Month: September 2006

links for 2006-09-05

what they see

My 7 year old made this for me. It measures about 1 1/2 inches on a side but the scanner was able to enlarge it a bit.

Click

Her description (for the exhibition catalog) is that it’s a one of those pinhole camera things (I have a couple of bellows cameras that just plain look weird to the younger set): the flash and CLICK! are self-explanatory.

The more I look at it the more I like it. I may have to run it through CafePress or some place that can do a one-off.

do these people realize how they sound?

Jane Galt Seems Displeased With Advocates Of Redistribution:

Beauty, like wealth, is relative–it benefits its possessor only insofar as they are lovelier than the women, or handsomer than the men, around them. Presumably, if we disfigured all the good looking actors in Hollywood, and the models in New York, and . . . well, heck, let’s slash the faces of everyone who’s better looking than I am. I am younger and slimmer than the average American, and have good teeth, long thick hair, and all the other accoutrements of an upper-middle-class upbringing. So we know that this would bring happiness to far more Americans than it would distress. We don’t have to turn them into quasimodo–just make them no more good looking than I am. Just think how happy America could be made if Cindy Crawford had saddlebags and a squint.

Wonder if she has ever read Harrison Bergeron? And does she realize how much she sounds like this twit?

salvaging corrupted email files

Something went south in Mail.app’s handling of my mail. I was seeing really slow performance, inconsistencies in read/unread counts, and other weirdness. When I did my monthly clearout of my inbox — anything that had stayed in there unfiltered gets moved to an archive folder — and it seemed to bog down and rebuilding didn’t seem to take, I realized I had some problems.

Part of the problem is the “improvement” of individual emlx files over mbox files: good for indexing but non-standard. But as some have realized, these are all just text files. And even though there is no standard for mbox files, just conventions, a couple of people have made tools to convert piles of emlx into mbox files.

I ended up with my emlx files intact but no way to get Mail to acknowledge them.

This seems to resolve it:

In Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”, the default message format for Mail messages changed from the Apple custom mbox-package format to the new emlx format (where messages are stored in individual files for Spotlight indexing). However, if you need to recover from a hard drive crash, it’s almost impossible to recover your mail messages easily since Mail won’t import emlx files and you can’t add them to your mailboxes any other way.

This seems to be working just fine. I can only Leopard’s Mail is less-intransigent about how mail is stored.

bike/messenger bags

Since I lost my really nice Bailey Works bag last month, I have been missing its carrying capacity pretty badly. I took my young’uns downtown today and where I would have had cameras with me and gotten some pictures, I only have memories and regrets.

So now to replace it. Bailey Works is my first choice, but their color options are limited unless you buy from them direct. $25 price difference, yo. And celery 210219828 Celery and burgundy 210219828 Burgundy-1 would not be my preferred picks.

Chrome also gets favorably compared but are even more spendy. Timbuk2 are off the list: I’d rather buy from a domestic maker if I can.

Any recommendations out there?

[this looks like what a lot of people are looking for: a pattern and some style ideas. very cool. ]