Status-Q

[Original Link] This looks like a nice home-backup solution.

[Original Link]

I’m back on page one! Of what, you ask? Of a Google search for ‘Quentin’, of course. I used to have a regular position on the first page but those fellows Tarantino and Crisp have been getting a lot of attention recently.

I notice, with envy, that my pal John Naughton is not only on page one of the ‘Naughton’ results, but he has first place! And third place! I can only dream of such fame.

A while ago, I replaced a Windows NT Server machine belonging to some friends with a basic Dell machine running Redhat. They’re only really using it as a file and DHCP server, but I’m pleased to see that it’s about 9 months since the last reboot:

[qsf@master qsf]$ uptime
 11:56pm  up 266 days, 11:56,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

I’ve written here before about my fondness for LaunchBar, and more recently I’ve also been trying
Butler.

These are handy utilities which speed things up for those who, while appreciating Mac OS X, don’t necessarily want to reach for the mouse, click on the Finder, go to Applications and then Utilities to find what we want. It’s not really any worse than Windows, but hey, we Mac users are used to a somewhat higher standard than Windows.

So these utilities both allow you to type a keystoke – typically Command-Space or Ctrl-Space – and then type a few letters, such as ‘PP’ to select PowerPoint, then hit return. They can also find entries in the address book, open a new mail message to a friend, play a track in iTunes, and so on. The best thing is that they present a list of options for any set of keystrokes and they learn as you go along, so if your instinct is to type POW to launch PowerPoint, and PP to bring up the phone number of your friend Peter Pan, you only have to select the desired action once and the utility remembers it. I’ve got so used to bringing up my To-Do list by typing Ctrl-Space T D Return that I don’t even remember which folder it’s in.

Butler is clever and has everything including the kitchen sink, but that rather puts me off. Its facilities for controlling iTunes are good, but otherwise I had to spend too much time deselecting options. My world is cluttered enough as it is.

LaunchBar has a long history and is many devotees, but I started to miss the quick keystrokes I’d had in Butler to pause my music when the phone rang. Utilities like X-Tunes do it even better, though, so for a little while, I’ve gone back to using that with LaunchBar in place of Butler.

But my latest discovery is Quicksilver; similar concepts, but very pretty and very much snappier than LaunchBar or Butler on my system. That was my main complaint with the other programs: too long a pause after the Ctrl-Space. Quicksilver seems very speedy, and with X-Tunes to control my music, I’m singing…

[Original Link] A whole new type of malicious software. Thanks to Dave Hill for the link.

[Original Link]

Here’s an interesting table. Ever get into a plane and think, “Mmm. Seems like a couple of extra inches of legroom compared to my last flight…”? Well here’s a list of how far apart different airlines put their rows of seats on intercontinental flights.

My Airport Express arrived today, and it’s great. I’m typing this on my laptop, sitting on the sofa in the living room, listening to music on the stereo. But the music playing on the stereo is also coming from the laptop, which means that when the phone rang a moment ago, I just hit a couple of keys to pause iTunes. (I recommend Butler for that, BTW). Remember those old days when you had to find a remote control?

So here I sit, rather bemused as I look at the bookcase full of CDs. All of my music is on my hard disk, and while it may be a little while before I’m happy to invest heavily in music which has no physical incarnation, I do now think of CDs as archival storage. It’s been a while since I actually had to open a CD case for the purpose of listening to the music inside. The iPod lives in the car, and the Airport lives in the sitting room. When I’m in the study, I have speakers plugged into the laptop via USB. I even find that I’m not listening to the radio as much as I used to, because all the programs I want are on the BBC or NPR websites and I can hear them whenever I want to.

Now that you’re staggering under the overwhelming flood of coolness emanating from my lifestyle, I can reveal that I’m actually listening to Boney M….

[Original Link] Light relief in the run-up to the US Election.

Here’s something that’s been bothering me, and no doubt has kept you awake at night as well…

Take a look at the word for ‘hot’ in many European languages: chaud in French, caldo in Italian, calido in Spanish, calidus in Latin. So how did we end up with the word cold which means exactly the opposite?

Well, the answer, of course, is that our words for hot and cold have Germanic rather than Latin roots. Our cold is like the German kalt and the Norwegian kulde, but I can’t help feeling this must have caused confusion throughout history. Interestingly, the Germanic word apparently derives from the Latin as well, but the Latin for frost, gelu.

So now you know.

[Original Link] John Udell has some more interesting reasons for using
Mozilla/Firefox.  (Interesting, that is, if you’re an
XML/Javascript enthusiast.)