Things to Prettify Your Mac

Breve Creatures screensaver the breve simulation environment.

IdleWeb view and scroll through websites as a screensaver

LotsaSnow - Pretty snowflakes fall against a background or over your dimmed desktop. I love this.

FuzzyClock tells the time in an around and about way.

and many localizations including Pimp-not sure wether this will be a permanent feature in my menu bar.

vUpstream is fast and flashy, but quite nice.

Oh and

ShadowKiller removes window shadows and speeds up my aging iMac (G4 800mhz). Not a prettyfier, but it does change the GUI.

Links for 18/08/2006 or Thereabouts

TimeLapse Screensaver
If I had an iSight this would be excellent, though I am not exactly sure what it does (I wanna try it out).
WebnoteHappy Lite bookmark pages and make notes on them. This is something I've been looking for for some time. For all those times you want to check to something out later but don't want to add it to your "proper" bookmarks (Or del.icio.us or whatever). From Firefox adding a bookmark can be triggered by adding a bookmark in the toolbar and clicking on that or by adding a keyword to the bookmark and typing that keyword into the address bar, WebnoteHappy will be triggered to get the page you want bookmarked and allow you to make a note on it. You can then export these bookmarks and notes to backup or to bookmarks readable by other browsers (I'm assuming they are readable by other browsers, haven't tried importing any yet.)
Pingling this dockling that sits in the dock checking whether you are online or not by pinging apple.com, google.com or shrook.com.
I have a dodgy router so this is very useful.
Quicksilver changes everything. The wowee intro to using Quicksilver. Yes, this has been around for ages but I just got around to it.

Last.fm excitement

After having heard about Last.fm for some time form other people's blogs (e.g. Tom plasticbag Coates) I have just jumped in and begun tagging and discovering what Last.fm is all about. It's very exciting, though I will not understand the ins and outs of the site and its offerings I shall go a hunting, and a listening. Also I am brushing up on my UNIX basics. That is keeping me busy while it's windy weather. I doubt there are other ducks on Last.fm, but Im sure that won't matter a jot. The Web should be welcoming to those with feet of web.

Soon some links, they are waiting to be posted, but I am lazy.
Oh, and on Leopard (see previous post), though some people are expressing their underwhelm-ment with the Sneak Peek on Apple's site, I am quite looking forward to seeing what it has to offer, It looks good to me. I am glad that it Apple say it will be PowerPC compatible. Time Tunnel is might useful, and core animation looks promising. The new apple voice sounds fantastic too. I can't be bothered to link to everything I've just mentioned. It's all there at Lepoard Sneak Peek. And yes there Spaces does look like Virtue Desktops. (can't find working link)

One Word

Lepoard

A Few Things

I have been deprived of t'Internet for some time now. (about a week) so have no great list of links to give (not that I usually do).

I just caught the last half of Armmando Iannuci's "Time Trumpet" and loved the video comparison of Tony Blair and David Cameron's styles - similar gestures, photo ops, tones of voice, themes. Although o'course it could have been spun out of context, I think instead it illuminated the extent of the similarities, that I hadn't noticed before.
I love the way the episode ended with a (sort of) sing-a-longa by Blair and Cameron to "Heroes" by David Bowie complied with clips from speeches the two have made. Very good. Wonder how long that took.

I am also loving Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe, the man that tells you what you need to know about the teevee industry (among sneers at adverts and other tv fare). In the first episode proper (there was a three episode pilot type thing a few months ago) Brooker talks about his reintroduction to the world of Eastenders.

"The real Eastend has got Hawksmoor churches, fashionable nightclubs and a thriving Bangladeshi community; Walford has just got Keith Miller swabbing windows with a rag on a stick."

"Jim Branning still looks like a 95 year old Thom Yorke"

Excellent.

I have been discovering more of the Smiths and I'm liking what I am hearing.
There is alight that never goes out
William it Was Really Nothing
What Difference Does it make?
How Soon is now
Handsome Devil
Hand in Glove
Vicar in a Tutu
This night has Opened my eyes
The Boy with the Thorn in his Side
Frankly Mr Shankly : - (I didn't that you wrote poetry, I didn't realise you wrote such bloody awful poetry Mr Shankly.)

In no particular order.

Quicksilver

I have experienced a moment of wonder, at Quicksilver. I remembered that I could attach actions to my (and their) applescripts (my applescripts are the talk of - like nowhere). If you install the Extra Scripts plug-in within Quicksilver and then type Extras into Quicksilver you can scroll through a list of the available scripts. Some nice little scripts they have going on there: Sleep, Toggle Audio inputs, also some shell scripts.
Oh the joy of controlling i tunes without making it the foremost application. mmm.

This is new to me thought I'm sure others were well aware of all this before. I still have to figure out how to use the clipboard and the shelf effectively (i.e at all)

p.s.
I just discovered Quicksilver can play audio files. OMFG. Is there nothing it cannot do?