An email alternative for .Mac email. Writing in his Seattle Times column, Glenn Fleishman offers some notes about the text chat options for Mac OS X users as well as an endorsement for the value of .Mac services for some mobile Mac OS X users. [Mac Net Journal] 
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You Mac fans will love this: Macboy. [The Scobleizer Weblog] 
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Load-sharing, low-latency RSS with Shrook. Shrook is a kickass RSS reader for the Mac with a lot of fit and finish. Graham Parks, the software's author, released a new version today with a really nice, innovative feature: distributed feed-pulling:

In order to keep each channel as up to date, each individual copy of Shrook would have to load the channel at least every ten minutes. For users, this would obviously have an effect on the performance of their internet connection and computer. For popular channel providers, the hundreds or thousands of RSS readers connecting regularly, around the clock, already represent a huge financial burden (amongst other problems), as most are billed on the volume of data transferred to and from their computers. Checking more often would only make things worse.

So how does it work?

To oversimplify: A central server maintains a database of when each channel was last updated. To keep it up to date, every so often, the server chooses a computer to check for new items and report back. The frequency of this varies from every 5 minutes for popular channels, to every half hour for channels with only one online subscriber, and it tries to use a different computer each time. At the other end, each copy of Shrook checks in with the server every 5 minutes, and if any of its channels are out of date, it reloads them.

Link

Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 
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Enable Disk Copy's expert mode for hidden features. To enable Disk Copy Expert Mode, type the following in the Terminal (found in /Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal):

defaults write com.apple.diskcopy expert-mode 1

Quit the Terminal and launch (or quit and re-launch) D... [macosxhints] 
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Eliminate duplicate shell commands from history file. If you're using the default terminal shell, you might be annoyed by the fact that repeating the same command with duplicate the entry in the history file.

ie: If you were to type the following commands:

echo hello world ech... [macosxhints] 
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Passing the buck, or 25, to MacSurfer. As a firm believer in passing the buck, in a good way, I just paid $25 for a one-year subscription to Macsurfer's Headline News. The site is still free, but it is looking for support. Sounds familiar. [Mac Net Journal] 
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An interesting interview with Jeffrey Zeldman. AppleMatters has an interesting interview with Jeffrey Zeldman today... [Mac Net Journal] 
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Use negative mouse scaling value to improve responsiveness. I know some people are unhappy with the mouse speed settings provided by Apple's Mouse preference pane. There has already been a hint on modifying the preference file directly to achieve more speed. I recently purchased a dr... [macosxhints] 
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macCompanion Magazine. It’s a new magazine with features, reviews, and so on. It has an RSS feed. [ranchero.com] 
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iTunes AAC Encoding/Submission Service. Is iTunes now open to indies? [MacRumors] 
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