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.

I must sign up for accounts on innumerable websites; it seems barely a day goes by without my requiring to come up with a supposedly unique password for yet another account. Of course, I don’t have unique passwords, and I can’t imagine any but the most paranoid do. It would be simply untenable to remember them. This situation is self-evidently ludicrous. It would be much simpler if there were a single location which can verify my identity on behalf of other sites.