This morning, I experienced a bug that I thought would have been fixed long ago. I had left my computer on last night, because I had a big file to download. When left on, my computer is set to launch the screen saver after 15 minutes, and then put the displays to sleep after 25 […]
Since I did a clean install of Panther, I am back to square one when it comes to trying iDisk under the new version of Mac OS X. (I am afraid I didn’t have time to explore the issue of whether you can “save” your local copy of iDisk before doing a system install and […]
F***ing hell. I thought that doing a clean install of Panther had cured my problem with being unable to log back in after logging out. Well, it didn’t. The problem is back, and it’s annoying as hell. (It means that each time I want to log out, I have to restart.) At this stage, I […]
I have actually found a way to reproduce the white folder icon in Mail’s mailbox drawer. It is a new thing in Panther’s Mail: you can have folders that are not mailboxes themselves. The weird thing is that the only way to create such folders (as far as I can tell) is to: a) create […]
This very long account by George Packer in The New Yorker of what’s really going on in Iraq is pretty much required reading for anyone interested in what has been happening there in 2003. Among the numerous erroneous assumptions and miscalculations of the Bush administration, the one that stands out is this idea that “liberated” […]
I finally decided that I was experiencing too many small glitches, and proceeded to reinstall Panther from scratch, i.e. by erasing my Mac OS X partition and doing a clean install. We still have way too many Mac OS X applications and utilities that cannot be installed by simply dragging and dropping them. It didn’t […]
As a follow-up to the previous item about difficulties with the login window in Panther, I disconnected all my USB devices from my G4 except for the mouse and keyboard. I restarted the machine. I logged in, holding the Shift key down, so that no startup items would get launched. I logged back out immediately. […]
So I have to restart my machine because of stupid iDisk problems. I restart it, relaunch Mail, and… nothing. No Mail Viewer window. I open a new Mail Viewer window and… all my view settings are gone! It’s all back to the default settings (columns, mailbox icon sizes, etc.) I am beginning to think that […]
So today I tried creating a “local copy” of my iDisk, hoping that it would improve the performance issues noted yesterday. This is done via the “.Mac” preference pane in System Preferences. The trouble is that my iDisk already contains about 30 MB worth of stuff. Of course, it’s all stuff for which I have […]
Today, while browsing my mailboxes in Mail, I noticed the following: Note the different-looking mailbox icon for the mailbox called “Technical Support”. I have no idea where this comes from. I wish we could apply label colours to mailbox icons in Mail, but as far as I know, it’s not possible.
The debate over whether links with a target=”_blank” attribute, i.e. links that force the browser to open the corresponding page in a new window, will probably never be settled for good. I personally use the target=”_blank” attribute for links to external sites, i.e. pages outside my own domain. I can fully understand the argument that […]
I really wish I didn’t have to write this… I don’t use my iDisk very often — and every time I do, I am painfully reminded of the reason why. I hadn’t seriously used my iDisk since upgrading to Panther. Today, I wanted to upload a number of files, 14 MB worth in total. Now, […]
I’ve already noted the major problems that have resurfaced in Panther when it comes to keeping directory listings synchronized between applications. But I thought the problem was limited to “non-compliant” applications such as Camino. Today, I created a new document in Word, and saved it in an existing folder. I then switched to Mail and […]
I have talked about how Microsoft Word’s multilingual capabilities are often more of a façade than anything else. But in truth this is a more general problem in modern computing. For example, one of the most fundamental behaviours on the Mac when working with text is that you can select a word by double-clicking anywhere […]
A good hint today at Mac OS X Hints: When a email message you’ve received contains a URL, Mail automatically turns it into a “live” link. When the mouse pointer hovers over that link, the pointer changes to a hand symbol, and a single click anywhere on the URL opens the corresponding page in Safari […]