Archive for the ‘Link’ Category

High speed downloading

aria2, a command line utility to download a file from multiple mirrors simultaneously. For Unix, Win32 and Mac OS X.

Opaque menu bar!

Mac OS X Hints describes how to make Leopard’s menu bar opaque. Much easier on the eyes.

Disk Inventory X

Disk Inventory X, like KDirStat for Mac OS X.

Seagate fireball

AppleInsider is reporting that Apple is ignoring two Mac data loss issues. One is an old bug (that really should be fixed). The other is an apparent abundance of failing hard drives:

Meanwhile, U.K.-based data-recovery firm Retrodata is warning Apple customers that they risk potential data loss due to a design flaw on certain 2.5-inch Seagate SATA drives, commonly found in notebooks such as the MacBook or MacBook Pro.

“The read/write heads are detaching from the arm and plowing deep gouges into the magnetic platter,” says Retrodata Managing Director Duncan Clarke. “The damage is mostly on the inner tracks, but some scratches are on the outer track — Track 0 — and once that happens, the drive is normally beyond repair.”

The problem is reportedly prevalent with Seagate 2.5-inch SATA drives that are manufactured in China and loaded with firmware Version 7.01. Model numbers affected include ST96812AS and ST98823AS.

Um, yeah. My first generation Intel Mac mini has a ST96812AS with firmware 7.01. I’d be a lot more worried if I wasn’t using Leopard and Time Machine.

How to tell if a website sucks

This one doesn’t need further explanation, does it?

Turning off Safari 3 warnings

Rob Griffiths posts some tips for turning off Safari 3’s more annoying warnings over at Macworld.com. My favorite? defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugConfirmTossingUnsubmittedFormText 0. When I quit out of a form, it’s because I want to quit. Warning me there’s unsubmitted form text in other tabs might be useful, but the current tab? No.

Marble of doom

via Daring Fireball, it’s The Marble of Doom1. Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a daemon or something for Macs to submit their spinning pizza time automatically to a site like this?

Or maybe that’s a depressing idea.

  1. I just noticed that when the page is slow to load, the marble shows before the rest of the site. That’s either really clever, or an amazing coincidence. []

CAPS LOCK protection

Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch writes about new logic in Apple’s keyboard to prevent accidentally activating the caps lock. It’s about time keyboard makers did this.

Appendix has a purpose after all

Purpose of appendix believed found: It’s for cultivating good bacteria. Another interesting point is that appendix problems “may be another case of an overly hygienic society triggering an overreaction by the body’s immune system.” Wow. (via slashdot)

Visualizing Fitts’s Law

Fitts’s law means that the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target. Visualizing Fitts’s Law offers some great diagrams on this.