Blender 2.28 Open Source 3D-Animations-Software for Mac OS X (Download, 2,9 MB) [Der Schockwellenreiter] 
7:40:09 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Organizing Your Digital Detritus:. From John Robb's Weblog, I'm learning a little — enough to scratch my head about whether this is interesting at all — about this new class of apps that promise, as Robb describes it, to "provide a PC-based organizational system for all the digital data a person accumulates during a lifetime... (to) make sense of the gobs of information we are going to store in our 1 Tb computers in 2006..." There's MyLifeBits, for PCs, which is from Microsoft and which Robb suggests will be seriously flawed by being inflexible and monolithic. DevonThink, so far only for OSX, is a "freeform database with a browser interface that organizes your local data by similarity" and looks pretty interesting to him. And then there's Dashboard, about which all the recent buzz is about.

I'll surely investigate this phenomenon further, but for now I'm dubious about their usefulness to me. Maybe I need to get the terabyte hard drive first or progress further along the continuum to benign senescent forgetfulness (in which case a terabyte-range handheld PC will be more useful to me than a desktop, of course). Robb suggests these will be great for webloggers but I suspect he doesn't mean my style of weblogging.

As Robb asks, "what do we call this category of software" anyway? And, other than the amount of their muscle, how is it different from the heavily-indexed freeform databases (like Ask Sam) or the index-based PC explorers (like Lotus Magellan) I've made use of in my remote past? Here are Dashboard's stabs at answers to both of those questions:

The dashboard is a piece of software which performs a continous, automatic search of your personal information space to show you things in your life that are related to whatever you happen to be doing with your computer at the time.

While you read email, browse the web, write a document, or talk to your friends on IM, dashboard does its best to proactively find objects that are relevant to your current activity, and to display them in a friendly way.

We call the dashboard an "association engine."

Part of my hesitancy is about that "friendly way". I'd be relieved if I didn't find it intrusive and annoying, even if my machine's performance didn't take a hit. I sound like the computerist version of a luddite, I realize, but I'm reminded of that old Twilight Zone episode in which the aliens arrive promising all sorts of boons to humanity. At the end, just as the world's leaders are about to place their fate entirely in the hands of the aliens, our hero runs up breathlessly to announce that he has just finished translating the aliens' handbook, To Serve Man. "It's a cookbook!!" he stammers. [Follow Me Here...] 
7:34:16 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Permanently change default read/write permissions. In the office environment in which I currently work, we've had constant problems with OS X's default permissions. Two of us work on one client's files that are stored on an external FireWire drive that is connected to my mach... [macosxhints] 
7:13:46 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Use an old serial VT100 terminal with OS X
Old VT-100 serial (RS232) terms can often be found for free in the computer trashes of various institutions like universities. I use mine as a terminal in a room away from my main computer location, but it could also be usefu... [macosxhints] 
7:12:06 AM      comment []   trackback []  



DEVONThink and libots. John Robb linked to DEVONthink which is a free form information manager for MacOS X. It takes a less structured approach than Chandler is trying to take. It looks like you just dump all your information in there and turn it's recognizers loose and it sorts it all out for you.

One thing that I noticed while reading the pages is that Mac OS X has a text summarization service built in. I've been looking for something like that for a long time. I know that the ATG (Advanced Technology Group at Apple) had one of these lying around. This is a great thing to have as a system service. If one of you MacOS X hackers can confirm this, that would be great.

In the process of reminiscing about this, I decided to do some Googling. It turns out that the Open Text Summarization library being used in AbiWord is now up on SourceForge. [Ted Leung on the air] 
12:03:18 AM      comment []   trackback []