Macs

Stykz and Revolution

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Stykz is a nice little animation programme…

[youtube 6ghwl9BxQ40&hl Stykz Demo]

…although you are not limited to animating stick people. A beta version for [W:Macintosh] is available with versions for [W:Windows] and [W:Linux] to follow shortly. It was created with Revolution which I once played around with as a replacement for [W:HyperCard] but I never did do much with it. So maybe it is time for another thirty day trial… and not get around to doing much with it 🙂

Apples/Pears Windows/windows

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Yet another switcher whinges that Macs do not work the same as Windows PCs and that Microsoft’s software for the Mac is different to the Windows version. Ok it is the day before MacWorld Expo so the article is probably more click bait than serious journalism but you have to wonder what these people are thinking. If you do not like Microsoft’s software for Macs don’t use it. If you prefer Picasa to iPhoto then ask Google for a Mac version – oh look here it comes now! But Picasa’s insisting that my EyeTV stream was a picture became rather irritating. I am guessing that iPhoto’s new Facebook button will be the deal clincher in this house :-/

 

One commentator to the switcher article said:

It still boggles my mind the hoops I have to go through to do something simple like renaming a file on Mac. What’s the hotkey for that? Oh, there isn’t one. You need to click and hold the mouse button down on the file name for what feels like a random amount of time (and if you get it wrong and “miss”, the file opens instead… which means whatever app it’s associated with also opens).

What? How hard can it be? Select whatever you want to rename, hit Enter, Type a new name, hit Enter, done.
Look…
[local /wp-content/uploads/2009/01/renaming.mov nolink]
Another common theme is the Mac’s menu bar not being attached to individual windows. Just because Microsoft managed to get this, and much else, wrong when they tried to recreate a window based operating system like the Mac had is hardly a reason to condemn the Mac. What you are doing is opening a document in the window not running an application in the window. You can open lots of documents all using the same application. You do not want lots of windows with the same application running in each. Which is why when you close a window on the Mac the application does not Quit.

Hey ho!

The Amazing Bouncing Spam

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spamcount.jpg

At 6:30 on Thursday (17/04/08) evening about 10 bounced spam emails arrived – someone having used my domain to send their spam. I had had a flurry of similar activity last year but that soon dried up. Over the next couple of days the number would edge towards 4500. On Friday 200 an hour were arriving.

Alarmingly some were “Out Of Office” auto-responses. I assume if anyone actually replied to the thing it would come back to me but replying to spam is never a good idea.

Several used some form of filtering service like Sendo or MailMarshal.

Most had the body of the message removed but from the few that had it intact it was apparently a link to bonmerfiket.net or Legal RX Medications as they like to be known. They have a splendid Anti Spam policy but you would not want to type your details into their form nor enter any financial details into their online order form – even though they claim years of experience, which is really impressive, but probably not too many customers in their early days.

Samuel Stimms seems to be somewhat elusive but if he actually existed he is probably related to Alex Polyakov who is usually high on the Spamhaus most wanted list.

If only everybody used a Mac we could be spared such things 😉