Laptop Day

Today is Laptop Day. Why? I got my laptop back. Surren got his new laptop, a Dell 600m. And Jenny got her Toshiba Monstrosity. So how did I celebrate? By getting my laptop back to the default “Raishad” state.

What is the default “Raishad” state? Glad you asked.

<li><a href="http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/">Quicksilver</a> - I can't live without this program. I use it as an application launcher, but Quicksilver is the swiss army of MacOS X Utility programs. It can do <em>anything</em>. It can control iTunes, send emails, do sums, and probably the most useful



<li>Bash Prompt - I need a colorful prompt, and I need colorful directory listings. Without these things, I'm useless.

Here’s the relevant section from my .bashrc

export CLICOLOR=1
export HISTCONTROL='ignoredups'
export PS1 = '[\033[00;36m]\u@\h[\033[00m]:[\033[00;35m]\w[\033[00m]\$ '

• lftp – There are no good ftp clients for MacOS X. Cyberduck is passable, but it’s no Flashfxp. In fact, you can take any MacOS X ftp client and apply it to that sentence, ______ is passable, but it’s no Flashfxp. To install lftp, you need Darwinports/Fink.

<li><a href="http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/">Firefox</a>/<a href="http://www.caminobrowser.org/">Camino</a> - Safari is a great browser, but it's missing a few things that I can't do without. You can get plugins to enable these things in Safari, but in my experience they are awfully clumsy. These "things" are:

• Quicksearches – You know the ability to type ‘artist cardigans’ in the Location bar and have it take you to the appropriate allmusicguide page. It’s such a great feature that you don’t miss until you can’t use it anymore.

<li>Find-As-You-Type - Only suckers type Command+F.</li>

<li>Automatic Image Resizing - No one likes to scroll those huge pictures from NOAA/NASA. </li>

• Adium – It’s only the best chat client ever.
• Growl – This goes along with Adium. I like having notifications from Adium, so that way I can continue what I’m doing and still read the incoming message.
• SubEthaEdit – For when you need a good light text editor. It also has a nifty command line tool, see. see let’s you open SubEthaEdit from the command line.
• SideTrack – My laptop was released before the 2 Finger Scrolling trackpad, so I need this to be able to use my laptop without a mouse.
• NetNewsWire – I’ve tried a bunch of different news readers, and this is my favorite.

Those are the essentials, all that is required to make me a happy camper.