Tag: apple

Pauli Exclusion Principle and iPod Mini in a juice bar

Recently a number of Leah’s colleagues, including the owner of the juice bar, have acquired iPod minis. However strange things started to happen with all the iPod minis. First one of the worker lost his iPod when the owner’s iPod was playing in the bar. Then today when another worker iPod was playing, the owner left his iPod in the gym and lost it.

To a trained physicist, there is a simple explaination to this. It is the Pauli Exclusion Principle. In short:

In a closed system, no two electrons can occupy the same state.

Obviously Leah’s juice bar is a closed system where no two iPod minis can be in the playing state at the same time. Simple really!

[composed and posted with ecto]

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ecto 2 beta

One of the perks of working with Adriaan is that I got to test out new beta release of ecto 2. This new version has gone multi-windows (or in Windows speak, MDI). It is modeled pretty closely to Mail.app (or Outlook) and I am just starting to exploit this feature. It is very convenient to be able to have a draft opened and jump back to edit an existing post. With ecto 2, I am beginning to treat blogging as the same as emailing.

I am not a big file uploader so I haven’t tried out the new ‘attachment’ feature yet but I feel it is definitely a step forward from the already great file upload feature in existing ecto. What I can’t wait for though is the WYSIAWYG editing. The existing preview feature is great but it is not as intuitive to use as WYSIWYG. However, being a developer myself I am comfortable in reading text interceded with code so WYSIWYG isn’t as big a deal as most user.

This also means that just when my Windows version of ecto catches up with the Mac version in terms of features and functionality, Adriaan has leaped ahead with ecto 2! Am I going be forever playing catch up? 🙂 The obvious question is of course when will WYSIWYG editing coming to the Windows version. Without giving away or promising too much, all I can say is that this is what I am working on right now 😉 How long will it take to become available, that I can’t tell you as I don’t know myself! Watch this space though…

[composed and posted with ecto 2]

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Internet is not just the web

I’ve been accessing Usenet since I have internet access in 1992. Lots of people nowadays equal the internet with the web but there are much more than that. Usenet is such a diverse and rich medium in which to get information that a lot of the time it is the only source.

Since I’ve switched to Mac I’ve been using the free newsgroup reader Halime. Sadly its developer has stopped work on it since November 2003. It has a very strong user interface and preview features that I love. However, since this weekend it has been behaving strangely with lots of beachball period.

I finally gave in this evening and downloaded a copy of Union from Panic. It has a different user interface philosophy but I got used to it very quickly. The one feature that I found really useful but not available in Halime is the ability to filter out messages without attachments. This is very useful for browsing binary newsgroups.

I think Union is very close to my ideal newsgroup reader. The only annoyance I have with it is the rather large icon/view of newsgroups’ groups (i.e. grouping of newsgroups). I prefer minimalistic UI and this is not one of them.

$24.95 is a slightly above what I would fork out without consideration so I think I will take the full advantage of the trial period and decide at the end.

[composed and posted with ecto 2]

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Mail Notification in Mail.app

If you have used Outlook 2003 for email, you will inevitably have encountered the new email notification pop-up window. It’s one of the better GUI design Microsoft has came up with and the transparency option makes it easy on the eyes too.

Now similar notification can be added to OS X’s Mail.app with Mail.appetizer. Give it a try, I like it so far. Though I would like to see options to set the border/margin size of the window. It is a bit thick for my liking.

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No longer tethered!

Ever since one of Apple’s Jaguar update (I think it was 10.2.6) zapped my PowerBook’s battery life from 3+ hours to just under 1:30+, my PowerBook has more or less tethered to the power socket. More so for the last few months when the battery lasts no longer than 40 minutes!

Well no longer as I received in the mail a pretty much brand new battery today, purchased on eBay for less than $35! Now I am happily composing this post untethered and the battery indicator reads 3:01 remaining, with 30 minutes usage already!

Long live eBay!

[Posted with ecto]

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