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p. I had a request in the comments of “this entry”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/archives/000505.html to post an image of my “iPulse”:http://iconfactory.com/ip_home.asp set up. So for all you crazy iPulse fans, here is my configuration. I should say, here is my most recent configuration; iPulse comes with a lot of different ‘jackets’ as backgrounds, and the colours and transparency levels of gauges are all totally customisable, encouraging entirely pathological levels of tinkering. I’ve experimented with a lot of different looks, but this is my favourite at the moment. The red blob in the centre is the CPU utilisation (around about 30%), memory usage is the grey arc at the top, disc usage at the bottom (there’s some disc reading going on, and some network activity—the red and green circles on the outer ring). The battery level is shown by the row of red dots, airport level by the ring of blue dots, moon phase at 12 o’clock, and finally the time (just before 9 o’clock) is shown by the black circles. Cool, eh?

p. I don’t use the 24 hour analogue clock, though I’d like to. It just takes me too long to figure out what time it is, which seems to somewhat defeat the whole purpose of a timepiece. I also don’t use the load history gauge because it adds a bit too much clutter for my liking. It’s amazing how quickly you got used to the display. I see it out of the corner of my eye, and think, “hmm, frantic disc activity and memory paging—Word must be launching.”

p. I’ve always been a big fan of Services in MacOSX. I think that they go some way to enabling the kind of complete integration between applications which would be great if it actually worked properly. I found a collection of free standalone services called [“Word Service”:http://www.devon-technologies.com/freeware.php], developed by Devon Technologies. There are three sets, grouped by function: ‘Convert’ contains options which do useful tasks like changing the case of the selection, removing quotes, or altering the encoding of line endings; ‘Insert’ lets you insert the contents of the path, or the current date and/or time in different formats; ‘Format’ does all kinds of useful things like removing multiple spaces, surplus line endings, and sorting lines alphabetically. There are all things I often find myself needing, so it’s very handy to have them available in almost every application.

p. There seem to have been some improvements to the Services menu in Panther. Jaguar had a really irritating bug which meant that if you had more than a certain number of services, the whole menu would refuse to show up in Carbon applications. That seems to have been resolved now, which is great news.