njr 3.0

Running out of space on your OS X root partition and don't know where it went? Get WhatSize. It's a one-trick application, sorting your files by size, but it works wonderfully.

Among the space-hogging items it found for me were Magic Mouse Discus, bundled with Toast 5, with installs almost 200 MB of graphics; and Maya, which installs 50 MB of files in /Library/Application Support/AliasWavefront (even though the application installed on another disk). Now I'm back up to 425 MB free.

12:30 AM | Radio
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Not much worth blogging recently in my life: car washed and vacuumed, taxes ready to go off tomorrow, head down in preparation for meeting with advisor on Wednesday.

Since my parents' last phone is dying, I spent a while last night looking through cordless phone/answerers, always an interesting sojourn into the inanity of consumer electronics (yes, Uniden, with 45 models of cordless phones, I'm talking to you). Here's what I picked out:

This phone supports up to 4 handsets (you can use them to do a conference call or for intercom). It is about $125 with one handset, or $150 with two handsets (VTech 2460). An additional handset is $60 otherwise, which makes the two-handset thing a good deal… It has very good sound quality, lightweight handset, answering machine, headset jack, includes a spare battery charger, and has a speakerphone on the handset.

More info here; buy it with one handset, two handsets.

This phone only supports 1 handset (Uniden makes more expensive phones, but they only support up to 2). It looks like a 2.4 GHz version of my phone, but with a smaller handset. It has a speakerphone in the base, but no battery backup so if the power goes out, you lose your messages. It's $80.

More info here; buy it here.

3:51 PM | Radio
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Retrospect was crashing a lot; I think it's an extension conflict. I wish OS X would run on Elmyra or I'd switch it in a nanosecond.

SpamAssassin wasn't working for my father, it turned out it was because his shell was set to /bin/false and it didn't want to create a user config (~/.spamassassin) for him. Fixed now.

9:36 PM | Radio
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Paolo's Weblog: Shared Outlines: GUI: Yeah! This looks terrific!

8:32 AM | Radio
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Why the hell do microsoft products make so much damn noise? [Steve Zellers' Radio Weblog]

The post continues to complain about Word making a noise when you save a file. Personally, I find this very useful and wish more applications would do it. Not everyone is trained to look up at the File menu flashing, and it can be annoying to have to switch your focus from the document you're working on.

Until the save sound was introduced in Word 97/98, my mother always used to save by the File menu rather than a keyboard equivalent so she was sure it worked. I'm sure this feature was motivated by similar observations by the folks at Microsoft. The monopoly, yes, well…

8:31 AM | Radio
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