Almost two years ago I discovered James McCombe's GLTerminal. Some people hacked it to work with Tiger, but I (and others) discovered after upgrading to Leopard that the Classic Terminal view was oddly scrambled, so to fix it I rearranged the character bitmap, as you can see under the cut:
( a tale of two character maps )

new and worksafe

As others noted, the original icon was a little over-the-top (jwz quote: "most inappropriate fanboyriffic application icon evar."), so I made it something more work-safe, a VT220 screen with "GL TERM" in green text.

old and "animeriffic"

To make Classic Terminal mode work (the pictured green-phosphor look) you still need to open the Preferences and re-select the "Classic Terminal" plugin, then click Save. I re-ordered the tabs with "Renderer" being the default, so at least you don't have to click on the Renderer tab like you used to; click-count - 1. If someone could reverse-engineer it so this step wasn't necessary, that would be nice. If James McCombe would update it (or even release the original source), that would be even better. Petition him via email, if you like.

Oh, and lastly it works pretty well with Spaces in full screen mode, though the window doesn't display right when looking at all your spaces (not bad for an app made in 2002, five years before Spaces was even developed).

Download GLTerminal updated for 10.5, sil vous plait.

EDIT 20090904: it still works fine on Snow Leopard. fyi, on my Macbook Pro 13" it pegs the CPU at just under 10% usage in top.

more from the macbook (a.k.a. bored-at-work) department:

Steps to a very expensive mirror:

1. Download this file to any mac with an iSight camera. Save it in your "~/Library/Screen Savers" folder, or in "/Library/Screen Savers", whichever floats your boat.
   
2. Open System Preferences, choose Desktop & Screen Saver, and choose "mirror.qtz".
   
3. Open terminal and type the following, all on one line:
   /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/
   ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background &
   
4. Hide terminal.

Voila. You now have in front of you the world's most expensive mirror.

Really. Give it a try!

"I have had to learn the simplest things last, which made for difficulties."
—Charles, Olson, "Maximus, to Himself"

i saw that quote at second read the other day, and it reminded me of what is probably the primary problem with being self-taught at a discipline. personally, lately, i've wished that i had more exposure to classic computer science coursework. teaching myself programming is fun and rewarding, but sometimes i spend entirely too much time banging my head against the wall solving a problem that has either already been solved by someone whose code i could reuse, or, worse, going at the problem in entirely the wrong way and kludging up the solution something fierce. how can i avoid this?

when teaching oneself something it is all too tempting to jump in with both feet and, throwing caution to the wind, experiment wildly until it works. while it may "work", one should then ask oneself: "does it work well?", "does it fully accomplish what it should?", "does it have any unintended side-effects?", and "could it be done in such a way as to make it better?" ('better' as used here could mean faster, more usable, more understandable, more sustainable, etc.)

tempting as it might be to use new skills to tackle one's most pressing pet project, it is more prudent to start small. do something useful and do it well; don't get too greedy at the start. when done correctly, small projects can be reused in larger endeavors: either by applying one's now-honed skills, or by incorporating old work into newer work.

in closing, i present two odes to simplification from the band The White Stripes:

( Little Room )

( Little Acorns )

i saw this at walmart for $15.

it captures pictures and video at 288x352, and even better, it's a usb webcam for $15.

note the complete lack of mac or linux support, not that that should surprise you. what surprised me was that, given the price and hackability of this little thing, no enterprising linux hacker had tried to write a driver, so says google:

Your search - p44417s linux - did not match any documents.
Your search - p44417s mac os x - did not match any documents.

well, crap. i am halfway considering just spending the $15 on it and giving a go at writing a driver, or sending it to the webcam-osx folks for their enjoyment. if someone could hack up a driver, i can think of a lot of a lot of uses for cheap-ass $15 webcams.

(from what i can find, the product name in full is "philips keychain digital camera", the product number is P44417S, and it's the newest iteration of an earlier, non-webcam version (J44417) made by gemini (and perhaps rebranded philips))