Hehe you can laugh at me in my cat in the hat suit but I won a pair of Bose speakers from The Mac Store at the Panther party! Thanks guys and gals!

I’ll go pick them up later and post some pictures

Infoworld has a nice little piece on Apple’s Knowledge Navigator (right out of the Alan Kay Dynabook concept) but the coolest part of the article is the link to the video.

For those who have not seen the Knowledge Navigator concept video, be sure to take a peek.

Gator renamed themselves to Claria.

Does this mean I need to install some Clariatin-D to get rid of the crap they stuff my PC up with?

MacOS X has always had the option to create encrypted disk images, but it has not always kept the passwords on the keychain properly.

I am not sure when this was fixed (Jaguar) but it works now – If you do not want to encrypt your entire home directory into a disk image (which is essentially what FileVault does) then just use Disk Utility (On panther, disc copy on Jaguar) to create a new encrypted disk image. Then when you set the password, add it to the keychain.

Any files you alias to on the disk will cause it to mount, just like a network disk (though LaunchBar does not do this) I use Quicken so when I log in, it opens the file to ask me for my quicken password – that makes the image mount, and now all of my files on that image are available.

I would imagine that if you want to copy the image to another disk, you would want to eject it off the desktop first.

I’m sitting in the office of my orthodontist this morning when an assistant comes and sits next to this gentleman. First thing out of her mouth was “Are you single?” he replies, “Yes, why?” “Well, one of our employees really finds you attractive, and was wondering. It is not for me of course, I am just asking for her.”

The guy is all embarrassed, and the two of them get to talking about their exes and all that. Then the assistant for his appt comes and calls him, meanwhile they are still chatting away and the second assistant is getting pissy at waiting, rofl.

Not sure what came of it, but was pretty humorous to watch.

So I break down and call Logitech about their new MX 900 Bluetooth mouse. Features are nice, bluetooth, all that. But it is designed for right handed only mousers. I am right handed, but I mouse with my left.

Me – “I am calling to find out about a left-handed mouse or an ambidextrous MX 900″ LT – “Our mice are only for right handed people, sir. I don’t know what you should do.” Me – “I’m sure you must be losing sales to people who mouse left handed” LT – “Well we sell a lot of mice to people who use their right hand.” Me – “So why can’t you design an ambidextrous mouse like Microsoft does?” LT – “Marketing has only designed right handed mice.” Me – “So who should I send my comments to?” LT – “We forward them on, but I don’t think we’ll have any ambidextrous mice soon.”

Damn, how lame. Sell a lot of mice to right handed people. Those guys can go click themselves.

We’re in the home stretch on the braces! I am in the finishing rubber bands now, which basically means I cannot speak much for 2 weeks. I can, but I sound like Peter Lorre, hehe. Should be good for some halloween scares!

This note comes from Curt who pointed out that this file:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/azureus/Azureus-2.0.3.2-OSX.zip?download

But I am not. I did have fun dressing up for the Mac Store’s Panther release party.

Ever been writing an email and wanted to attach a file on the desktop? Sure you could use the Attach dialog and choose desktop and find the file, but man, it’s right there on the desktop, just under some windows!

Well it is a snap in Panther!

With the window you want to receive the file on top, simply press F11 to Exposé the desktop. Then click and drag the file you want to drop into the (now hidden) window. While dragging, press F11 again to show the previously Exposéd windows, and drop into the target window!

How slick!

Over the course of several Panther upgrades, I’ve noticed some files tend to not get updated. In one case, the java internet plugins did not get updated because their modification dates were set to the year 2010.

My suggestion is this: If you have DiskWarrior (you do, right?) run DiskWarrior on your disk first and repair any date and other disk issues.

Then do an archive and install (which is really a backup and install) of Panther. If you notice things not working properly, see your local consultant/dealer for a clean install of the OS.

Mail now remembers when you turn on the BCC field and leaves it available for subsequent messages you create.

When you turn on message threading, Mail will collect messages with like subjects into groups. Mail sometimes gets this wrong, but the feature is still worth very useful. You’ll get a bunch of new UI, such as coloring, indenting and faux messages once you turn this on. The Faux message will be one that is a summary of the entire thread. You can click on one of messages in the thread to jump to it.

However, the coolest part of message threading (to me) is keyboard navigation. When a thread header faux message is selected you can:

• Press Delete to delete the entire thread
• Press down arrow to skip over the thread
• Press right arrow to expand the thread and select the first unread message (or last message in the thread if all have been read)
• Press down arrow to read the next message
• Press left arrow to collapse the thread

Viewing HTML email is a nasty way to get tracked by spammers. The spammers put images in with names coded to your email address and as soon as you view the image, the spammer knows you read the email and now your email is more valuable to other spammers!

Go to Preferences, choose Viewing and turn off the showing of HTML messages. However, with Panther’s Mail application, if you do get an HTML message that is legitimate (say an Apple newsletter) a nice “Load Images” button will appear for you to click. And now, mail will actually render the HTML text, just won’t load the images!

Where did the Internet System Preference go? How do I set my default Mail client, Web Browser, etc? Believe it or not, Apple moved these into the preferences of the respective Apple applications. You can find the default mail viewer application preference in yep, Apple’s Mail.app preferences panel.

You can likewise find the Default Browser and Save Location for files in the preferences of Safari. Why did they do this? I hope it is just an oversight to leave out the Internet system preference panel. I DO like having the information in the default application’s preferences panel, but I don’t like that being the only place it is settable.

If you have a mouse with a scroll wheel that is also a button, pressing and holding down on the mouse wheel will bring up the Application switcher bar and you can then scroll through to another app (while holding the wheel down) and then release over the application you want to switch to.

If Stuffit Expander insists on opening the zips you make with the Finder’s new Archive command, select said Zip file and choose Get Info. Then turn down the “Open With” panel and click the popup menu and choose “Other” Now, click your hard disk in the left sidebar, then select System, then Library, then CoreServices and finally “BOMArchiveHelper” Press OK. Then in the Get Info dialog, press “Change All” and ok that.

You can quickly resize all finder columns to the same width by double clicking on the column resize widget while holding down the Option key. The column resize widget is located in each column below the scroll arrows.

The Finder’s search field, located in the toolbar, is hot searchable now. This means that the Finder starts finding as you type. It also defaults to all local disks, so this can get pretty slow if you have a ton of files.

In a Finder browser window, click the magnifying class icon to the left of the search field and hold the mouse, it is a menu. Choose “Selection” This will cause the Finder to only search your current folder and below. If you want to search an entire drive, just open the top folder Of course you can always switch it back, but I like this as the default.

I use an external Linksys 802.11g wireless card. Apple added support for these cards in June of 2003 in 10.2 (Jaguar) which was great, but less than pefect. You could experience kernel panics if you removed the card while the Mac was asleep, or inserted one after waking up the Mac.

I am happy to say that these issues appear to be solved with Panther. I have pulled the card with active network connections, plugged it back in and all was well. I have booted the machine without the card, plugged it in once the Finder finished loading and all worked flawlessly.

I have also tried several combinations of sleep/yank card/wake machine/insert card and have had everything work just peachy!