Here’s what I wrote on Flickr to explain this picture:

The source code for MacPaint and the QuickDraw graphics library is now available, as is their story, at the Computer History Museum. To celebrate this news, and to illustrate that great tools retain their utility even as they age, I used MacPaint to paint a portrait of MacPaint programmer Bill Atkinson.

Gruber posted a link to this image yesterday. It’s been viewed over 20000 times in the day since.

Check out Bill’s website for his photography and iOS PhotoCard app.

Prompted by some of the comments on Flickr, I posted some other nostalgic Mac Plus software pictures.

Thanks to iFixIt for the excellent step by step disassembly guide. Without it, I’d probably have removed many screws I didn’t have to remove.

I don’t have an iPad, but I got to play with one for a while today.

Swanky. I like some aspects of this reader, but I’m not crazy about the fully justified text. Here’s what the same article looks in McReadability:

Which layout you prefer is, of course, a matter of taste. My stylesheet scales down images, if necessary, to fit the column width. Tofu was my inspiration for McReadability. Here is the Amar Sagoo’s argument in favor of the multi-column format (Amar created Tofu):

Text is usually very wide on the screen, which makes going from the end of one line to the beginning of the next difficult. That’s why newspapers have narrow columns: It makes them faster to read.

So why not just take a normal window and make it narrower, scrolling down as you need? Well, there are usually a lot of lines in a text, and all look more or less the same, so if they move past your eyes vertically, they are difficult to keep track of. The text doesn’t feel stable, and you get lost easily.

Here’s how it looks with Readability, a great bookmarklet that filters out the crap and presents the content in a simple, elegant, format:

I created an alternate stylesheet for Readability that formats the text in multiple columns, newspaper-style. (NEW! Compare to Safari Reader.) You scroll sideways; in this format, it’s easier to consult more of the article without scrolling.

This modification was inspired by a desktop app called Tofu.

Compatibility

All Readability configuration options are supported, including footnote links. Margin width is interpreted as the inverse of column width (wide margins yield narrow columns). Some column width tweaking and cross browser debugging remains to be done. I know it works in Webkit and Mozilla (Safari and Firefox); implemented with CSS3 Columns.

That’s hot, Jim. I want it.

First I want to check if it’s feasible or worthwhile to submit it as a patch to the original bookmarklet, although there are valid concerns that the column format isn’t appropriate for all types of content that may be viewed with Readability.

Otherwise, I’ll definitely make it available here – although I’ll have to investigate what’s permissible. (I have difficulty understanding the terms of many open source software licenses.) Fortunately, since all my changes are confined to the stylesheet, a normal Readability bookmarklet can be edited to point to a copy of the multi column stylesheet.

Update: Now available.

Torchlight provides a built-in screenshot function to save snapshots of your adventures. The keyboard command is Shift-F9. The screenshots are supposed to be saved in ~/Library/Application Support/runic games/torchlight/screenshots/. However, presently they are written to the torchlight folder with a filename like screenshots\05222010_081129195.png. If you look in ~/Library/Application Support/runic games/torchlight/local_settings.txt, you’ll see that the SCREENSHOT PATH variable includes a backslash, so the path gets misinterpreted as part of the filename on Mac OS X. Fix it to read as follows and your screenshots will be filed appropriately:

SCREENSHOT PATH :screenshots/

I’m sure that was bugging you.

First, identify the number of a needed part. Let’s suppose it’s this brick:

It’s not yet in the official part library, but an unofficial version of 60475 is in the LDraw.org parts tracker. You can download the unofficial part and its prerequisites manually, or you can create a dummy model that requires it, and let LDView retrieve the files you. Here’s how.

Create a file consisting of a single reference to the desired part, 60745.dat:

1 71 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 60475.dat

Let’s call it download.ldr. Next time you want to download a new part, just change the highlighted part number (or add a new line for the new part; it doesn’t matter how the parts are positioned):

LDView can download missing parts automatically. First, make sure “Automatically check ldraw.org for missing parts” is checked in the “Updates” tab of LDView Preferences:

Next, open download.ldr in LDView. If it’s already open, reload it. (This will happen instantly if you’ve selected “Auto-update immediately” from the File → Polling menu.) When LDView loads the model, it will attempt to retrieve any missing parts from the parts tracker. After a moment, your new part should appear:

The new part (and any prerequisite sub-parts or primitives) will be added to your library:

To use your new part in Bricksmith, click “Reload Parts” in the “Parts” tab of Bricksmith Preferences:

The new part will now be available in the Bricksmith Parts Browser:

So, the point is that if you want to use a part that’s not yet in your library, just paste the part number in download.ldr, open it in LDView, and reload your parts library in Bricksmith.

The screenshot above shows exactly how to set it up. So, if you’re cleaning up a lot of old LDraw files, now you can do it with nothing more than a right-click on the file or files of interest.

Is there an option I have overlooked that enables this sort of behavior?

Clarification: NetNewsWire does this with unread posts – all new items from subscriptions within a folder appear together when you select the folder – but I’d like to be able to browse all items, whether or not they’re new.

Now if you open a Processing source code file in TextWrangler, it will be displayed with basic syntax highlighting.