Articles posted in January, 2004

Panther’s Mail: Needs visual effect when threads are being moved around

Friday, January 30th, 2004 • 7:21 am

Here’s a bug report I’ve just sent to Apple: * SUMMARY Mail: Need visual effect to help avoid confusion when removing messages from thread * STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Sort the contents of a mailbox in chronological order. 2. Select a thread that contains several messages with different dates. 3. Expand the thread. 4. Select […]

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Word X: Another improvement that won’t be included in Word 2004

Friday, January 30th, 2004 • 6:31 am

I’ve already mentioned a long-overdue enhancement that probably will not be included in Word any time soon, even though it’d probably be much more useful than whatever fancy “intelligent” feature Microsoft is promising for Office 2004. Here’s another example. For years now, Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit text editor has included a feature that makes perfect sense […]

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Frank Gannon, Aristotle on Relationships

Friday, January 30th, 2004 • 4:14 am

Last week’s “Shouts & Murmurs” section in The New Yorker featured this text by Frank Gannon. Pretty funny stuff — if you’re familiar with Aristotle’s Poetics.

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AirPort dead in the morning

Friday, January 30th, 2004 • 1:09 am

Yesterday, I installed Apple’s recent Security Update and the AirPort 3.3 software update. They both worked just fine, and I was back in business in little time. I used the Internet all evening without any problems. Then I left my computer on all night, as well as my dialup connection in my AirPort Base Station. […]

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Panther’s Mail: Problem when quitting Mail while Mail is checking for new email

Friday, January 30th, 2004 • 12:51 am

Here’s a bug report I’ve just submitted to Apple: * SUMMARY Mail: Problem when quitting while Mail is checking for new email. * STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Configure Mail so that you have 5 different email accounts or more, that are all checked automatically at regular intervals. 2. Try to quit Mail while the mail […]

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Gretchen Voss, My Late-Term Abortion

Thursday, January 29th, 2004 • 3:16 am

I am not interested in starting a discussion about abortion, but I found this article quite moving: “My Late-Term Abortion“, Gretchen Voss, The Boston Globe And I continue to find the current Bush administration very scary indeed.

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Word X: Finding commands in the ‘Customize’ dialog

Thursday, January 29th, 2004 • 1:59 am

A long time ago, I wrote a whole article about how poorly designed the “Customize…” dialog in Word was. (I am weird that way.) The sad thing is that things haven’t improved one bit. On the contrary, Word X has even introduced new problems, with windows and toolbars overlapping each other and what not. One […]

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Virus notifications: ‘Warning! Your computer is infected!’

Thursday, January 29th, 2004 • 1:41 am

These days, most Windows viruses work by using entries in the infected computer’s address book to disguise their messages as coming from these people. This is why you might get an infected message from your friend A that in fact was sent by the computer of your friend B, whose address book contains both your […]

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Dead pixel has moved again

Thursday, January 29th, 2004 • 1:39 am

Yesterday I wrote about this “travelling” dead pixel that I had on my Apple Cinema HD display. Well, today it’s moved again. Now it’s somewhere in the top-left quarter of the screen. Strange.

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‘Make Text Bigger’ keyboard shortcut (cmd-+)

Thursday, January 29th, 2004 • 1:35 am

I have always had problems with this shortcut. The fundamental issue is that, on my Canadian CSA keyboard (and on the U.S. keyboard), “+” is not a key. It’s what can be obtained by pressing the Shift key in combination with the “=” key. So when an application says that the keyboard shorcut for making […]

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Half-dead and travelling dead pixels

Wednesday, January 28th, 2004 • 4:11 am

My 23″ Apple Cinema Display HD has 1920×1200 = 2.3 million pixels. With such a high number of individual pixels, it was probably unavoidable that I would get at least a few dead ones — if not right away, then maybe over time. When I got the display nearly two years ago, I noticed one […]

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Panther’s Mail: Making simple things complicated

Tuesday, January 27th, 2004 • 11:20 pm

The fact that there is no way to browse or modify the list of existing mailboxes in Mail without selecting them in the mailbox drawer on the side, which in turn causes the display in the main viewing area of the Mail Viewer window to change, continues to be a major design flaw in Panther’s […]

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Panther’s Disk Utility: Utterly confused about disk partitions

Tuesday, January 27th, 2004 • 7:35 am

This problem is reaching embarrassing proportions. Yesterday, I mentioned some phantom partition non-sense I experienced while trying to repair an external FireWire hard drive with multiple partitions. It turns out that the problems are not limited to external drives. Today I tried to repair one of the partitions on my internal hard drive. Disk Utility […]

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AirPort: Impossible to create a roaming network with a dialup connection

Monday, January 26th, 2004 • 11:27 pm

Here’s a bug report that I submitted to Apple this morning via Bug Reporter: * SUMMARY AirPort: Impossible to create a roaming network with dialup connection. * STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Connect the Ethernet ports of two (original) Graphite Base Stations (BS1 and BS2) to an Ethernet hub 2. Connect BS1 modem port to phone […]

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More FireWire flakiness

Monday, January 26th, 2004 • 8:41 am

As a conclusion to my “hardware nightmares” roundup for today, I also have to mention the problems I have been having with FireWire. I think I have narrowed them down to one of my external FireWire drives. It is a Kanguru Quicksilver Combo drive (FireWire/USB 2.0). For some reason, the drive’s volumes (I have three […]

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