Current mood:

geeky

what's on my dock? (and menu, and desktops, etc...)
responding to an O'Reilly Network article, i'm spilling the dirt on my dock. and my menuextras. and my desktops. and on my hacks and tweaks to the system. oh, hell, it's a mac customization orgy chronicled behind the cut.



first of all, my dock (i have it aligned right (on my right monitor), pinned to the bottom so the trash stays put, with bouncing icons but no magnification. i also applied the transparent icon hack for hidden applications):

1. the Finder
   
2. CPU Monitor (to tell me how hard my poor 450 MHz beige G3 is working)
   
3. Safari
   
4. iChat AV (alas, i have no iSight)
   
5. iTunes
   
6. TMBG Clock Radio: standalone flash app that plays rare, live, and b-side performances by They Might Be Giants, as well as interviews. rock on!
   
7. nsNet: warning - very addictive... more so than crack
   
8. Goban: play go vs. the computer (GNU Go), locally via Rendezvous, or on Internet go servers of your choice.
   
9. iJournal: a sourceforge app that lets one update one's LiveJournals outside of a web browser. click, type, post. done. (with apologies to NexTel). the red badge indicates that i have unread friends' posts.
   
10. Calculator (soon to be replaced by Emu48 if i can make it work correctly)
    
11. Sherlock (thinking about removing it since i don't use it much, but i have the feeling that i should be using it...)
    
12. System Preferences (also thinking of removing this. it is in the apple menu)
    
13. Terminal ("this is UNIX, I know this!")
    
14. Microsoft Word (flame away, i can take it)
    
15. TeXShop: a Cocoa-ized LaTeX frontend. i haven't decided whether i should use this or iTeXMac, but i'm more familiar with TeXShop, so it wins for now.
    
16. Project Builder. RAD man, just rad.
    
17. Software Update. ignore this. can't quit it without either restarting or shutting down. grr, apple, grr.
    
    
18. my home directory
    
19. my Applications disk (see partitioning tweak mentioned below)
    
20. my Developer folder
    
21. the Trash. duh

next, the end of my menubar:

1. Meteorologist: a nifty sourceforge project that displays current and forecasted weather from several weather servers for locations you specify.
   
2. the iChat menu
   
3. the AppleScript menu
   
4. the Displays menu
   
5. the volume menu
   
6. the clock
   
7. ASM (Application Switcher Menu): viva la old-school applications menu! eureka!

my two desktops currently show randomized images from the abandoned Rochester subway.

other custom hacks/tweaks:

• using Interface Builder I edited the cmd-Q keyboard shortcut out of Safari. i had about had it with accidentally pressing cmd-Q instead of cmd-W and instead of closing the current tab, having all of Safari go bye-bye.
  
• i added support for 1152x870 to both of my monitors' lists. i have no idea why it's not a "supported" resolution, as my monitors support the resolution, my cards have the VRAM necessary and the refresh rate is acceptable (75 hertz). DDC sucks. personally, i suspect the Apple-branded VGA adaptors i have between the monitors and the display cards. anyway, i ended up having to install shareware (boo, hiss) rather than being able to do a terminal or plist hack. fortunately once i enabled the resolutions i was able to uninstall the software. ha!
  
• following the advice here, i partitioned my larger drive into 3 partitions: 6 GB for my OS X system and root directories; 25 GB for users' home directories; and finally 4 GB for applications (i have a separate 8 GB drive for classic and other junk). the rationale behind this is that having my home directories and applications separate from my system files, i can upgrade my system at will without having to reinstall or reconfigure anything. if the unthinkable happens (system corruption) i can simply reinstall OS X without touching the other two partitions. i did it the UNIX Way, with fstab and ln because that is the One True Way, and because netinfo sucks.
  
• i made custom icons for my drives and folders, some of which you can see on my dock above. the generic disk and folder icons were getting irritatingly boring and indistinguishable.
  
• i installed some software from the Fink project, notably the gimp and wget and links. i hope to use Gentoo's distribution instead, once it has been fully ported to OS X.

whew. i think that's it.

so... what's on your dock?