A while ago Nys asked me to draw her a bookmark. It took me a while to think of anything, but I eventually created an anatomically-incorrect bookworm (with arms and all), who munches on the top of your book whenever you close him up inside it.

I also had an old apple sticker laying around, from before I switched to linux. I stuck it on my current case, but it seemed a little out of place. So I modified it a bit. This would make much more sense if I actually had a hackintosh, but it’s still cute ;)

It’s a friggin monkey! Nursing snow tiger cubs!

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I’ve long been interested in étoilé. It’s a linux distribution built on top of GNUStep, aiming to provide a more modern (read: prettier and generally a bit more Apple-Like) operating system than the GNUStep base. Obviously as a mac user who has switched to linux for its openness, this is a pretty tempting idea.

Anyways, I recently downloaded the VirtualBox image to take it for a test run. Aside from there not really being much software to use yet (making it hard to take for a spin), I noticed this in the system menu. It’s probably somewhat more important to get your character encoding right if you’re going to be all fancy and have accents in your name ;)

A thoughtful essay on the modern state of friendship

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John Gruber discusses PastryKit, Apple’s fancy webkit library for making surprisingly native-looking apps in the MobileSafari browser. I’m uneasy:

Everything related to scrolling is implemented within the app itself, in JavaScript.

Ugh… Is that sort of thing really what we want to encourage in app development? For particularly well-thought out examples, like picasa’s, it makes some sense. But for a mobile device, with limited resources, handling low-level UI events in Javascipt? Come on…

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I just discovered zenity, which is a great tool for simple gtk+ interactions with a script.

It has the following types of interactions:

• calendar (date picker)
• file / directory selection
• error / info message
• list picker
• question (yes/no)
• progress dialog
• systray notification
• and more… ( see the man page )

The usage is brilliantly simple, and it’s very unixy despite being a GUI tool. I just wrote a pygtk+ app to do some photo importing stuff, but doing it with zenity would have been far simpler.

Well worth keeping in mind for your next user-friendly shell scripts (particularly for the more advanced progress, calendar and list picker dialogs).