To get rid of the hidden .spotlight folder on removable volumes like flash drives, cd to the volume and then:
touch .metadata_never_indexThis tip compliments of Cro Magnon on the Ars technica Mac forum, and Mac OS X Hints, from whence it came.
It seems that a cat has adopted us. It is at least a mutual love affair between Lily and a calico kitten that has begun to haunt our carport. Yesterday, it got a name: Laten.
At some point we realized that the best compromise solution for our current living space was to put a window above the washer and dryer, which sit on the south wall of our kitchen. Our kitchen is quite large — one can imagine a real estate agent using something like “farm-style” to describe its size — but it is also fairly dark. In its current state, there is a window over the sink and a window cut into the door, but both of those give onto the carport, which means they will always bring in a fairly subdued light.
In other words, our kitchen is a large cave.
So the first thing the new window does is bring the hope of lightening the cave. The second thing it does is give us a view of the backyard from the kitchen, which is important when you have a growing girl in the house who, as summer approaches, wants to spend more and more time outside. And with our improvements to the backyard, we do too. The new window will, we hope, give us more communication between the backyard and the kitchen.
We also hope to put a counter in over the washer and dryer, simultaneously closing them in and removing them from view and giving us additional counter space — not, mind you, because we really, really need more counter space.
But before you get to the dream, you have to do a little destruction. Here is an image from the current work:
I’ll post a slideshow of the project once it’s all done.
You have to love Instructables. So much great stuff, and so thoughtfully done. Now someone has posted how to screen print tee shirts: here.
Sometimes the series of connections that is the internet (not the wires but the ideas) is truly amazing. As many readers of this blog know, my editor of choice is Textmate. Textmate made quite a hit when it premiered on the Mac platform, which up until that time really only had BBedit for users in need of a heavy-duty editor. (Was XCode available and useful then?) BBedit had a free version, but if you wanted the full version, it was expensive. Textmate was €39 — which was closer to $39 then than it is now. Textmate also possessed the amazing ability to be extended in utility by its users, who quickly proceeded to share bundles of snippeds, commands, and macros with each other.
Linux and Windows users who saw Textmate, perhaps through David Hansen’s famous Rails screencasts, wanted to know when its developer, Allan Odgaard was going to port his application over their preferred platforms. Allan steadfastly refused, and in a move that surprised everyone, seemed perfectly happy when Alexander Stigsen began to develop an editor not only a lot like Textmate but also one that could use adapted Textmate bundles — the very engine of Textmate’s success. I occasionally checked out the E Text Editor, but because I don’t work on Linux or Windows, I never paid any serious attention.
All that has changed with Stigsen’s announcement that he is going to turn his stable, profitable, conventional software company into an open company.
What does that mean? The first thing he has made the application’s source open — except for a small, central portion that he maintains as proprietary. The next step is to set up a venue in which individuals can participate and begin to feel their way around the project — the code, the tasks at hand, the procedures. What he hopes will happen is that as some individuals become more interested in working, they will find themselves commensurately compensated. (The mechanism he has planned is worth reading on his site.)
Why is this an interesting series of connections? Because these kinds of enterprises are exactly the kind of thing that I think we should not only be studying in the academy but also replicating.
We have been asking Lily to tell us her dreams for, it seems, a very long time now. It all began when she wasn’t even a year old and she had night terrors. As someone who suffered nightmares as a child that I still find haunting, I hoped to get her to talk about her dreams and to give her control over them. But up until today, she has never told us, or never been able to tell us, what was the content of a dream.
Today she did. And she dreamed she was in a store with her friend Ava and they were looking at ponies. Toy ponies? we asked. Yes, she said, and then added that there were also two unicorns off in a dark area. We asked her if she was afraid. No, she said. I could see them. I could just see them.
Well, here’s an interesting item from the on-line New York Times: Hewlett-Packard is offering a new web-based on-demand printing service for magazines, called MagCloud. A content creator uploads a properly formatted PDF and the cost to the purchaser is 20 cents per page plus shipping. (That’s the base cost. Anything on top of that results in profit for the content creator.) Here’s the story.
In my life I have loved one vehicle I owned, a 1986 Isuzu Trooper that I bought used in 1992, with a lot of help from my mother. Since 1999, I have driven a 1997 Isuzu Hombre pickup truck that we bought used after living in Lafayette for a few months and trying to make do with one car. I had planned on driving that truck until at least half of the boat book was done, but it seems to have had a different idea about its life course and gave up its second clutch. With the cost of repairing it estimated at $850 on a truck whose total value was only about $1600, I got our mechanic to agree to buy it for the difference and we headed out as a family to buy me/husband/daddy a new truck. I have always wanted a Toyota Tacoma, and I was pretty content with the extended cab model with the inline 4 cylinder engine. Yung took one look at the cab and decided it was too small for our growing girl and voted for the double cab.
I think I now have the second vehicle in my life that I will love:
For record, here are the cars I have owned/driven:
And now this truck.
Adafruit Industries, the folks who also brought you the DIY TV-B-Gone remote control to turn off the televisions in public spaces that sometimes are just too much have come up with another DIY kit: a monitor that sends usage statistics to your Twitter account. Check it out. (It’s a terrible URL, btw. Come on, Adafruit. Join this millenium.)
This afternoon on the way back from school, I told Lily that Yung had made an appointment to get Lily’s hair cut by one of her favorite former teachers who is just about done with her training at the Aveda Institute here in Lafayette.
“I know,” Lily said.
“How do you know, honey? Mommy just made the appointment this afternoon.”
“I know.”
“But she just made it.”
“She told me.”
With that, I understood that Yung had told her that she was going to call and make the appointment. We went on to talk about something else, and she said “I know.”
“How do you know so much?” I asked.
“Because I’m smart.”
“Well, you know,” I said thinking I would take advantage of this moment to make a lovely point about life. “You know, Lily, some of the smartest people I know are the ones who know what they don’t know.” Top that, I thought smugly to myself.
“Well, daddy, what if you know what you know?”
Ouch.