The Cube’s Fatal Flaw: Cats

As a cat owner I found this amusing. Apparently cats are one of the reasons why the Apple’s G4 Cube failed:

Worse, the top of the machine was a magnet for dirt, hair and cats. Hair would fall across the optical drive slot and then get sucked right into the drive when you inserted a disc.

And, yes, cats. My friend had a cube at his home. The cats would love to sit on top of the nice, warm, flat cube. Which would both fill it with cat hair and turn it off… then on… then off… then on… then off for as long as the cuts stuck around. He finally had to put one of those pigeon guard kind of strip of nail things on top of the cube to keep the cats from corrupting his filesystem!

bbum’s weblog-o-mat: The Cube’s Fatal Flaw (via)

Things you may not know about NetNewsWire

Brent Simmons, the developer of NetNewsWire, has posted a series on hidden features of the feed reader. Parts one, two, three, and four are all a great read.

What I dislike most on NetNewsWire is that the keyboard shortcuts are clearly designed for the English keyboard and some of the combinations are pretty useless on others. Luckily, Simmons hints that a keyboard shortcut customization is on the to-do list for the future.

Tasks bundle for TextMate

As part of the MacHeist bundle there was a program called TaskPaper. After looking into it I found it pretty limited. As did Henrik Nyh:

Tasks bundle for TextMate – The Pug Automatic

I came across TaskPaper the other day – a simplistic to-do list app currently in development by Jesse Grosjean, who made the equally simplistic text editor WriteRoom.

— — However, I edit my text files in TextMate. Using something else for to-do list text files complicates things. So I made a TextMate bundle for it