Steve Jobs released a statement today (A Greener Apple) that thoughtfully and simply summarizes progress Apple has made in improving the environmental footprint of its products. The letter covers everything from plans to phase out toxic chemicals to electronic waste recycling, and each step sounds more reasonable than the last.
I would post excerpts here, but I don’t think they would do the piece justice. The entire statement is worth a read. It made me happy to be an Apple customer.
I was so keen on the idea of pushing a module to CPAN that I almost didn’t catch a fatal flaw in my scheme. Mac OS X (motto: It Just Works) was doing something odd to my tarball as it was created: it was adding a whole host of files that weren’t there originally. Not just the .DS_Store files we all know and love (and learn to remove), but odd shadow files like ._foo.txt for foo.txt and ._Makefile.PL for Makefile.PL.
Yep. Now you might see the problem.
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The worst part of having multiple e-mail addresses is keeping on top of new messages without spending every waking moment checking each account in sequence. That’s why I love “Gee!”:http://www.lloydslounge.org/gee/, a functional little GMail notifier for Mac OS X.
Gee (I’m going to stop exclaiming it) checks GMail’s Atom feed for my messages and updates a small blue circle in the menubar with the count of new ones. Pretty standard, but Gee goes one louder: clicking on the circle drops down a list of the senders’ addresses (or subject, or a combination depending on preference) so that I can quickly tell the difference between spam and an important message without pulling up GMail itself. If that’s not enough, Gee also lets me reset the counter so I can _choose to ignore it_ until something newer comes in.
That combination of simple features provides the best attention-span booster I’ve had in weeks. Of course, I just blew any productivity gain by blogging about it, but I had to share the love.