Looking back through the archives, I can see I used to post more often. In July 2003 alone I posted twenty-seven times, compared to around eight in a good month this year. Partly a function of time available, but also of posting more frivolous things.

I’d like to up the post-frequency here, so perhaps I should take a lesson from my past self and post more frivolous, personal items. As at least half my readership (that’s one of the two, for those keeping count) knows me personally, posts such as these may be of interest.

Form vs Function is an old debate, stemming from items being designed to be beautiful over being able to function efficiently. The quintessential example is a door concealong its use in favour of sweeping vistas of uninterrupted glass.

Form needn’t be in competition with function; indeed, form is an essential part of function in many cases. Well fitted, beautiful clothes are a tour de force in form, but the very form is part of function: to flatter the wearer. In a different sphere, the form and elegance in OS X has the functional aspect of making the system seem solid and well engineered.

My previous post was written as I was working out how best to use my new Mac setup — in addition to my MacBook I now have a first-generation mac mini.

The primary boon I wished to score was that of freeing my laptop from the desk. There were several conspirators keeping the laptop on the desk.

Firstly, most of my data is stored on a large LaCie usb hard-disk, meaning if I wish to access it my macbook was tethered to the disk and so the desk. The LaCie is designed to sit below a mini, so my first move was to place it there. The mini acts as a file-server, using afp to share the disk. The laptop wirelessly connects and mount the disk.

Yesterday I was asking around my long-suffering friends for two pieces of software.

The first request was for a piece of software which would allow me to use speakers attached to a mac as a set of AirTunes speakers — so they would appear as an output in iTunes on a second mac. The reason for this was laziness — I wanted to avoid fiddling with wires when changing the mac I was using for music.

All my flickr photos are now under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. This means they can be reused by anyone for non-commercial purposes as long as I am attributed. I think these are fairly reasonable terms; should the unlikely happen and someone wants to use a picture for commercial usage, they are free to contact me.

I’m not sure whether my writings here will be placed under the same license. Though I think their value to be insignificant, the principle is sound. Before doing this, however, I need to rewrite my site’s FTP client so it doesn’t swamp the destination server so much.