Ain't these tears in my eyes telling you

[austin_dern]

I noticed in the bathroom this morning that my liquid hand soap is blue. That's no remarkable by itself except that my shampoo is also a blue version (billed as ``Vanilla Tea'' scented). If I could find the matching conditioner for that, that would also be blue, although it would be a slightly different blue. On top of that, my body wash is blue as well. I don't know what's gone on my life that all my body-cleansing liquids should be blue simultaneously, but I realized in the shower I was washing my hair with the body wash.

And a couple of days ago I accepted the invitation of iCab to download a new version; they jumped up to a new minor version number, up to 4.2, with all sorts of fixes and improvements that I will never actually notice. I don't want to sound dismissive of new features like where, for the bookmarks (according to the version history), it's ``now possible to activate the synchronization of the bookmarks via WebDAV server'', which I'm sure is something that makes a set of the population extremely happy. I'm just not one of them. And they haven't been able to fix it so when you drag an image off the web page onto the desktop the URL where you got the image from is stored in the file information. (iCab 3 does this wonderful feature, which is so convenient you'd think every browser would.)

But the day after the download it popped open a notice there was another update available, and did I want to download it now? I didn't so much want to, but obviously some bug was discovered and needed patching, and I didn't think about it then because I had something else urgent to get to. When I finally did get the updated 4.2.1 I found what the major bugs fixed were. Some of them related to Kiosk mode, in which the browser takes up the entire window and you can't get out of it and I've only opened this ever by accident. The important fix, though, was to ``a bug which causes iCab 4.2 to report new updates even when no updates were available''. I had never before encountered Russell's paradox in a version history.

Trivia: The number of Bell telephones in service in the United States reached the thirty million mark in 1948; this represented a rise of over forty percent since the end of World War II. Source: Telephone: The First Hundred Years, John Brooks.

Currently Reading: The Wall Around The World, Theodore R Cogswell. Not only is there an address label on the interior page, but the title page is signed, apparently by Cogswell.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

The Wall Around The World

That's one that always stuck with me - that and 'The Spectre General', which I had in the same volume.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

``The Spectre General'' is in there too, yes, although it read to me like it was taking an awfully long time to get where it was going. It also felt like it might have fit in on X Minus One; I wonder if it did get in the series. (I don't know offhand.)

There's also a reasonably clever deal-with-the-devil story, and a cute mix of vampires with alien invasions which again feels like it might have been profitably ripped off by The Twilight Zone. And in a what-decade-was-this-written moment (it was written in the 50s) characters in the space fleet muttering about the Prime Directive.

Where I draw the line and threaten to throw the book against the wall is the one where the aliens interrupting a supply run have the most brilliantestest plan ever for breaking into the human stronghold: they'll hide inside the food cans and leap out when the humans are getting ready to eat! How could that possibly fail disastrously?

Oh, yes, and I almost forgot: there's a cute twist on the werewolf concept that I'm kind of surprised Robert Scheckly didn't use. I imagine Ron Goulart has, though.

Kiosk Mode?

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

I was under the impression that *no* Mac browser actually offered a kiosk mode. It's disabled in Mac Firefox, and Safari conspicuously lacks it. (I was researching the question a few months ago since Kiosk mode might actually come in handy should I start allowing the joey to poke at websites like pbskids.org.) Apparently Macs are "too good" to use as kiosks, or something. ;^b

Re: Kiosk Mode?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I've never noticed kiosk modes since, well, I don't need to leave any of my computers in a public space so I never noticed whether there are kiosk modes or not. I only discovered it by accident when I hit, I think, flower-K while using iCab, and that really quite disrupted my plans.

Anyway, if you do want to try it, iCab is a free download (http://www.icab.de/) despite hourly nagging if you don't buy it. (iCab 3 uses a different engine and only nags the once, at startup.) It does use the Apple Web Kit things, so if stuff runs in Safari it should run in iCab 4.

Re: Kiosk Mode?

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

Hrm. Between nags and using WebKit I suppose I'll have to pass on it. ;^)

I remember iCab from the old 2.x versions, when it was the most "modern" browser which could run on Motorola 68k Macs. (I'm sure I still have an emulator image with it installed lying around.) I'm sort of surprised it's made it to the "OS X" era, honestly. Of course, knowing they're using WebKit sort of explains it. One gets the impression sometimes that any shmo+the family dog could bang out a WebKit browser over a long weekend.

Maybe I can scrounge an old PC laptop and slap Linux on it for my "something for the baby to pound on" needs by the time it becomes an issue.

Re: Kiosk Mode?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, iCab 3 is still around and still uses its own original engine, which is why it's able to grab the URL of the image when you drag it off the web page onto the desktop. (And only asks the one time ever, and even supports pre-OS X Macs, although not 68k ones.) WebKit I don't know anything about past the name and that it doesn't give the chance to save URLs in information boxes, so I've missed out on any good fights over it.