Spotlight – TigerWiki
has some tips on using boolean searching with Spotlight. They also note you can use Spotlight from the command line as “mdfind”. This means that “man mdfind” will reveal all Spotlight’s secrets.
Cory Doctorow, over at boingboing links to a potential scoop about Apple to add Trusted Computing to the new kernel from a slashdot posting and commentary that references www.osx86.classicbeta.com (which I don’t see a story about on the main page).
Like, Cory – I’ve been an on-off Macintosh user for a long time (1985 for me, but Cory since 1979? you must have been 6 year old hacking on that Apple II!). If Apple Computer Inc. adds “trusted” computing, even in iTunes (wait, it’s not already in iTunes?), or in any other part of the OS, it would push me away from from the Macintosh as a computing platform I would use or recommend. I have been running GNU/Linux (but I usually just say “Linux” or in this case Ubuntu) on a PC/Intel machine now and it is pretty respectable and easy to use. I suspect many people are moving towards Linux-based systems and this would surely push them (or their companies) over the edge.
I would miss a few applications on the Mac, such as Salling Clicker, NetNewsWire and Quicksilver, but that’s a sacrifice I’d make to know that I can use my data whenever and in whatever application I like. I encourage these software developers to make their case known to Apple that choosing to enable a DRM system inside the OS (at the kernel level even) would impact the sales of their applications.
I also happen to work for a place that buys a huge number of Macs (let’s say 10,000 a year as a guess) and I would do my best to persuade them to stop purchasing all Apple equipment. I encourage anyone else with a dog in this fight to make a declaration about this too.
If I were the rabble-rousing, organizing type – I would recommend someone start an online petition to communicate mine (and your) opinions on trusted computing to Apple. Steve Jobs has managed to reinvograte Apple in the past few years, but I can think of nothing that would kill the Macintosh buzz and cachet quicker than locking owners out of their own data.
Update: It looks like myself and others didn’t have the whole story (but who does?) in that there do not seem to be any current plans to enable this technology into the core of the Mac OS. Some have mentioned that it could be used to ensure that the intel-flavored OS will only run on Apple hardware. As an Apple Computer, Inc. shareholder I can understand this, as a Macintosh user I do not want this as an extra thing to have to worry about when using the system, as a OS X developer I do not want this as an extra set of functions or libraries to have to work with or be concerned in conflicting with.
I do have to ask myself, is there any situation or clever use of “Trusted” Computing or DRM that is actually useful for a user? One comes to mind – version control – but there are a number of non-restrictive ways to solve that problem as we know. Let’s discuss it.
Thanks to an email from Brent Simmons, the Firefox extension Feed Your Reader lets you auto-subscribe to a feed from Firefox to NetNewsWire.
Just install Feed Your Reader and select the “Feed Protocol” option in the extension’s one and only configuration option. Then right click (or hold-click) and select “Subscribe to This Page”. You’ll be prompted by Firefox to choose an application to work with the “feed://” protocol. Just find NetNewsWire and you’re all set.
TextWrangler, My favorite text editor for the Macintosh has an update to version 2.1
Don’t forget to pair it up with Daring Fireball’s Markdown for easy, markup goodness.
Maybe not all 46 are useful, and some are obvious, but these Windows apps look pretty good if you need them or didn’t even know there was an application that did some of these things. And hey, they’re supposedly free: The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities.
Note that these are classified as free, but that’s not explained in depth. While some are open source, the provenance of many of them are either unknown or not stated by the list makers.
Not only a large amount of RSS Feeds from Apple, but an indicator of how often they are updated. Daily or Hourly.
Intellext: Watson for Windows.
A few applications that may not actually make a WinXP machine more like a Mac, but handy none the less: WindowsDevCenter.com: Stop Mac Envy Forever.
Disclaimer: I work with one of the companies mentioned, Pluck.com.
From Philip K Dick to a distrubted processing screensaver, the electric sheep screen-saver, seems to combine part grid network technology with “the collective dream of sleeping computers from all over the internet”. Whatever, but the graphics are quite something.
I’ve seen a lot of notice about a new search tool from Blinkx.
If it does some of the work of the Dashboard project, but working on Windows platforms.