Random Non Sequitur

Well, I filled the holes in my Arcade Daze dock with this post, but my insane sense of completionism compelled me to add a few more apps I use frequently: Cyberduck, iTunes and NetNewsWire. As before, credit for the original style goes to Gedeon Maheux of the Iconfactory. You can get the rest of the Arcade Daze set here.

And if you’re looking for an easy way to manage your custom icons I highly recommend CandyBar by Panic. It’s fun to use and will work with the sets at the Iconfactory as well as the .icns files I’ve posted here. Enjoy!

P.S. I’ve gotten a few requests for other icons in this style, but these are the last ones I’m going to do. Arcade Daze rightfully belongs to the Iconfactory, so we’ll just have to anxiously await the next application set!

Cyberduck, iTunes and NetNewsWire icons

As a webmaster, I do a lot of work on whole directories of files, usually over a remote connection to an NFS share. The advantages of this are obvious, but unfortunately the disadvantages are equally so – the biggest one is that live editing is so slow that you are much better off just pulling the files down to edit locally. I don’t like doing this for many reasons, but mostly because I’m lazy – I want to eliminate the extra step or moment of latency when the file is transferred up or down. I also want to take full advantage of TextMate and just open the whole folder as a project so I can easily move between the files I’m working on. Try this on a remote directory and you might as well suit up for a day at the beach.

Enter ExpanDrive (MagnetK, $29). This nifty little app is built on the MacFUSE core (but uses its own proprietary file system) and allows you to mount any directory as a drive over SFTP, and it looks and behaves like one with the help of some aggressive and intelligent caching. I set it up to point to my home directory and created a TextMate project for a good 1,000+ files and it worked like a dream – I never noticed any lag and it didn’t beachball like crazy when I switched focus off the app.

What I love most about it is how invisible it is. It was clearly designed to make me forget that I’m working on a remote drive, and allow me to interact with it as though it were on my local computer. It succeeds beautifully at this, and after only a week of use I already can’t live without it.

You might ask what it has over MacFusion, a free open-source app that allows you to interact with SSHFS in much the same way. MacFusion is also a great piece of software, but it doesn’t do any caching or automatic connection management. The result is an experience that is a lot less invisible, and you will still see plenty of beachballing apps if you try to do a lot of live editing. Still, MacFusion will definitely do the trick for many different kinds of work, and it’s worth trying out both to see what works for you.

As an interesting side note, ExpanDrive is written in Python with only the GUI in Objective-C.

A truism: engineers are often not the healthiest people around. We don’t sleep enough, we don’t eat right, we don’t get enough exercise and we’re prone to being overweight. Moreover, we neither have time nor the inclination to address our bad physical habits because we’re so often hyperfocused on the metaphysical, the intellectual or the technical. Inner self: very important. Outer self: not so much.

I myself grew up quite pudgy and have always been so. I was a stubborn mule about it too. Even though I knew it was unhealthy and I was unhappy looking the way I did, I refused to do anything about it, both out of laziness and the ridiculous notion that being concerned with my physical appearance was somehow shallow. For years I trudged on this way until I realized, as many people in my aging generation are starting to, that my lifestyle could go on forever, but my body certainly wouldn’t.

So earlier this year I made it a resolution that I was going to get myself to a healthy size and stay there. I signed up with a clinic specifically designed to treat obesity, and started a four month program over the course of which I lost about forty pounds. By no means am I out of the woods yet; any behavior change takes time, and I’m attending courses on weight maintenance for the next six months just to ensure I don’t return to my old Mountain Dew-swilling ways and gain it all back.

It has been an experience the likes of which I can’t adequately describe here (but I’m always happy to talk about it if you ask). But I have learned a few basic things that I thought I would share, as someone who’s been through it.

Five things you probably already know about weight loss (so no more excuses, right?):

1. Reduce the number of calories you eat. I don’t care how you do it – give up sugar, give up fatty food, portion control. Whatever is easier for you. Your body only needs a certain number of calories a day to keep you going (approximately your weight in pounds times ten) and if you routinely exceed this number, it will start storing the excess energy as fat. Keeping a food diary is immensely helpful – I highly recommend calorieking.com.
2. Exercise frequently with low intensity. Find something easy and enjoyable that you will do every day for 20-30 minutes and do it. This will help keep your body burning fat for energy instead of muscle. Just don’t push yourself too hard or you’ll actually start burning glucose stores instead of fat, which will only make you feel hungry.
3. Drink at least 2 quarts of water a day. Not only does it help you fight fatigue (a common symptom of dehydration), but it also serves to make the fat-burning process more efficient. Flavored water counts, but black tea and coffee don’t – and watch the caffeine.
4. Eat lots of lean protein. White fish and white meats like chicken and turkey breast are low-fat and relatively low-calorie. Even better, they are loaded with protein, which will help you feel full even if you’re cutting calories.
5. Don’t let yourself get really, really hungry. If you’re dieting, you will be hungry from time to time. What you want to avoid is the situation in which you let yourself get absolutely starving, and then start making bad decisions about food. Eat a healthy snack in between meals, or eat smaller meals more frequently.

I won’t lie and say that it’s easy, but it does get easier. 90% of the battle is education. If you’re interested in learning more, I recommend The New Fit or Fat and Thin for Life. Both are fairly technical and don’t have too much of the usual pseudoscientific nonsense.

And if you’re trying out a Wii Fit, let me know how it works for you. :)

During a recent trip home to Chicago (more precisely, Algonquin) I found myself going on a nostalgia treasure hunt through my parents’ basement. Among the usual prizes of old yearbooks, photos and toys, I unearthed a cache of computers, none of which had been turned on in almost fifteen years. The oldest machines in the collection were an Apple ][, a Mac Plus, and a Macintosh SE (all of which still boot). There were also two newer machines – a PowerPC box and a Performa, which was our first computer with a CD-ROM drive. Other Macs the household has seen are a blueberry iMac, a G3 iBook and a G3 tower. These days I use a Mac Pro tower and a Macbook Pro for work, while I tote around the featherlight Air for personal use. And then there’s the iPhone.

Yeah. This stuff is in my blood. It’s probably in yours too, if you’re reading this.

Old Mac users have more than just a shared history. We have intense cultural pride. There were times when it was a 45-minute drive just to get to a store where you could buy Mac software. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to try to make the stuff, much less sell it. While I was milling around the SFMacIndie party at Jillian’s last night I was astounded by the sheer number of developers there. There are people who converted because of the excellence of the developer tools, or because they see opportunity in the market, or because they are attracted to the explosive growth of the iPhone. Actually, these are all pretty legitimate reasons to develop software for a platform. It’s not just folks doing it for the love of it anymore.

There’s no way this is a bad thing. More developers means more choice, more innovation and a better experience for Mac users everywhere. It’s just different, and it’s easy to be wistful for a world that has gone by.

To me, the rainbow logo is the icon of the Old World of Mac. The world of Mac that I fell in love with is different, both simpler and more complex, than the glossy technoporn world we know now. So I’ve decided to take it back (with all due respect to Clerks 2). I want to remember the richness and color of that shared history, even as we move forward into what looks to be a Golden Age for the company who’s products have shaped my life in so many ways. So henceforth I’ll proudly display the old logo in place of the new one wherever I can, as a simple homage to the culture that brought us here.

If a computer can be said to be a place, then my computer is the place that I call home. I spend more time there than anywhere else, love it and get sick of it, and get a bizarrely human satisfaction from decorating it. It stands to reason, then, that one of my great passions (and not-so-secret shames) is customizing my OS.

I’ve recently become enamored of Gedeon Maheux’s vintage game-themed Arcade Daze icon sets over at the Iconfactory, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that when I installed the first application set that almost all the apps I have in my dock were updated. Being the completionist that I am, I created my own icons for the missing applications: Firefox, Xcode and Interface Builder.

The two developer tools were surprisingly not too difficult, but Firefox was more challenging and I’m still not entirely happy with it. Here’s hoping Gedeon covers it in the next application set. In the meantime, you can grab all three icons here. (And check out my now fully pixelated dock!)

Interface Builder, Xcode and Firefox icons