ExpanDrive

One of the most irritating signs of my advancing age has been the recent deterioration of my eyesight. Not that it’s especially poor (somewhere between 20/50 and 20/75), but it’s bad enough that without eyewear, I find myself squinting hard at the screen a couple of times a day.

Fortunately, OS X has some pretty neat tricks built into it for those who need a little extra help in the vision department. In the Keyboards & Mouse System Preferences panel, you can enable a screen zoom with ctrl+scroll wheel (or ctrl+two-fingered scroll on a laptop). The Universal Access panel also has a bunch of squint-relieving features, including the ability to make the cursor friggin’ huge.

3rd-party eye support isn’t bad, either. Despite being kinda ugly and uncreatively named, Computer Glasses allows you to zoom into a localized area, rather than blowing up the entire screen. And Switch Res X is a fantastic way to get at screen resolutions that the Displays preference panel doesn’t want you to see. It’s handy for nailing down the happy medium between pixel count and legibility, or for setting up your Mac with an HD TV.

For web browsing, the recently-released Firefox 3 does wonders for my fading eyesight. While most browsers use the “Apple+hyphen” and “Apple+equals sign” commands to decrease and increase text size, the new Firefox does them all one better by re-rendering the entire page—and all its independent elements, like movies, graphics, etc—in a slightly smaller or larger size. I think that’s pretty impressive.

I also really dig Noctournal. It’s a customizable screen inverter from the makers of Quicksilver that saves wear on the eyes, and can also make your batteries last a long, long time. Caffeine, while it does nothing for battery life, does a tremendous service by preventing Energy Saver from darkening/turning off your screen without warning. Greyish screens might save energy, but they are murder on the eyes.

There’s a lot of crap in my life that I’m sick of. Websites that make you register. “Green” vehicles that get 22 miles per gallon. Stores that call you a “guest” instead of a customer—I mean, WTF? If you were a guest at my house and I made you pay $10 bucks to use my wireless network, would you ever come back?

Anyway, with the NBA Finals underway, there’s a lot of talk about whether or not Kobe Bryant is as good as Michael Jordan. After Game 4, in which the Celtics stormed back to win from a 20+ point deficit in Los Angeles, while Kobe got shut down faster than clicking hardrive at an IT convention, most of that is gone.

But, being the objective guy I am, I’ve decided to compile a list of things at which Kobe Bryant is superior to Michael Jordan:

1. Whining - after every drive that couldn’t have been made with a blindfold on, even the ones where he scores, Kobe turns to the ref and shouts, making some gesture to indicate that his jersey was tugged or his arm was held. Jordan just backpedaled down the court and played defense—better than Kobe does.
2. Retiring - Kobe could still blow this one. He currently has zero failed retirements to Jordan’s two, but he’s just so freakin’ unpopular with teammates and standoffish with fans that I can’t imagine anyone would want him back.
3. Dodging Rape Allegations - Honestly, this one might just be a trick of circumstance. I feel like if Jordan ever had to dodge any rape allegations, he would have done so better than Kobe.
4. Gambling - I could be way off on this one, but numerous people claim to have won tremendous sums of money from MJ, including one claim in excess of $1,000,000. Kobe might have similar losses that I just don’t know about, but in my experience, only interesting people gamble.
5. Stonewalling - Seriously, if I were to engage in some sort of criminal conspiracy with with either Kobe or MJ, I would go with Kobe, since he’s really good at being cold, unfriendly, and not talkative. That’ll come in handy, should he be taken into custody. Jordan would be all garrulous, charming the cops and trying to sell them McDonald’s or Nike or whatever.
6. Wearing an Arm Sock - Grasping for straws, I know. But Jordan never wore an arm sock. Kobe wins by default.

Now lets compare this to the list of things in which Jordan’s skill exceeds Kobe’s:

1. Basketball - No contest here. 6 titles, 5 MVPs, and no 20+ point comebacks in the Finals by opposing teams on his home court vs. 1 MVP and no titles without Shaq (though a 2008 title is still possible). Jordan also did it against tougher competition.
2. Marketing - The fact that Kobe plays with a friggin’ undershirt on but MJ remains the Hanes spokesman speaks volumes about the divergence in natural salesmanship between the two. Kobe couldn’t sell smack to a junkie, where Jordan could get one clean just by flashing a smile.
3. Acting - Jordan has a number of film credits (though not quite as many as Shaq), including the 1998 feature Space Jam, a film that was built around the MJ brand. He also appeared in real movies like He Got Game. Kobe just does a lot of talk shows.
4. Baseball - During retirement #1, Jordan played poorly on a minor league baseball team. He also bought them a bus, but still, he didn’t look entirely out of place on that level. Kobe has yet to play professional baseball.
5. Changing Jerseys - “When I come back like Jordan, wearin’ the four-five“ . MJ briefly played with the #45 jersey upon his return to the Bulls because his signature #23 had already been retired. I don’t see any #8 hanging from the rafters at the Staples Center, do you?
6. Being a Teammate - Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Horace Grant - Jordan made all these players better. He pressured them to succeed, but he never lectured them or chewed them out. He earned their respect. Kobe, not so much.
7. Trivial Pursuit - This is just a guess. But Jordan has three years of study on an academically-eligible-to-compete level at North Carolina. Kobe did not attend college. (Related - how sick would it be to see a fourth Jordan comeback to play and complete his degree at UNC?

So yeah. Clearly no contest here. LeBron is already a better comparison to MJ, and he doesn’t even have titles yet.

Now if only I could get the New York Times to stop making me register.

So in the coming days/weeks/months, ExpanDrive is getting a new icon, both because the current horseshoe-shaped magnet isn’t particularly unique, and because really big magnets and hard drives don’t exactly play well together. Obviously, I’m excited to see what we get, but would like to make one request: no birds.

Seriously, they’re freakin’ everywhere. I remember back in the day when I first stumbled across Adium. I was like “huh, the icon’s a fruity little duck”, but with OTR chat support and totally customizable user interface, who was I to complain?

A few years later, before ExpanDrive made my choice of SFTP client utterly moot, I brought Cyberduck, which sports yet another birdy little icon, into my apps folder. Shortly thereafter, Gaim, Adium’s Windows doppelgänger became Pidgin, and another avian icon hit the software scene.

Around 2006, they began popping up everywhere. ZeFrank, for example, suddenly developed a sweet spot for duckies, which kind of seems a step down from his previous infatuations with kitties and stirring the pot of love. I’ve been using NeoOffice (which rocks a sweet pirate ship icon) for a while, but just the other day, as I was rooting through an old harddrive, I noticed the subtle bird references inserted into OpenOffice.

I decided things were getting downright Hitchcockian when I started looking for something lighter than Wordpress, but equally hackable, for my homepage blog. Chyrp fit the bill perfectly–with one tiny exception.

So, yeah. I’d prefer an icon with no birds. In fact, I’d like to maybe see something that kills birds, like DDT or an automatic shotgun. Y’know, just in case. I realize bird-killing things don’t have all that much to do with SFTP or hard drives, but that’s what you pay designers for, right?

Until then, just be careful what sort of information you reveal over Twitter. The birds are everywhere…and they’re watching.

Syntax Highlight Code in Less
Jeff and Matt both use cat, presumably because they’re so tough that they can read long documents faster than Terminal.app can print them to the screen. On the other hand, I use less, and now I use less with pretty colors. I’m superficial like that.

“Experts Revive Debate Over Cellphones and Cancer”
“Cellphones emit non-ionizing radiation, waves of energy that are too weak to break chemical bonds or to set off the DNA damage known to cause cancer. There is no known biological mechanism to explain how non-ionizing radiation might lead to cancer.”

Magnetic Fields Movie
Let me start by saying that I’ve heard a lot of people talk about magnetic fields, and I’ve never heard them described as a hairy ball. There’s a hairy ball theorem, and magnetic fields are sometimes said to act like hairy rubber hands (field lines “want” to be shorter, and further away from each other). But there’s no hairy ball magnetic field. The “hair” on the sun is really a magnetized plasma, and so I think it’s unfair to call it simply a “magnetic field” (it’s really much more complicated). And finally, all of the animations of magnetic fields seem to ignore the Earth’s own intrinsic magnetic field, which would likely dominate the room unless they hard some really impressive currents going through those pipes. In short, I wasn’t impressed.

The Big Picture
Stunning photos at Boston.com. Just go look. Do it now. Make sure you catch the high res photos of the Amazon undiscovereds.

Black Cab Sessions
Musicians driving ’round Trafalgar Square, playin’ a little tune, innit?

“One More Thing” An oldie-but-goodie from The Onion.

Shell Script Mistakes
“While there are lots of shell programming pitfalls, at least the interpreter will tell you immediately about them. The mistakes I describe below, generally mean that your script will run fine now, but if the data changes or you move your script to another system, then you may have problems.”

Robert Muraine Audition - SYTYCD 4
Robert Muraine is now my second favorite dancer in the universe, behind Michael Jackson (obviously).

“Chasing José”
“Over the last few years, Rob has negotiated prospective deals for Jose worth almost $2 million. Rob got Taco Bell to ante up $25,000, plus residuals, for Jose to star in a TV commercial in which Jose would hold up a huge burrito and say, ‘This thing’s gotta be on something.’ Jose demanded $50,000 instead and Taco Bell walked. Rob also got Jose an offer of $100,000 from GoldenPalace.com, which would require Jose simply to wear that company’s t-shirt and cap whenever he was on TV. Jose demanded $200,000 and Golden Palace walked. Then, Rob got Jose an offer of $75,000 from a reality TV show that wanted to film Jose in a wheelchair for thirty days. Jose demanded more, and the TV show vanished. Finally, Rob got Jose an offer of $500,000 for a movie based on his life, but Jose demanded $1.5 million and the offer vanished.”

Twitter bucks
I wonder if they’ll let you buy twitterbucks with flooz. John Gruber suggests a more realistic business model for twitter.

On Language: Emoticons
“The trouble is that the stylized drawings of iconography (rooted in the Greek eikenai, ‘to seem like,’ and graphein, ‘to write’) are threatening to take over the precise communication of words.”

Hoax: 13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers
We don’t issue retractions here at Magnanimous. We silently delete misguided posts, and then link to their expose as if we never fell for it in the first place.

“Dear American Airlines”
“‘Dear American Airlines,’ the 180-page letter begins. ‘My name is Benjamin R. Ford and I am writing to request a refund in the amount of $392.68.’ But ‘request,’ he decides, is a word ‘too mincy & polite, I think, too officious & Britishy.’ He demands a refund.”

The situation with Address Book / Google Contacts sync is completely bizarre. The Google Mac Blog says that OS X 10.5.3 “now lets iPhone users sync their Address Book with Google Contacts.”

Awesome, but what’s up with iPhone requirement? Is there some special technology in the iPhone, a technology that doesn’t exist in full-sized computers, that makes the sync possible? Is this a business ploy to attract gmail users to the iPhone who might otherwise use a Google -> Address Book -> iSync double-bridge to get their gmail contacts on their Razr?

But then you can enable sync, without an iPhone or iPod touch, if you’re willing to brave a simple .plist hack? I’m very confused about what the logic is behind all of this.

Since graduating college, I’ve been a fairly happy Bank of America checking account holder. There are an absurd number of BofA ATMs in Boston and a reasonable number of branches. However, there is a $750 minimum balance requirement that sort of grinds on me - mostly because the account makes no interest. New checks cost a ridiculous $25, which I am forced to pay nearly every year as I move around.

A few months ago I saw an ad for Schwab High-Yield Investor Checking. It advertised 3% interest, no minimum balance, all ATM fees [domestic and international] refunded. It seemed too good to be true - but Schwab is a respectable name, so I gave it a good look and opened an account.

This is a great deal. It’s not too good to be true, and there isn’t a catch.

• 2.01% variable APY - [about 5x the national average]
• No minimum balance requirement
• All ATM fees are refunded [both domestic and international]
• Free bill pay
• Free checks
• Overdraft protection
• Built in brokerage account [with reasonable trading fees]

The major downside is that you won’t be able to interact with a real person at a local branch, although they have 270 investment branches you can supposedly go to for service. Apart from that, it’s pretty nice. The website isn’t quite as pretty as the BofA site, but is certainly just as functional.

For an even higher interest rate, Jon keeps all of his money in the the [dubiously named] Bank of Internet USA, which is currently yielding 3% on a $1,000 minimum balance. I’m not too sure about that one.

If you haven’t tried some good Oregon Pinot Noir, you’re really missing out. This was only $19 at Martinetti’s in Boston. Incredible.

Whether iTunes or VMWare Fusion v1.0 is the culprit, I’m not sure. I’ve been getting high CPU usage while my guest OS is idle in VMWare Fusion 1.0 final. The solution, noted elsewhere, is to disable ituneshelper.exe using autoruns or msconfig.exe. vmware-vmx CPU usage with an idle guest OS went from 38% to 8%