colour).

A quick run of Windows Update to apply some security updates from, hmmm, looks like 1999. 😀

And finally, we install Firefox 1.5.0.9 (it crashes on first run, but a reboot and relaunch and it works perfectly). Finally, a decent browser.

Unfortunately, Firefox 2.0.x apparently doesn’t want to work with Windows 95 anymore.

Great fun – and I couldn’t have done it without this guide.