Minimal News Update

I would think the house never had as much traffic (both physical and electronic) as this Saturday, thanks to family and friends calling in. And me trying to get some work done... Oh well. I've already resigned myself to the fact that nothing much is going to get done this weekend, and just spent my last few hours reinstalling my G4 from scratch and cleaning its keyboard.

Here's a few interesting bits of news I spotted since yesterday:

• NewsFire has been updated to version 1.0 - which is now US$19.99
• NetNewsWire Lite has been updated to version 2.0b22, which means NewsFire is in the Trash bin. I only use a "standard" RSS reader as a backup to newspipe anyway...
• Melo called me to, among other things, let me know about mairix (a kick-ass mail indexer) and the way he got it to work with Mail.app. Being a heavy IMAP user too, this is definitely something I will look into when I find the time. It's not Spotlight, but I have this idea of getting it to work with Quicksilver... We'll see.

Update: Nicholas Jitkoff (he of Quicksilver fame) just dropped this script snippet on me (line breaks inserted for readability, might need some more tweaking later):

using terms from application "Quicksilver"
        on process text theString
        do shell script "mairix " & theString
        tell application "Mail"
                activate
                set selected mailboxes of (make new message viewer
                   with properties {mailbox list visible:false})
                   to {mailbox "Results"}
        end tell
        end
end using terms from

• Melo also e-mailed the bunch of us this link. I've gone through all of this before, but the Growl "new items" script is a nice touch. I've been using Growl-enabled versions of my photo scripts for months now, but it never dawned on me to hook my Drop Box folder...
• Looks like Mozilla Sunbird has reached 0.2. I wish Apple would take a hint and have iCal both read and write to HTTP/WebDAV servers.
• coLinux also got a (much delayed) update, which sadly removes kernel 2.4 support. Well, at least it can now directly mount portions of the host filesystem.

Finally, a short tip for anyone wanting to clean their old Apple keyboard (as I just did, since my old G4 will be picked up tomorrow): A damp cloth with nothing but water and a smattering of alcohol will do wonders.

The keys pop off easily if a soft lever is slid under them (I used a small paintbrush with a long, flexible wooden handle), and the only real trouble is patiently scrubbing off the keyboard and keys themselves one by one. Remember, keep the alcohol content of the mixture way down and don't get any on the clear plastic (the polycarb seems to be impervious to alcohol, but you never know).