Peter Vidani

⌘⇧; is my favorite photoshop shortcut at the moment.

John Brissenden:

OK, I’ll start. It’s a tie between Safari 3.x and Mail. Safari because it’s slow, and temperamental - I’ll do the slow and temperamental around here, thank you very much - and so much worse than the boring-but-at-least-it-worked 2.x. Mail for pretty much the same reasons, and especially because it’s the poor man’s GMail.

Andrew Fox:

Mail is awful. Safari is tolerable, mostly because it works with the new multi-touch trackpad motions and Firefox doesn’t. I’m not a huge iChat fan either.

Marco:

My vote goes to iCal. It’s not that it’s bad — it’s just inexcusably mediocre for such a simple program. It takes a lot of effort and money to truly improve on mail clients and web browsers, but improving iCal should be cheap and easy — Apple just never seems to think it’s worth the resources, receiving almost no meaningful improvements since its 2002 release.

I’ll go with iTunes simply because of how much focus Apple has lost in it. It’s not a music player anymore; it’s also a music store, a movie store, a place to buy applications for your phone (I don’t even own an iPhone), a tv, a radio, and a big brother that now keeps track of what songs you listen to. If Apple is so much about the music, why can’t they make a player for their computers?

I recall buying the iPod years ago because of the disappearing trick that happened to the device when I listened to it — that is, the device wasn’t interfering with my music. But even closing iTunes is the equivalent of taking a limo to the store down the block and parallel parking it on the left side of the road. That’s because you aren’t closing a music application, you’re powering down a strip mall.

Here’s how it works. I let my wrist lay on my shifter, so that my index finger is right in front of my radio’s [»] button that seeks to the next station. My car is pretty bumpy, especially on Milwaukee’s roads, so every 5-20 seconds my finger will bounce forward and change the station. I’m not praising the radio stations available, but after a while you just want to listen to something, anything. But you can’t. Even missing the last two words of a commercial will start driving you to madness. And of course, the only thing you can blame is yourself (for playing this stupid dumb game).

Intermediate drivers can try it on AM too, but be forewarned, there’s a lot of static and you’ll pray to Jesus you run into Rush Limbaugh.

Admittedly, I take really long showers. Well I used to. At one point I could be seen in the shower with a full bowl of cereal, a cup of coffee, or an apple (the list could go on, if I weren’t so proud, but I will just note this: don’t bring hot wings in there. The reward in doing this isn’t even close to being worth it.) But in the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on a routine that could finally put an end to the 12 minute shower.

It’s simple. I eat breakfast, and I take a shower. These are the first two instinctual tasks that come to mind when I wake up; the two already coexist in my mornings. So here’s how I tie them together to achieve a 3 minute shower. I don’t have a toaster or a microwave, so the bagel takes about four and a half minutes to toast in my toaster oven. So I place the halves on the tray, set the oven to cook without a timer, and make for the bathroom. Now I’m forced to work at a pace that a bomb technician could be proud of. And if I don’t hurry, I’ll have a bagel as tough and as black as Wesley Snipes holding a sword.

I’ve been at it for about two weeks now and I haven’t taken a long shower since it started. I value a good bagel too much to do that. Also, the panic helps me wake up in the morning and it’s sort of fun. If you suffer from the same greed that I did, I suggest you give this a try. A couple of alternatives that come to mind are cracking an egg onto a medium heated pan, or pouring a bowl of cereal before you get in. If you don’t want it to be soggy, then get the hell out of the shower.

caseyliss:

What’s a good screensaver for OS X?

Fliqlo (click the left disk for a screenshot) and Polar Clock.

Is hearing a new album or band, and not wondering if they’re coming to town but when.

tmblg:

Can someone please explain the “Like” feature to me? I like that I can bookmark things that I find interesting but don’t want to reblog, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to view things I’ve liked, and reblogs have significantly decreased. Fewer reblogs = less new content. What’s the idea behind it?

Fewer reblogs = less duplicate content. I believe that’s one of the stronger ideas behind it. Another concern I’ve seen people have is the omission of Vimeo’s like feature in dashboard embeds. For that I hope the two can get some consolidation, but until then, I guess I’ll click both hearts.

RIP Catherine Davey Vaulx.