My monitor has been playing up recently, flickering all over the place (as seen in Die Hard 4.0). Knowing it was only a matter of time before it completely kicked the bucket I ordered a new monitor, on special for $255. My old monitor promptly started working properly and has not had a problem since.
Anyway, I picked up my new monitor yesterday and I can only describe it as enormous. It’s a 20″ widescreen monitor at 1680 × 1050 pixels (my old monitor was 15″ at 1024 × 768 pixels). I have to sit back when I am watching a movie, which is now a much more pleasant (and detailed) experience.
Maximizing windows can be quite insane at this size (except for movies of course). But maybe I will simply get used to the new size.
It is definitely noticeable that things are being designed for bigger and wider screens. The Apple Menu bar seems far less cramped spread across an extra 656 pixels.
Trouble is, my monitor at work now seems awfully small.
After being without a UPS for what seems like forever (almost two years) I finally got around to buying one. The only problem is that the software doesn’t show the status of the UPS, but it will shut down my computer if the battery is going to go out, so it’s better than nothing.
View my photos of the UPS installation
I was just visiting the Apple website when I noticed them talking about the new Intel chips that will be in future Macs. And I have to love how they summed it up:
What’s an Intel Chip doing in a Mac? A whole lot more than it’s ever done in a PC.
Hehe
When I made some changes to this site recently I used the great little FTP program, Transmit. I was very happy with its useability then and I still am. I particularly liked the little dashboard widget you could set up so you could simply drag your files to the widget, it would load Transmit and send your files all while the truck rolls along.
Of course, FTP isn’t the most secure of protocols and I certainly wouldn’t be eager to open up FTP on the server at work. Fortunately Transmit does Secure FTP (through SSH) right out of the box. And using it is as simple as normal FTP.
So if you have a Mac and use FTP for more than just basic transfers (which the commandline client does superbly, even including tab-completion for remote filenames, something severely lacking from other commandline FTP implementations), get Transmit. It is money well spent.
Doing research for a University assignment and getting frustrated with Adobe Acrobat’s lack of integration with Mozilla Firefox I discovered the Schubert|it - PDF Browser Plugin.
It was a breeze to install (drag it to the internet plugins folder and restart Firefox. Not only that but it is so much nicer to look at than Preview.
So, if you have a Mac and you look at PDFs, use this plugin. It is free unless you are a money making business, and even then it is only $69 US for a site wide license (as many computers as you can fit in a 5 mile radius).
UPDATE (25th October 2006) - This only works on Power PC Macs. Not Intel-based Macs. It won’t crash, it just won’t work. (Well, at least that’s what happened to me.)