Monday, 18th December, 2006

Funny Little Icons

The other day, I was sat with a colleague as we were putting together a few final changes and additions to our web journal, when he remarked on how I seemed to have more "funny little icons" in my dock that he did.

"I mean, you've got a little truck! And a thing with a flower on it! And a chicken! Why haven't I got those?"

So, I thought I'd just run through a few of the more interesting utilities and icons in my /Applications folder, and highlight some of them.

God knows why — maybe it'd be useful for someone

Transmit

This is the "little truck" my colleague was referring to. Transmit is an ftp client — and IMHO one of the best. I love how just double-clickig on things in its file-browser opens them up in BBEdit (and saving them sends them back)

I think if I had one grumble, it would be that I can't have more than one window (per server) open at the same time, so (unless I'm missing something) I can't just option alt-drag things from one folder to another to duplicate them.

http://www.panic.com/transmit/

Chicken Of The VNC

It's such a stupid name, but bloody useful. Ages ago, I set up a VNC (Virtual Network Computing) server on Erin so I could control her from my other Macs — but these days all you have to do is turn on "Apple Remote Desktop" in the Sharing preference pane.

Granted, Apple Remote Desktop itself ($$$) gives you loads of extra controls and options relating specifically to Mac networks — but to just control another Mac (or PC for that matter) any VNC client will do.

My current fist of fun is to take control of all the Macs in my room at work, and scare the crap out of the students by making their mouses move

http://www.geekspiff.com/software/cotvnc/

SSH Tunnel Manager

As much as I purport to be a bit of a commandline geekess, sometimes I just can't be arsed remembering the intricacies of commands, or writing aliases for them. So something like this is great for me. It lets me set up SSH tunnels between my remote Mac and Erin, so (amongst other things) I can tunnel out of our Uni's firewall and access my home mail from work.

Hurrah!

http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/stm/

coconutBattery

I linked to this the other day — it's a little app that tells you how your battery is doing. It also tells you how old your Mac is — in case you wanted to know.

http://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/

HTML Character Converter

You have no idea just how much I love this app I can't remember whether or not it works for other apps, but I use it with BBEdit to convert special characters into their HTML Entities.

Normally this isn't a big deal — mostly I just end up typing ™ by hand in this blog — but when you're putting together a journal with loads of artists in it — who all seem to have names with accents and stuff — it's totally indispensible.

You can choose just to convert weird characters and leave things like < intact (useful for HTML), encode < as well as weird ones (useful for putting code in web pages), or encode everything (good for obfuscating emails and the like)

http://www.kavasoft.com/CharacterConverter/

iEatBrainz

Haven't used it for a while, but it was really useful when I started trying to organise my iTunes library a while back. It links to the MusicBrainz database, comparing the actual contents of tracks to try and work out their title/artist/album information.

http://jay.tuley.name/pages/software

SpamSieve

SpamSieve, oh how I love you

Every hour, every day, it sits there quietly in the background wiping out practically all offers for V1AGRA, opportunities to make pots of money by holding Nigerian fortunes in my account, and "hot girls in my area".

Seriously, I only get about 3 or 4 bits of spam a week these days. And usually it only takes me to tell SpamSieve that one of them is spam, and I never get another like it. Also, I can't remember the last time I had a false positive.

http://c-command.com/spamsieve/

VLC

I presume the little traffic cone is to indicate that it's "under construction", but you just got to love VideoLAN Client. It can handle pretty much every type of media file, and you can get around that annoying "You must change the Region Code of your DVD Drive" thing by using it instead of Apple's DVD Player.

I mostly use it at the moment when I'm streaming my EyeTV from my G5 to my PowerBook using CyTV.app

It's also bloody good for getting screengrabs from DVDs

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Fugu

I don't use it much — I'm happy with Transmit — but I'll include it here because of its icon.

Fugu is a graphical frontend to the commandline Secure File Transfer application (SFTP). SFTP is similar to FTP, but unlike FTP, the entire session is encrypted, meaning no passwords are sent in cleartext form, and is thus much less vulnerable to third-party interception.

http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu/

xScope

OK, last one. It's not as 'sweet' as the other icons (although that's purely subjective ), it's just such a bloody good utility.

It's a suite of tools that sit in your menubar: rulers — great for measuring stuff on screen; screens — which show you the amount of space that (for example) a poor-old Windows user with an 800x600 screen has in MSIE; loupe — a magnification thing that also you can grab colours from; guides — great for lining stuff up betwen different documents in different windows; frames — little boxes you can drag around the screen; and crosshairs — that let you measure stuff based on an 'origin'.

http://iconfactory.com/software/xscope

Enjoy

Ah. Nope, sorry

Just to close the loop on yesterday

Don't you just hate it when I interrupt an interesting conversation with totally unrelated stuff?

?

Self Scrutiny And Umbrellas

I think there are several different 'forms' that my transvestic expressions take:

1. Wearing women's clothing for 'innocuous' reasons.

2. Wearing women's clothing for 'self-expression' reasons.

3. Wearing women's clothing for 'performative' reasons.

4. Wearing women's clothing for sexual reasons.

And I think (indulge me here) that each of those warrants a bit of exploration.

'Innocuous'

Sometimes, because I'm a lazy-arse (and have no washing machine), I run out of underwear. So sometimes I wear panties because that's all I've got in my drawer. Equally, I've found that women's shirts fit me better than men's ones — which tend to hang off me like a tent.

So sometimes, the reasons I'm 'crossdressed' isn't because I am a transvestite, it's purely 'practical'.

On the other hand though, I can't help in those situations but feel a little sense of "*hee hee hee* No-one knows I'm wearing panties"

'Self-Expression'

This one's harder to justify in my head. Truth is, a lot of the time at home, I slob around in a t-shirt and jeans. But under the t-shirt and jeans, I've (say) got my tits in.

I have no idea why I do this I just like it.

'Performative'

If I think back and compare the way I'm out these days to (say) five years ago, there's a massive difference. (I don't mean "out" as in "I've told everyone" — I mean "out" as in "out and about".)

I think that before, the way I tried to act and dress was all about 'covertness' — trying not to be read — whereas today I'm much more likely to be more blatant about what I am, running around in huge hooped-skirts in public, or wearing jeans to a tranny-do.

I think that's because I've found that it's pretty impossible for me not to get read — so I compensate by going the other way. It's as if taking that step of being 'in public' unlocks an exhibitionist streak in me, and gives me licence to be a bit more outrageous — and the 'mask' (or 'costume' ) heightens that.

'Sexual'

But there is a festishistic side of it for me — although very few people have actually seen that. (I think it worth pointing out that this is nothing little to do with my wanting to snog both boys and girls — it's about very specific clothing.)

...

The thing is though, because all of those things come under the heading of "Transvestism", they all blur into each other — and I think that a lot of the confusion/offence/whatever that happens is because one part seeps into another.

So, for example, just because I fantasise about running around in a petticoat (amongst other things), being put over someone's knee and spanked, doesn't mean that that's the extent of my crossdressing — nor does it reflect any of my views on women.

But I do feel that some transvestites don't make those distinctions in their heads, and as a result — most likely innocently — end up offending pretty much everyone around them.

...

There was a little thought I had earlier — that we have a tendancy to always feel as if we're on the defensive. And perhaps because of that, we see any questioning of the things that we do — or the way we express ourselves — as being an attack on our very selves.

But I do think that sometimes we need to be not quite so precious about some things, and need to ask ourselves whether or not the way in which we manifest what we are — for whatever reason — always matches the context.

Stuck Record

FWIW, I do know that I keep saying the same things over and over again, with only slightly different words. It must be incredibly tedious if you read this every day. It's just that I never feel I ever really get to the bottom of anything — and maybe, if I keep repeating myself and returning to old topics/rants, one of these days I'll actually manage to come to some sort of conclusion

I've said that before, haven't I?

Tearful Farewells

There are some things in life guaranteed to make me cry¹:

• Onions
• Gin
• Reminiscing about past cats
• Watching a scene on telly where someone is saying goodbye to someone else

That last one always flips me back to memories such as watching my Ex disappear from sight on a train just before she jetted off to Australia for three weeks, or a similar moment over fifteen years ago in an airport in Belfast.

So, when I realised that such a moment was coming up in Torchwood last night, I prepared myself for an outbreak of The Blubs™...

...and...

...nothing

*sigh*

It just really isn't doing it for me. But I'm going to hold out for whatever this "thing from the darkness" is that they keep warning about.

¹ I'm dead girly, me.

Archive

Woah, I thought I'd lost this — Now there's a blast from the past, literally.

Filament

photo

Whenever Siobhan's creativity waned, she bided her time by taking stupidly close-up photographs of things

Starship Troopers for me — I need something brainless

Macsanta

Speaking of apps, 20% off a load of good'uns — most with a lot nicer icons than some of the above (via Daring Fireball )

I just can't find it in me to like any of the characters

Mmmm. Toasty

See, this is why you'd never make a good blogger. If it wasn't for self-referential, circular navel-gazing discussions, we'd have nothing else to fill up the internets with