Mokka mit Schlag » Mac

I’m investigating external Weblog editors. I’m surprised there are no simple plugins for BBEdit or jEdit to handle this, and there doesn’t appear to any real open source software.
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Apple’s posted yesterday’s MacWorld keynote address in QuickTime format.

Objectively the announcements were pretty major. Subjectively, they managed to completely uninterest me. I’ve never liked iMacs (I prefer separate monitors and computers) and I don’t need a new PowerBook (excuse me, MacBook). I was hoping for an Intel-based Mac Mini, but that was nowhere to be seen. And of course there was no BlueTooth Mighty Mouse. Oh well. maybe next year.

The one piece that really impressed me was the new magnetic connector for the power cord. We’ll have to wait to see if it actually works and holds up to daily use. However it sounds like a really good idea, and exactly the sort of thinking different that Apple’s famous for. Without any extra effort or thought on the user’s part, the computer just works better. Problems happen less.

The typical computer company response to a problem with users accidentally pulling a computer to the floor is to ignore it and blame the user. Many won’t even cover the damage under their inadequate warranties, even though it’s their design flaw that led directly to the damage. Most users agree and blame themselves. I think from this point forward any time you trip over a cable and pull a stack of routers and hard drives crashing onto the floor, you should ask yourself why that had to happen. The short answer it didn’t have to happen. Devices should be able to be unplugged at any time for any reason including clumsy users. And of course the sheer number of cables should be kept to a minimum. Design is a usability issue.

It’s about an hour to go until the keynote address so I thought I’d toss out one random prediction I haven’t heard anywhere else:

A Bluetooth Wireless Mighty Mouse
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Are you tired of host names like eliza-7.local in Mac OS X? Are you tied of seeing pointless dialogs like “eliza-7.local is already in use. Switching to eliza-8.local”? Do you want a stable hostname you put in scripts, MYSQL user tables, and so forth? If so add the following line to /etc/hostconfig:

HOSTNAME=eliza.elharo.com

Of course you’ll change eliza.elharo.com to the fully qualified domain name of your machine. You’ll need to use sudo to edit the file. On versions of Mac OS X prior to Tiger (10.3 and earlier) you may need to delete the existing HOSTNAME line as well.

It’s up to you whether or not to register the name with your local DNS server, though I find it convenient to do so. One more trick: it’s completely possible to register NAT addresses like 192.168.254.23 with external DNS servers like EasyDNS. You’ll only be able to connect to that system from within your local subnet (unless you’ve configured your firewall to forward external requests to that local address), but the DNS resolution still works.