I got my hands on one of the new OWC Mercury Elite cases last week – the big one that looks most like a mini-G5 tower. I think it would make a fantastic casemod project for the Mini-ITX crowd (with a nano-ITX board, I’d guess). Imagine a little card-reader slot right where the CD/DVD drive is on the real PowerMac. Dare I say it would be cute?

The irony is that, if somebody builds such a thing, it will likely be Windows/Linux only – unless they do it by stuffing the guts of a Mini inside.

Choice of FTP clients has long been a minor religious war among Mac users. I stopped having strong opinions on this a couple years ago when I realized that transparent, read/write FTP/SFTP should really just be built into the OS. Apple’s KEEPING ME DOWN again.

Anyway, somewhere along the line I switched from Interarchy (which I had relied on since “Anarchie” days) to David Kocher’s Cyberduck. There’s no doubt that Interarchy is the more powerful and mature program. But what I need, and what most people need, from this type of program is fairly simple. It’s a graphical client, after all. There are plenty of freely available ways to accomplish more complex file transfer magic tricks – notably rsync and friends. Cyberduck does support the ODBEditor protocol, also known as “Edit With” – this lets you open a file from your FTP client directly in editors like BBEdit, TextWrangler, TextMate, SubEthaEdit, and Smultron that support the protocol. I use this feature pretty heavily.

As of yesterday, Django has changed its model syntax. So code that formerly looked like this:

class Comment(meta.Model): 
    fields = (
        meta.TextField('comment', 'comment', maxlength=3000), 
        meta.CharField('headline', 'headline', maxlength=255, blank=True)
    )

will now look like this:

class Comment(meta.Model): 
    comment = meta.TextField(maxlength=3000) 
    headline = meta.CharField(maxlength=255, blank=True) 

Sweet. This brings Django more in line with the Rails philosophy that syntax matters. Making things easier for the developer to type, remember, and read can only bring good things.

A List Apart, the website for people who design websites, relaunched this past Tuesday (they like Tuesdays) with a lovely new design and, at least as interesting to me, a completely new back-end powered by Ruby on Rails. Check out that stupendous live comment preview! Designer Jason Santa Maria, CSS ninja Eric Meyer and CMS maker Dan Benjamin have all done great work.

Zeldman also includes a capsule history and colophon.

DoctorMac Direct, a remote tech support service for Mac users, has a very handy Quick Checks and Fixes page that walks through a lot of good standard “try this first” troubleshooting techniques. If you’re an experienced Mac admin or power user you know most of this stuff already, but bookmark the page for the next time you get asked for advice. We all have succumbed to the temptation to try short-circuiting the troubleshooting process, but often we just end up discovering the disconnected cable twenty minutes later that way.

Last fall I posted a blog entry titled “Serving Notice” about the inadequacies of OS X notifications compared to their OS <=9 predecessors, and about my hope that Apple would look to cool projects like Growl for interface ideas. Well, Apple is holding out on me, but good work on Growl continues and the list of applications using it is growing.

One of my favorites is the unassuming NetGrowler, a faceless app which uses Growl to display information about changes in your network connection. If you’re a laptop user like me, often changing networks many times a day, it’s nice to know the exact moment at which you’ve received your new IP; and if you deal with flaky wireless connections it’s good to know whether that IP is real or “self-assigned” (i.e. non-functioning).

Via Bruce Schneier: In Cambridge, England, police are reporting multiple thefts where laptops stored in car trunks (er, “boots”) have been located by thieves using Bluetooth-capable cellphones. What were those people thinking? Don’t they care about battery life?

The RISKS Digest from May 2005 also has a posting about the same thing happening at Disney World.