When i was a kid i absolutely loved getting my first pocket knife. It was given to me by my granddad and i’ve still got it, somewhere, amidst all the other pocket knives i’ve collected since. To this day I carry a pocket knife or multi-tool just about everywhere i go (insert TSA gripes here) because they’re simply so damn useful. So when i saw Gever Tulley’s TED Talk on dangerous things for kids in which he suggests all children should be given a pocket knife i was interested.
Tulley also suggested in his talk that children be allowed to take things apart and learn how they work which was another of my favourite hobbies as a kid. My father would always bring home broken computer equipment and i would disassemble it and, rarely, put it back together again. Part of me thinks this is what lead to my love of computers and tinkering.
Looks like Tulley’s book Fifty Dangerous Things has finally been released and if it’s anything like his TED talk it should be excellent. Will definitely be picking up a copy myself.
So i caved and bought a Magic Mouse. I’ve been using it for about a week now and surprisingly don’t hate it. In fact i actually kind of like it. My only complaint is that Apple didn’t do more with multi-touch. Currently you can right-click, scroll, and navigate back/forward in certain apps.
Maybe i’m just spoiled by the MacBook Pro’s touchpad but i really miss being able to 4-finger swipe to open Exposé. Granted fitting four fingers on a Magic Mouse would be a bit of a pain but i still feel like more could have been done with the mouse.
On the plus side the right-click functionality doesn’t feel as awkward to me as the Mighty Mouse did, however i find myself trying to two-finger click for right-click sometimes as thought it were a touchpad. An option for middle-click would be really nice (three-finger click?) as i’m getting tired of seeing the “open in new tab” context menu in Safari.
All-in-all a decent product and so far i’m not writhing in pain from RSI as i expected i would be with all the gesturing.
Snow Leopard’s System Preferences loves to complain when you try to open older 32-Bit preference panes and will require you to restart in 32-bit mode to open them. One of the annoyances of running the MySQL on Snow Leopard is that even though they have an x86_64 package they still ship a 32-bit preference pane with it. The guys at Swoon got sick of this and have put out a 64-bit preference pane. Not an every-day annoyance but a small one that’s been fixed. Hopefully it’ll be rolled into the package released on mysql.com soon.
I’ve been using colloquy on my Mac and iPhone for a while now but the simple fact is getting constantly disconnected because of calls, following links, or what-have-you really gets old (and annoys everyone else in the channel). When i saw that the new iPhone app supported push notifications i was excited but a little hesitant – after all i don’t exactly want to route the entirety of my IRC traffic through someone else’s server. Thankfully the guys have been working on a rather interesting approach to push notifications – you host the server yourself. With an upgrade to the colloquy client i run on my Mac at home i can how log in to one persistent connection while on the road. Pretty handy if you ask me.
Just a couple of projects that have caught my eye over the past few weeks with a common theme – super-sizing toys from our childhood. The first project is Jeri Ellsworth’s 52″ net-controlled Etch-A-Sketch. It was built from an HD TV and is controllable via an IRC bot.
More recently the NYC Resistor hackers have been working on an 8′ Lite Brite. It’s not net-enabled, but that’d take the fun out of it.
Any other super-sized toys i’ve missed? Wonder what’ll be next.
