2014 Links & Tips

I love my Pebble! Agree 100% with this guy.  Nerdwise, today I learned how to quickly control Time Machine from the command line.  This is useful because TM and Aperture share a physical disk (and it's slow enough already without having to multitask).

Finally, this command allows a time-stamped status ping to run from my terminal widget, to check that my machines are healthy and on-network:

ping -i 20 192.168.xx.xx | while read line; do echo `date` - $line; done

Ode to the Powerbook G4

I have a 12" Aluminium Powerbook G4 (1.5GHz, 1.25Gb RAM and OS X 10.5.8 if you care). It runs perfectly, has a gorgeous screen and one of the best laptop keyboards I've ever used. It has bluetooth and wifi, as well as a decent-sized HDD. As well as all of this, it's a complete design icon. The lines are clean, the shapes well-considered and the entire ownership experience is slick. This was a first at the time; these machines were the diminutive gem of the Powerbook line - beloved of students and commuters; the connoiseur's choice for mobile computing. When compared to 'normal' laptops of the time (I also had a Toshiba Tecra 9000) they were impossibly alluring. And yet there are dozens on eBay for £80 buy-it-now. How depressing.  Seems I'm not the only one to lament the passing of this glorious little powerhouse into bargain-basement shame: wiki for this machine is interesting, there is a brief commentary from Jonny Ive on its design here, and this is a true love letter, which I entirely agree with.