An antibacterial mouse. What a great idea!

Unfortunately, the remarks about how grubby a typical desk is prompted me to try to shake some of the muck out of my keyboard… eugh.

Seriously though, I'd like to see this feature a standard part of mouse (and keyboard) design. It'd also be good if the manufacturers designed input devices to facilitate cleaning. Most modern (i.e. optical) mice are OK, but keyboards, quite frankly, are pretty hard to clean; most of the time you find that you have to actually take them to pieces to get them properly clean, and it isn't always as easy as it looks getting them back together.

Posted by alastair at 2:52 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I recently acquired another 23" display. Whilst this new screen looks superficially the same as one of the existing units, it clearly has a different LCD panel. Rather irritatingly, the new panel reproduces colours quite differently to the older one, and the Apple supplied ICC profiles really don't do much to fix this.

Calibrating the two using the software calibration feature in Mac OS X didn't help that much. It's just too hard to get accurate—or even reproducible—results by judging colours with your eyes. If you only have one display, and don't otherwise care about colour, you might not have noticed this, but believe me, with two it's a real nuisance.

Anyway, I invested in a gretagmacbeth Eye-One Display 2. It's made a big difference. Both displays now appear basically the same; you can still detect a subtle difference in between the two (due, I think to the native whitepoint difference), but it's a whole world better than the default settings.

One other benefit of having a proper calibration tool is that it's possible to get the two panels set to the same brightness, which is very helpful (again, it's quite hard to judge if you're trying to set it manually, although you will spot the difference during use, which can be annoying).

Posted by alastair at 2:46 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I've updated my regular expression patch for ICU to work against the recently released ICU4C 3.6.

You can read about the functionality this adds here and here.

Posted by alastair at 4:00 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What a cool idea for an OS X screensaver.

I'd quite like to see how much code this took; they (Bruno Roudot, Boris Cargo and Vincent Zorzi) used Quartz Composer, so I'm guessing it's not nearly as much as it looks.

Anyway, it's a neat screensaver.

Posted by alastair at 10:39 AM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As a Mac user (and with a shiny new Mac Pro at my desk, to boot), I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with StuffIt. The fact is that it's a product that I just don't need, and would rather not have installed on my system, but the sad fact is that a lot of Mac files are compressed with StuffIt rather than being zipped, tarred and bzip2'd or gzip'd, or even just stuffed in a compressed .dmg.

Originally I wasn't so bothered, but what made me blog about this today was the fact that I wanted to expand a .sit on my new machine, and I discovered that you cannot now download StuffIt Expander without giving your e-mail address to Allume, and worse than that, without “agreeing” to receive unwanted marketing from them.

But I'm locked into doing this by the fact that other people are using StuffIt. (And why, by the way, is StuffIt Mac twice the price of the PC version? For that matter, how can a compression tool possibly be worth the amount they're charging for it?!)

The e-mail has just arrived, and I've confirmed my e-mail address to them; however, to save others from having to do so, here are some direct links to the downloadable versions:

StuffIt Expander 10.0.2 (OS X 10.3 and later)
StuffIt Expander 8.0.2 (OS X 10.0 to 10.2)
StuffIt Expander 7.0.3 (Classic/OS 9.2.x)

These came from the actual download page, rather than the e-mail based thing.

Hopefully they will work without you having to go through the e-mail sign-up form and then wait for them to spam you later before you can unsubscribe.

Posted by alastair at 10:31 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)