ExpanDrive

Maybe you heard earlier this week about Apple taking out a patent on some solar cells, so soon we can all have solar powered MacBooks and iPhones and blah blah blah.

Look: that might do it for my cousin Irene with the gold pigtails and a frilly pink dress, but that sure as hell doesn’t do it for me. I demand MORE POWER. And like John McCain, who’s so tough he wouldn’t even use a solar-powered sundial, I know exactly where to get it.

That’s right, I’m talking about a nuclear computer. I’m sick of being behind the Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys in generating what is obviously the manliest form of power on earth. And don’t bother whining about “feasibility”. If we’d let weenies like you take over during the 60s, there’d be a Russian flag on the moon and the national pastime would be badminton.

A Mac Pro weighs almost 50 pounds, and enough fissionable material for an a-bomb weighs only 11—still sound impossible to you? Sure, you’d need turbines and a cooling system and crap like that, but Apple’s always bragging about how awesome its designers are. Now it’s time to put up or shut up.

On top of just being frickin’ awesome, nuclear computing would all but solve the national energy crisis. When you were running some pansy application like Mail or iWank or whatever, you could use the power supply in your PC to run the rest of your home, and even sell power back to the grid.

Look, I love the environment as much as the next guy—wind turbines, recycling, bottle deposits, hybrid SUVs; the whole nine yards. But solar’s simply not a viable solution for power users; I mean, what are you gonna do when the sun’s not shining?

Let’s say you’re playing Quake IV in your bedroom at 4am, and somehow fighting back the entire Korean Peninsula with a single measly railgun—do you want to get gauntleted because a “low power warning” pops up and ruins your FPS? Or do want your power supply to get so hot from rendering ultra-high-res blood spatter that you have to huck it in the bathtub to prevent a meltdown?

The choice is yours, people. Don’t let Steve Jobs talk you into buying an inferior product.

Image: MacNuke, created by author. From original work by Gmn wnr. Free use under cc-by-sa-2.5.

In version 1.15 we’ve included a little script called expan that lets you connect and eject drives right from the command line. Because nobody wants to have to hike all the way over to the gui when they’re already cranking on their keyboard in the Terminal. Am I right, or am I right?

You can install expan with just a button press (and a password entry) from the ExpanDrive preferences window. It works exactly like you’re probably all ready guessing

 expan connect driveName
 expan eject driveName

The script will connect and eject every drive that has driveName in its URL or as part of its Drive Name. If you want to connect all your drives, then something like expan connect . will probably do the trick.

Finally, because even desktop apps can be Web 2.0, we’ve made a screencast so you can see expan in action.

Jonathan, for about as long as I can remember, has been a proud owner and advocate of Kinesis ergonomic keyboards. He was the first among a growing group of people I know who swear by these things. Problems with RSI and CTS, for most, seem to melt away or be largely alleviated by the Kinesis. I’ve never really had any problems with my wrists/fingers, so there was no pressing reason to get one of these things. On the outside, I always thought the Kinesis was ridiculous. I couldn’t even log into my webmail without hunting and pecking away. Pair programming on it was pretty much impossible. However, after I could count 10 friends who swear by these, and finding myself [again] in need of a new keyboard I took the $300 leap and gave it a chance.

The first week of retraining micro-muscle patterns was painful, I admit. But now I find myself in love. It’s Freaking INCREDIBLE. Take a look at this thing, it’s a beauty, and the geek factor is off the charts.