Status-Q

How Linux Could Overthrow Microsoft - a well-written article in MIT's Technology Review.

Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons
for you are crunchy, and good with ketchup

1. Safari can now save 'Web Archive' files. A single file that captures a page with all its images, links etc intact. Useful for anything that you suspect may become premium content in a little while! IE on Windows has had this for a while, of course, but on the Mac, as you save it on disk, it gets indexed by Spotlight...

2. The Mail app can now resize images. This is a great timesaver for me; I'm always creating small versions of my pictures using PhotoShop or ImageWell before dropping them on a mail message. Now, if your message has images in, a menu appears at the bottom of the window allowing you to select the size and telling you how big the resulting message will be. Very handy.

Extract from a nice NYT story by Jennifer Lee:

Powerball lottery officials suspected fraud: how could 110 players in the March 30 drawing get five of the six numbers right? That made them all second-prize winners, and considering the number of tickets sold in the 29 states where the game is played, there should have been only four or five.

But from state after state they kept coming in, the one-in-three-million combination of 22, 28, 32, 33, 39.

It took some time before they had their answer: the players got their numbers inside fortune cookies, and all the cookies came from the same factory in Long Island City, Queens.

Chuck Strutt, executive director of the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs Powerball, said on Monday that the panic began at 11:30 p.m. March 30 when he got a call from a worried staff member.

The second-place winners were due $100,000 to $500,000 each, depending on how much they had bet, so paying all 110 meant almost $19 million in unexpected payouts, Mr. Strutt said. (The lottery keeps a $25 million reserve for odd situations.)

Of course, it could have been worse. The 110 had picked the wrong sixth number - 40, not 42 - and would have been first-place winners if they did.

In the early 80s, a new device suddenly became an indispensable part of office life and revolutionised corporate communications. And no, I don't mean the PC.

A wonderful article on the history of the Post-It Note.

Many thanks to David Orange for the link

I wrote about the ability in the new Mac OS X to drive portrait-mode displays. Normally, on Powerbooks, this only applies to external displays. There is, however, a hidden way to rotate the internal display, which can be nice if you want to view a whole page:

Open System Preferences (it mustn't already be running) and hold down Alt while clicking the Displays icon. You'll then get the option to rotate the display.

Warning! This doesn't rotate the trackpad! It can therefore be a fun challenge to manipulate the cursor after doing this. If you have a mouse, you can turn either it or the laptop through 90 degrees and everything is easy! This works quite well:

It took me some time to work out how to connect to my T-Mobile (UK) GPRS network using my Mac and my Motorola V3 RAZR phone, so I've posted this in case somebody out there is Googling for similar things!

1. Go to Ross Barkman's splendid page and download the 'Scripts for Motorola GPRS phones'. Unstuff it and copy the scripts into /Library/Modem Scripts
2. Quit Internet Connect and System Preferences if they're running. They need to restart to pick up the new modem scripts.
3. Look at the Readme that comes with the scripts. In particular, if you've used GPRS phone connections before you may be expecting to put *99# as the phone number. These scripts expect you to put the APN instead, which in my case is general.t-mobile.uk
4. You may need to configure the PPP connection, for example to turn off PPP Echo packets. This sort of control is not available through Internet Connect, so go to the Network section of System Preferences, select the Bluetooth section and click Configure. Here you can set the PPP options
5. You can also choose the Bluetooth Modem type. I used Motorola GPRS CID 1.
6. The account name for T-mobile in the UK is 'user' and the password is 'pass'. Similar information for other networks is on Ross's page.
7. Configurations made through System Prefs seem to update a default 'Main Number' configuration in Internet Connect when you click 'Apply'. The interaction between these two is not entirely clear - I should stick to making changes in the System Prefs.

The Organic Trade Association has come up with some fabulous marketing... well worth watching if you know anything about Star Wars.

Rose bought some broccoli from our local supermarket. It came in a plastic bag.

On the bag, it says, "To preserve freshness, this product has been packed in a bag".