schrödinger's dog

Mac Mail

On a whim, I changed Barb's Mac's email program from Thunderbird to Apple's Mail. I did this mainly to get Spotlight (Apple's nice system-wide search tool) to search emails. Apparently nobody has yet written a Spotlight plugin for Thunderbird.

While I like Thunderbird a lot, and use it on my Linux boxes, Apple's Mail program has some nice features. For example, when viewing inline email attachments like JPEGs, Thunderbird doesn't size them properly. A large JPEG will be rendered in actual size. Very annoying. Apple Mail, however, will conveniently resize the inline picture for easy viewing. In Thunderbird, Barb had been forced to open an image viewer for every attached picture. This was not only annoying, but left a trail of photos littered on the desktop.

And here's another nice touch I noticed in Apple Mail: Normally the Date Received column is displayed like "December 22, 2006". But if you shrink the column width, it doesn't just truncate this date. It changes its format in an attempt to fit. It changes to "Dec. 22". Very thoughtful of Apple.
Jim on 12.29.06 @ 09:46 AM ET [link]

Santaland

NPR kindly put 7 minutes of David Sedaris' Santaland Diaries on their website (Real Audio or Windows Media).

And there's a longer segment of the same in this episode of This American Life (flash player), though you need to wade through several other pieces in the same episode.
Jim on 12.22.06 @ 07:17 PM ET [link]

Mighty Mini

I got Barb a Mac Mini for her birthday. It's a remarkably small box, smaller even than a hardcover book. I think Apple basically took the guts of a laptop and repackaged them, minus the screen and keyboard. You can connect any external VGA or DVI monitor, and any USB mouse and keyboard. I used my old 15-inch LCD that I recently repaired. I splurged and got an official Apple mouse and keyboard.

This new Mini replaces her aging G3 iMac that I had picked up at the MIT flea market for next to nothing. The iMac went upstairs to the girls' room, replacing an ancient Win 98 machine, which will probably get trashed.

I bought the low-end Mac Mini machine, with a 1.66 GHz Intel Duo core, and 512 MB of RAM. It probably could use more RAM, and I'll likely upgrade to at least 1GB at some point in the future. But opening the Mac Mini is notoriously difficult (thanks, Apple). Some unofficial web sites suggest using a pair of large plastic putty knives.

All in all it's a nice little machine. It even has a small speaker inside, which I wasn't expecting. I had heard bad reports about the included DVI-to-VGA converter, but I looks fine on my old Samsung LCD. It also boots up fast. Much faster than my 1.5 GHz Dell running either Windows or Linux.
Jim on 12.17.06 @ 06:18 PM ET [link]

Back from Africa

I just returned from about 2 weeks in Namibia, setting up a satellite-based cell phone system. I really only got to see the capital city, Windhoek, but it was still interesting. Weather was beautiful, about 90F and dry. The people were friendly and almost all spoke English. The white population speaks German, Afrikaans, and English. The blacks speak English and their native language, with some Afrikaans thrown in.

Someone described Namibia as "South Africa without the grief". The racial tensions and violence seem much less prominent than in South Africa, but most residences and hotels were still ringed by electric fences.

Namibia is the home of the Khoisan (nee Bushmen) who live primarily in the Kalahari Desert. They are generally light skinned with small noses, and their native language includes clicking sounds. I would sometimes hear these sounds when waitresses would chat with each other. Only a small fraction of the non-white population of Windhoek seemed to be Khoisan.

The only actual wildlife I was able to see was a small antelope about the size of a dog. But while I was there a large helical-horned antelope called a Kudu crashed into someone's window near my hotel. Apparently it was rabid. Meercats get rabies, and the meercats bite the Kudus. And some locals that I talked to say that you can sometimes see cheetahs running beside the road.

But most of the wildlife is well outside the city. The Etosha Pan is a favorite spot for wildlife documentaries.

The South Africans that I was working with rank right up there with Brits in drinking capacity. We spent four nights at the famous Joe's Beerhouse ("everybody comes to Joe's") drinking Tafel or Windhoek lager, with shots of Jaegermeister thrown in, and eating Gemsbok and Kudu. Jaegermeister can be thought of as cough syrup, best served chilled, and best downed quickly.

I'll post some (poor) photos later.
Jim on 12.10.06 @ 09:54 AM ET [link]