Brent Simmons (NetNewsWire fame) did it again with Big Cat. While not new, this little plugin lets you write contextual menu items in AppleScript and Unix shell scripts. One plugin to filter text/files and then it dispatches to the chosen script. Much faster than having 100 individual plugins!

I’m not so sure I like the new iMac. It looks like something Gateway would create. I can’t tell if the screen can move up and down, although I know it tilts. It is lighter, and presumably faster. I guess all of the cables go up the middle on the back.

I wonder why they ditched the wonderful arm of the old iMac?

Ars reports that Microsoft will be nuking WinFS, the much touted metadata file system from Longhorn such that it can ’ship in 2006′ The bloodletting has begun.

Longhorn was being OS X before Microsoft started cutting features. Do you think they will stop with WinFS? Probably not. As with XP SP 2, they’ve proven that can’t get it right the first time.

• Windows update reported a 78mb SP2 patch
• Started the download. After about 20 mins of “preparing” (I guess saving off old stuff) it is downloading a 95Mb file. Good to see Windows can still count.
• No wait, now it is backing up after starting the install
• Rebooted, have Windows XP “Please wait…..” blue screen
• That went away and now XP is booting in 800×600 it seems.
• Now I have “Help protect my PC” screen and am turning on automatic updates (Which was on before, but I guess windows forgot)
• Logged in, have a security center. My firewall is on, updates are on, no antivirus installed, so it is warning I might be at risk. Course I am writing this on my Mac.
• I got asked to let a program for my Sony phone run. Course it was a DLL and didn’t say anything about my sony phone, but I’m a geek and I just knew.
• I ran star wars galaxies and a security dialog opened BEHIND the game window. LOL. Oh it is saying it is blocking some features of _aunchPad (SWG uses LaunchPad) Hmm should I keep blocking or not? The firewall has prevented it from receiving connections from the net. That should be ok. I’ll tell it to ask me later.
• Oh there is one for LaunchPad too. Ok you too, LaunchPad, remind me later.
• Game patched ok
• Game played ok
• Mozilla ran ok

I’ve added a permalink to Maggie’s wonderful Katie Galaxy comic strip. Maggie is one of the most insightful, outspoken, caring, loving people you could meet – Toss her some props for the amazing work she is doing as an amateur artist!

In the “You can’t teach an old dog new security tricks” a firm in Germany has reported finding several flaws in SP2 that allow circumvention of the new security dialogs. Nice job, MS. As Gates said, “This is really important software.” Obviously MS put it’s best design/QA team on the job!

Full article

How many times has someone sent me information about themselves and I have had to copy/paste it into my address book? too many times

Did you know that if you open address book, you can drag your card, with all of your data on it, into mail.app very easily?

Just:

• Open Address Book
• Choose “Go to my card” from the “Card” menu
• Click and hold the icon of the card in the title bar. It will tear off
• Drag card icon into email window and release

That is easy! Click here for a movie to show you this in action.

Now what if you have phone numbers, emails and addresses that you don’t want to give out to the general person? Use a private vCard. First, use Preferences from the Address Book to enable private vCards:

Now, go to your card as listed above and edit it by choosing “Edit Card” from the “Edit Menu”

Notice now, that on your card only, you have some blue checkboxes. If you uncheck these, then that data will not be exported when you give someone your vCard! Notice how I have hidden private data:

Please use this as when someone gets your vCard in an email, they can simply double click it and have it installed into Address Book. also, the vCard format is standard, so it may work in other applications and even on Windows! Maybe.

P.S. A vCard is simply a standardized format for sharing the kinds of data that appear in an address book like program.

This is why I use Macs

Read on, be scared, be sure to thank Microsoft.

Cult of Mac reported on a new feature of .mac, to use aliases.

Now I just might start using my .mac account. I can do this with geeksrus, but why pollute my namespace?