Month: October 2007

A few years back, I was on my way out to a camping trip on Halloween. I stopped at a local supermarket for last-minute supplies, and wanted to buy a couple of eggs to make an omelette the next morning – preferably two or three, but I settled for half a dozen. When I went to check out, the cashier let me know that they were having a special where I could get two dozen eggs for the price I was paying for half a dozen. She could not understand why I thought that was funny, or why I suggested it should come as a package with a case of whipped cream.

I won the costume contest at work today. I wore my ghillie suit, with a single large rubber eyeball. I told people I represented the things in the fridge and that we were demanding our own government.

(only of interest to people I’ve emailed or Mac App geeks)

Do you remember the cool quotes that used to appear below my emails? I had a lot of them, and they were set to cycle randomly. These are “signatures” and in OSX standard email application mail.app they’re (or more to the point, were) stored in a file called “signatures.plist” (in Users/you/Library/Mail/Signatures).

Somewhere around 10.3 the format of these files changed, and because I did a new install and not a convert, I managed to lose them. D’oh. As of 10.4 (or so) there was a new format (allowing different signatures for different email addresses). 10.5 may even be a little different. This is a “property list” file, which is sort of like an xml file but somehow different. Within the file, each signature is encoded rich text. No matter that my signatures were all plain text, they’re garbages up so they’re unreadable, even in Apple’s Property List Manager app. And there doesn’t appear to be any application that’s capable of extracting the signatures from the plist file.

I’ve got the original files, and I’d like to pull the .sigs out of them. I used to put all the cool quotes I came across here, and nowhere else. What I’m going to have to do is install an old version of OSX on a spare iBook and then try to get the file to open.

 

Update: Yep, that did it. Leaves me wondering whether I need to keep an old machine around to convert old straggler files.

On Linux I would expect this file would be editable in a text editor; modern versions would be simple xml. Not sure how Thunderbird (the Mozilla/Firefox email reader) handles them, but I bet they’re editable.

In other news, I’ve got OSX 10.5 installed on three machines (including a G4/800 iBook that’s “too slow” via target disk mode). Yawn. It’s pretty and all, and the autobackup is great, but otherwise no big whoop. Looking forward to mobile Home directories (on iPod?) and of course to future laptops/handhelds. Sometime this month would be fine.

I don’t watch much TV, but I do tend to watch more if A) I have a cable connection, B1) I’m sitting around icing my foot so I can’t get up and do much and/or B2) there’s too much smoke and ash in the air to want to go outside.

But I’ve decided that I will never watch another show that features a panel of contestants who are eliminated one by one, either by each other, or by an equally or in some cases far more insipid group of panelists (or worse, by an audience or phone-in poll). I will make an exception only when those eliminated are immediately and graphically executed by their fellow contestants. Bonus points if any of the judges and/or audience members or people who called the 900 numbers are executed, either on purpose or accidentally; I assume most of them would be fragged with “friendly fire”.

What I’d really like is an easier way to eliminate television channels that either I haven’t subscribed to, or that I know I will never watch. Most of them can be removed by entire class of channel: I can live without seeing any of the Spanish or foreign-language channels. Eliminate the home shopping channels (again, preferably by execution). Remove the pay-per-view, HBO, Showtime, etc. Get rid of all the sports channels (despite my futile desire to someday see sumo, rally car racing, or gladiator battles). Then there’s a bunch that I’d want to remove one-by-one. I can do this at the moment, through a bizarre clicker incantation that appears to also summon demons that leave dirty dishes in the sink and dirty socks on the floor. Or maybe that’s just Elvis. In any case, I can create “favorites” then painstakingly and laboriously delete every unwanted channel – but then every time I turn the cable box on I apparently have to put it back in Mode Favorites A or something.

That, and I’d like to have on-the-fly favorites that I can tag shows that I want to “surf between”, similar to the “last” button that flips between two shows. With the number of commercials and/or junk content, it should be possible to watch three or four shows at once.

I drive an SUV; the smallest I could get that would still tow a trailer. If I could have bought or converted to biodiesel and filled up with used french-fry grease, I would; and I still may someday. My wife drives a 10-year old Taurus; she'd really like to replace it with a hybrid but they're expensive and of dubious environmental benefit.

I'd like to consume less, and I'm trying. I recycled two computers this weekend that were headed for the landfill – they're being used again. And I resisted buying another one (so far). I'd also like to be able to buy products with less packaging and clearer information about content and recycling.

My local trash company, Waste Management, still makes us separate glass, aluminum, and paper products and isn't really clear about what is and isn't reprocessed. Until we get matter disintegrators, we should at least have aggregated recycling – everything dry goes in one big bucket, the processing facility sorts it out. This would also (somewhat) discourage homeless people digging through the recycling bins, “cherry picking” the aluminum to the recycling company loses money on the operation.

I watched Who Killed the Electric Car, and An Inconvenient Truth, and was convinced by both of them. I still feel that as individuals we're becoming less and less powerful against the government, multinational corporations, and PACs (as well as the Bavarian Illuminati) – so knowing about these problems and being able to force change to solve them may take a lot of inertia.