Richard's Notes

Yes, I bought my copy of Snow Leopard on the day it was released to the public. Better still, I didn’t even have to queue for it. The Sydney Apple Store was quiet when I walked in on my way to work. $AU39 later and I had my copy of Snow Leopard in my hot little hand.

After dinner, I took the plunge and installed Snow Leopard. I put the DVD in the drive and waited. After a while, the installer prompted me to “Install” Snow Leopard, so I did. I sat back and waited. The whole process, while uneventful, was as interesting as watching grass grow.

After Snow Leopard was installed, I tried to notice the differences between Leopard and Snow Leopard. Guess what? There aren’t many visual differences.

The most significant visual difference for me, was the ability to turn on the day, date and month in the menu bar clock. For me, the clock is now perfect. Now I don’t have to fiddle with the date/time formatting options anymore. Thank you Apple developers.

The most disappointing thing about the upgrade was that GPGMail was considered to be an incompatible component of Apple Mail. Unfortunately, Stephane has decided not to continue with the development of GPGMail now that Snow Leopard has been released. It’s a shame, because I like to GPG encrypt my e-mail when I can, and GPGMail allowed me to do that with Apple Mail. Stephane — thanks for your work on GPGMail.

I took Stephane’s advice and downloaded Thunderbird 3 Beta 3 (with support of reading the OS X AddressBook) and a development version of Enigmail. While Thunderbird and Enigmail do allow me GPG encrypt my e-mail, Thunderbird just does not feel integrated with OS X like Apple Mail does. For example, in Apple Mail, I can drag a VCF card from an e-mail message and drop it in the AddressBook to import the new contact. Thunderbird does not support that level of integration.

Despite my disappointment with Thunderbird, I do continue to use it. That is, until I can master signing and encrypting e-mail messages using digital signatures (S/MIME) in Apple Mail and mutt. What I want to do is:

• Create a self-signed Certificate Authority certificate and have my CA trusted by my Mac Mini and my Linux machine.
• Create a personal certificate for my e-mail address, signed by my Certificate Authority created in the step above.

I must admit, I’m struggling to make this all work. For some reason, I just don’t seem to be able to Google the right web page which describes exactly what I’m trying to do. I’m sure it can be done, it’s just of matter of finding that elusive web page which will make the whole process clear to me.

I should get back to researching digital certificates and S/MIME.

Why are there so few bluetooth mice available? More interestingly, those that are available (at least here in Australia) are predominately small mice for notebooks. Why are there no desktop (full sized) bluetooth mice readily available?

When I purchased my Mac Mini, I also bought a Wired Mighty Mouse. It’s been OK, but nothing spectacular. There’s a couple of issues that drive me mad with the Mighty Mouse.

1. The mouse is slow to move across the screen. No matter how fast I set the tracking, I cannot move from one side of my 30″ monitor to the other without having to lift the mouse from my mouse mat. OK, I admit that I do like a sensitive mouse, but the Mighty Mouse does not let me configure it to be sensitive enough for my liking.
2. The mouse is fiddly when it comes to pressing the “right” mouse button. I like my two button mouse, so I set my Mighy Mouse up to be a two button mouse. However, I have to be very careful when pressing the right mouse button, because, if your touch is not light enough, you get a left mouse button click instead of a right mouse button click.

This afternoon, while I was at Officeworks I saw a Logitech V470 Cordless Laser Mouse for Notebooks (Bluetooth). It was only AU$65.00, so I bought a shiny black one. The colour contrasts nicely with the white Mac Mini.

I’ve just paired the mouse with my Mac Mini. The default behaviour of OS X when pairing a mouse is just so easy. And it just worked. Goodness me. I’ve had to adjust the mouse tracking to be on the second lowest setting because the mouse is so sensitive! The mouse cursor rockets across the screen now. It’s too fast now! Yes, I know, I’m never satisfied.

Despite the small size of the notebook mouse, it actually feels quite nice in my hand. Having distinct left and right mouse buttons is wonderful. No more ambiguity about which mouse button I’ve pressed.

I’m having a little trouble getting used to the speed at which I initially move the mouse — it seems to lag a bit and then catches up. I’m not used to the lag, but I guess I’ll get used to it.