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And yes, it works VERY well, orders of magnitude faster than Ht:/Dig, features incremental reindexing, and can be configured to auto-convert various filetypes to text before indexing. I'd say it's exactly what the poster ordered.

Colloquy - Webkit based IRC client. not too newbish.

It's a nice app... looks great and works well, except for a big problem under the hood. It had MASSIVE memory leaks last time I tried it. If you don't like restarting to get RAM back, take a look at the (perhaps overly simplistic) app Conversation. It gets most IRC jobs done well. However, if you're looking for a little more power, just stick to BitchX :-)

As an owner of a bluetooth phone (with hosed AT commands no less), the biggest value to me has been syncing with my laptop's calendar and address book via Apple's iSync. Being able to sync as often as I want to without grabbing cables, etc is a big deal. I frequently leave my phone in my pocket while syncing. It becomes second nature and I find myself less reliant on my PDA when not in my office.

I just wish I could use Salling Clicker. That would be cool.

These are all the free (as in beer) applications I use all the time:

WireTap: Save an audio file of any sound being played on the Mac by any other application.

DVDBackup: Great for backing up DVDs (while removing region coding, CSS encryption, and Macrovision encryption.) You'll still need Toast to burn the DVDs though.

PixelNhance: A must-have to tinker with the color/brightness/contrast etc. of your digital pictures.

Pixen: The best pixel-level editor on any platform.

MorphX: Morphs one image into another.

SnapNDrag: For screen captures (Grab is another basic screen capture utility that comes bundled with OSX).

Galerie: Puts your photos in a nice album-type gallery of web pages for being served by a web server.

LaTex Equation Editor and Tex Fog: The equation editors I use. Requires Tex/LaTex to be installed..

And if you are into LaTex, you'll also want CPlot: A parametric equation plotter.

CyberDuck: Open source S/FTP client. (Other FTP clients for OSX include osXigen, Transmit, Fetch, Fugu...).

Onyx: A must-have system utility.

MenuMeter: Another must-have system info utility. Excellent.

Books: A library software (book database).

Xnippets: A decent information organiser.

Carbon Copy Cloner: Backup software. (Donationware)

A few apps I have gladly paid money to use:

ChartSmith: Wonderfull for making all kinds of charts you have ever thought of (and some you haven't).

EvoCAM: Great app to record/play (or otherwise control) a Firewire/USB camera hooked to your Mac. Well worth the shareware price. (Also checkout their other offerings - ImageDV and VideoScope)

Intaglio: The 2D vector drawing/CAD program of my choice for simple CAD/ technical drawings.

Keynote: A (much better than) PowerPoint replacement from Apple. I use this all the time. (When it came out originally, I paid $$ for it; I heard Apple is bundling it with iLife now?)

Little Snitch: Keeps tabs on any stealth connections being made to/from your Mac, Shareware.

Intuem: Nice MIDI app with a clean interface. (GarageBand, one of Apple's iLife apps, is great for Audio/MIDI as well, but I find it limiting for my purpose because it does not do MIDI-out to my keyboard/synth.)

cheers- raga

Bluetooth is wonderful! I originally wanted a cell phone with BT so that I wouldn't have to type all my contacts a new phone (AGAIN!), so I got a SonyEriccson T68i and a D-link Bluetooth USB nubbie. Once you do this, you will refuse to either type your contacts or connect via cable ever again.

Later, I got rid of the T68i (not because of the phone, but because of lousy AT&T service). I replaced it with a Nokia 6600 (also BT).

Then I found Salling Clicker, which is quite possibly the coolest thing to ever happen to a cell phone since free long distance. I can control PowerPoint, Keynote, DVDplayer, Mail and iTunes with my phone. The slickest thing about Salling Clicker is that I can have the phone in my pocket, get up and leave the room, and iTunes pauses. When I come back into range, iTunes begins playing again.

We recently bought an Acura TL for my wife, which also has Bluetooth. We have both of our phones paired to it, and to make or receive calls all we have to do is push a button on the steering wheel, the stereo mutes, and the car initiates the phone to dial numbers from a phonebook.

I do sound like a fanboy for Bluetooth, because I am one!

Maybe this will scratch that itch:

Keyspan.com

If you have a bluetooth enabled phone (or bluetooth enabled Palm OS device) you can use Salling Clicker software to control your Mac from across the room.

Also, I use heat sinks as handy desktop business card holders.

Personally I've make a keyring out of a set of PCI bridge chips here I've also built coasters out of a cut up logic board and some plexiglass, similar to the ones at thinkgeek The light elements from old scanners are nothing more than CCFLs so there are any number of uses for them when you pair them with an old wall wart.

here my doubts would be why would they only take pics while it was still in its box? take it out, set it up the way it should be, then snap some shots. seems suspect, plus it's gray, not the candy coloured lighted thingy we're expecting. perhaps it looks diff on, and again, why not power it up if it's real?

(protest bush)

CB

iMac G5

I haven't heard of anyone doing this so I'm sure it is more complicated than a bunch of file conversion routines but nonetheless it is interesting.

They are doing it, just not with bone yet. Check out the the case studies. The models are either being used for surgical planning, or for implant design. I actually first saw this sort of thing years ago, on a documentary, showing how they used stereolithography to create a piece of skull to exactly fit a hole some guy had in his skull, and they implanted it.

The file conversion procedure involves converting a massive amount of raster data (DICOM) to vector data (STL). This requires some manual intervention to do things like segmentation (isolating the proper body part) and patching up flaws that the conversion process couldn't handle. Some bone layers were too thin to automatically be recognised, so there were a few holes, and metal artifacts like braces cause after-images in CT scans that have to manually be edited out for the STL mesh.

You'd be surprised at where the technology is now. I have a jaw problem, so I went and got a CT scan done where I got the results on a CD rather than film. The viewer on the CD was for Windows, so I was unable to view it on my PowerBook. I came across a fantastic free (GPL) program called OsiriX which runs on OS X 10.3 (Panther). With this, I was able to view 3D images of my skull and jaw on my laptop. The site even lets you download example DICOM data to try out with the program. For DICOM viewers on other platforms, you can check out IDoImaging.com

And I'm actually in the process of having DICOM data converted to STL by Simpleware.co.uk and will have a model made with a Z Corp 3D printer. I just sent them the CT Scan DICOM data by FTP, and they are in the process of converting it to STL, which I will retrieve by FTP. Then I'll FTP it over to the local RP service with a 3D Printer, and they'll post the model over to me in a parcel.

if not, give it a try:

1. Download a text: (say Alice's Adventures in Wonderland). The new site has a vastly improved interface; listing books in available formats (always plain text, sometimes pdf, palm doc, tex)

2. Have at it in you text reader of choice. If you are on the mac, I highly recommend the free tofu. It breaks the text into columns that are high as the window. Navigate by shifting columns or pages of text. This simple change makes a huge difference when reading large amounts of text. It makes reading books on my laptop pleasant rather than an ordeal.

What about on other platforms? What are the best programs for reading etexts?

Just when I thought I was the only one who checked the boards, I find out there are two. j/k.

Anyhow, I've encountered the exact same problem, and our friend who posted the fonts on his .Mac site looks like a good bet.
http://homepage.mac.com/kiddailey/files/misc/ibm-f onts.sit

There are a couple of other things I'd like to bring up. First, I noticed that the backspace doesn't work automatically under the terminal when connecting to telnet sessions. There is a check box in the preferences to change that. Secondly, I write messages in some of the games and apparently the terminal puts in some bogus characters here and there. This may be related to the fonts yet again. However, I thought it was worth mentioning.
For those of you who scoff at playing some door games on the BBS, I suggest you try Usurper. It is a lot of fun. Here is a link to a page that talks about the game in detail, and has some links to where you can telnet to, and play it.
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Castle/7177/u surper.html

P.S. Some BBS installs have a web front end leveraging Java, which work quite well.

ZTerm was ported to Mac OS X awhile ago. It's shareware, but it itches the scratch well enough.

Argh. Someday I'll learn - preview first, then submit.

http://homepage.mac.com/kiddailey/files/misc/ibm-f onts.sit

The only other point I forgot to mention is that your term program will need at least ANSI color support (that you may have to tweak) for this to work right.

Clip can be found here

I may add that to me as a German it is just utterly puzzling what seems to be politcally important to the US these days. Don't you have a current war to worry about? What is it with all these silly Vietnam rehashes?

I have my own idea that might explain it. I recast gravity in my theory and it seams to work on the quantum level and in General Relativity. http://homepage.mac.com/timg/iblog/index.html

It goes in the menubar, and it's called Gmail Status. It's not perfect, but it does a fine job and doesn't require any open web browsers or whatnot.

Mac users have this http://homepage.mac.com/carsten.guenther/GmailStat us/ as a freeware option.

Step 3.5: Bake Powerbook at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

Well, I'm a genius, and I got this ;)

http://www.mac.com/

That was Deep Space Nine that introduced Temporal Investigations.

Done right (and used sparingly), some of the best Star Trek episodes have involved time travel/alternate reality - think of Mirror, Mirror, Yesterday's Enterprise and, yes, Trials and Tribblations.

Excessive use of time travel has since become a copout. If all problems can be solved with a bit of time travel, where is the drama? And why don't they use time travel as a tool (think The End of Eternity), rather than merely as an all-too-convenient plot device?

...laura

When we finally do meet Spock. I hope he doesn't break out in this tune.

Fine, for all you noobs who don't believe me.

http://homepage.mac.com/gellenburg/8hoursbaby.png

See my instructions. While specifically for Verizon, the technique should work for any carrier that supplies you with an e-mail address.

...the exact same screenshots that have been going around the net for a week.

Explain this picture then...

Here's some in-game screenshots from a guy who managed to get his hands on it already.

Doom3 Pix

there is no money in it for them when their customers can transfer mp3s from their PC's to their phones, and seeing that the phone manufacturers sell their phones to the Telco's (and not end users) the Telco's have significantly more control over the functionality (and therefore dysfunctionality) of phone devices than Microsoft will ever have in the PC world.

Indeed. I bought the kick-ass Sanyo SCP 5500 (Sprint's VM4500) phone with camera, video, ringtones, organizer, etc. for my SO. It's a fabulous phone for only $179 with rebates on a 2-year plan.

Sprint really really wants you to pay $15+/month for PCS Vision where you pay them for picture and video mail, and buy your ringtones and games from them. It's convenient and you can see Sprint PCS wanting to be like .mac for your phone, but the fees add up.

Meanwhile, in theory the phone is expandable. So you can go to Radio Shack and buy a USB cable, and then go to FutureDial and buy SnapSync and SnapMedia, and jack your phone into your PC, and transfer your contacts, pictures, and ring tones. In practice you've just spent more than the phone cost you to get some poorly-written Windows-only software with all kinds of limitations. Likewise, this phone runs Java so in theory you can download your own MIDlets. In practice, I've yet to figure out how, and Sprint has no interest in telling me. As the parent posted, this situation is exactly how the telco wants it. Premium phones have the checkboxes for PC connectivity and Java, but in practice it's so painful most users will pay Sprint for their easy service, and Sprint only has to support a closed device.

I think the telcos' self-serving focus will actually save the PDA-phone market. If you buy a Treo 600 or a Samsung sph-i500, it is going to sync fine with your PC out of the box, and you can easily install third-party Palm software like media players, e-book readers, etc. But that expandability, media access, and user control makes PDA-phones a lot less appealing to telcos. Maybe that's why Sprint is dragging their feet on the greatest (for me) PDA-phone-camera-music player with SDIO expansion yet made, the Samsung sph-i550: announced in 2003, approved by the FCC early in 2004, but Sprint won't sell it in the USA until 2005.

The Baked Apple?

Remarkably, it still works.

I remember an ad that Apple ran in the 80's sometime about an Apple II that survived a fire. The story goes that some guy's house caught fire, and the case of the Apple II basically melted down. The guy took it to a dealership and asked if there was anything they could do... they took the mobo out, put it into a new case, and boom... the thing worked fine.

The headline for the ad read "Baked Apple." I tried Googling for it, but all I could find was the more recent story of a powerbook baked in an oven

I don't recall any specifics of abusing my own Apple II's, back in the day. I'm sure I had a few "oh shit" moments when I plugged or unplugged something while the machine was on, but I don't think it was as dramatic as hotplugging a floppy. Frankly, I'm just still amazed that my 20 year-old Apple //c can still boot. Hey, wait... it's around it's 20th anniversary... I need to dig it out of the basement and fire it up again...

Not to say this is or isn't at least contributory infringement-- IANAL.

Welcome to Slashdot, Cynical haven.

Remember, Slashdotters panned the iPod when it was introduced. They're doing exactly the same thing here. I really get a kick out of reading some of these braindead posts.

Battery life!
OGG!
What? Only 12 songs?!
It's not a Newton!
Apple is dying!
I won't buy it until it has X feature
AAC sucks, X format r0x0rs yo!


Okay okay, so some people are posting positive comments, but they seem to get lost in the pointless hand waving from the haters. Thanks everybody - In a years time, this phone will be a success and you'll STILL be bitching about not having OGG support on X device.

The real iPhone will be when Apple makes an official bluetooth remote. I've got a Sony Ericsson T610 and it's amazingly useful for controlling VLC and iTunes from my couch, but current cell phones weren't meant to be used like this. If Apple designed a bluetooth phone with nicely laid out iTunes/DVD remote features, I'd be first in line to buy one.

What about Leonard Nimoy as Bilbo?

Alright, so I walked down there, it's a group of three stores a few feet away from the corner of Market and Castro. One of the stores is indeed a UPS package store with Mailbox service.

I took a few pictures with my cell phone in case anyone is curious.

http://homepage.mac.com/davedog

My dad, my brother and I all had lasik two years ago. I even have the video of my procedure (MPEG-4 video, 35MB) online.

No complaints, corrected to 20/20, no night-vision problems. I'm a happy camper!

(I'm 27 -- 25 when it was done, my prescription was -1.75 and -2.25, only slight astigmatism)

- Peter

On the Mac side, you can use Salling Clicker in conjunction with your bluetooth phone or PDA. Salling Clicker has iTunes remote functionality, including playlist support, browse/find by artist, album, genre, etc.

http://homepage.mac.com/gregknac/monolith.jpg just got done with it

"AirPort Express gives you no way to see what song, or play list, is currently playing, and no way to change the music.[...]Apple hints that it will be addressing this problem in a future version or via some kind of add-on product"

I've got my Airport Express hooked up to my stereo and use Salling Clicker to make my Ericsson phone the remote control. Using Applescript you can control all the functions of iTunes and even have iTunes send track, artist and playlist to the phone's display. This type of set up was one of the main reasons I got the Express and it works great.

Perhaps you could boost your phone's bluetooth and use SallingClicker...

I have a remote.... i don't know why everyone is griping...

This is the page you're looking for.
This is the original /. article on the subject.

I use SlashDock on Mac OS X. It's really great, because I just rightclick on the icon in the dock when I want to check for new developments on my favourite websites. It's very convenient especially when at work. Oh yeah, you can choose the update frequencees individually, and it starts the schedule on app launch, so it's radomized properly too.

It depends. It's very convenient for synching with your computer or other devices.

I've found it invaluable for communicating with equipment that I leave out in the field for sound measurements. Rather then needing direct access to the locked case to check on sound levels (which often interferes with the measurement), I can walk to within ~30ft of my monitor, whip out my Sony-Ericsson T616, and check its status. This is a custom use, but using toys like Sailing Clicker, you may be able to come up with various other uses.

In case anyone thinks the parent is joking, allow me to assure you that he is quite serious. I've never actually read the book, but isn't that more of Heinlein's domain?

I've tried the 3 currently-popular ones (can't recall them off the top of my head
Did you try ffmpegX.

But have you actually tried to use Squeak or any of his other projects? They make neat demos. They demonstrate ideas very nicely. But I haven't found the "real, live, usable".

Yes, very much so. As I've pointed out in this thread and plenty of other times over the years, Squeak is basically my desktop OS. I have written some simple glue that allows me to run Squeak full-screen and easily switch to the only other app I need the regular OS for- a modern web browser, which means Safari or Firefox for me. That is thanks to the ever-so-slick AppleScript plugin that has been in Squeak for a very long time. I started implementing something very similar using Windows Scripting Host for Windows, but never had the time or reason to finish it.

Aside from the browser, I can do most of it in Squeak. Granted, some of it involves running the vt100/xterm client- but it's written in 100% Squeak. My email goes through the Squeak email client, Celeste, or Pine on a school Unix machine. I chat through the Squeak IRC client. I write code in Squeak's browsers. I post to my LiveJournal, keep track of RSS feeds and the weather with my own little widgets, kind of like Konfabulator for OS X, but they're nothing "special"- making them is quite easy with the Morphic GUI toolkit, so it's not as big of a deal as it is on OS X or Windows, where people are used to being forced into working one way with their data and apps.

Another practical aspect of Squeak for me is Dynapad. Dynapad is a PDA operating system/environment written in Squeak by me. I mostly stated the project as a reaction to the death of the Newton OS. The NOS is a lot like Squeak- you've got a nice, dynamic OOP language and the system is written in it. And unlike systems written in a crufy and static language, extending or modifying apps is pretty easy to do.

Some old screenies here. In this case, the little date book apps especially takes advantage of the kinds of technologies that make Squeak what it is. Older ones here, but I've been beyond burn-out busy in the last year. :/

Kay has been out of the visionary stage for a long time. I may be a blip, but I'm not the only one who uses Squeak for more than just cute demos. I don't use most of the new demoable features, most of them not being terribly interesting to me. But that doesn't stop Squeak from being the most productive environment I've ever used.

In addition to me using Squeak like this, myself and others have written apps in Squeak. No, they don't look like a native OS X/Windows/GTK+ app, but where I've used it for apps I've shared with others that wasn't an issue.

And for those who are dying to have a bland and consistent UI (no problem with that!), there is the Squeak binding to wxWidgets- wxSqueak.

Why should Kay have to limit himself to some other environment simply because you prefer it? Sure, Kay or someone else could re-write GTK+ so that it had the kind of power- useful *and* demoable power- that the Morphic toolkit has. Or add this to Quartz. But why? Kay isn't in the business of appeasing those who wouldn't be happy anyway by the work. Kay, like a lot of old and new Smalltalkers, is comfortable in that world. I am one of those people. I only use Windows, OS X and Linux as little as I have to, mostly as a host for Squeak and a usable web browser. The rest I can do within Squeak itself. On my Linux machine, I was even able to dispose of X11, instead using the links/g (with graphics) browser displaying to the framebuffer- and Squeak displaying on another fb console.

I'm not saying that this sort of setup would be for everyone. It's not! But then again, a hardcore emacs user just looks nuts to most people- at least my environment looks and feels very close to any other modern GUI system superficially. I use Squeak because it is the only environment that exists [1]. I can't do this stuff i

No, that's no typo. Slashdock is a dock-based RSS grabber. Works pretty darn good, author is helpful, and is very unobtrusive (or obtrusive, if you want it to be.) Used in conjunction with Camino, it makes for highly efficient browsing.
Highly recommended.