I'm a photographer (flickr.com/photos/doctormemory) and lament them old polaroids. I'd love to be able to make little prints wherever I went, and leave them in books at the library or under napkins at restaurants for other people to discover. Adding a little art to people's lives is what I'm all about!

http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html

Bean, anyone? It's like a fuller version of TextEdit, does full-screen really well, and it's free. Beats more complicated project management apps like Scrivener (which is very useful in itself) but has a little more oomph than WriteRoom for when you need to just write but want some options.

I back up all of my photos to DVD, and usually delete the RAWs and JPEGs from my main hard drive after a while to free up space. Still got everything on the DVD, so no need to worry right? Wrong! I recently tried to dredge up some pix from my trip to Poland last year and found that even though I'd verified the disc after burning it, the thing wouldn't work in any of the 5 Macs (and one PC!) I tried. Turns out that several other DVDs from the same batch aren't working either.

There's a lesson in this: always make several backups on different batches of media (and not no-name cheapo DVDs either!)... and pester TUAW for a free hard drive too, so you can make a THIRD back-up copy!

So when are they going to start tweaking Spaces? Apple's Own™ can't hold a candle to VirtueDesktops which had many more features, and Beryl for Linux is even better! You'd think that if they're going to implement a multiple desktop feature, they'd want to make it as flashy as possible. I use spaces on a daily basis, but I'd switch back to VirtueDesktops in a second as it was far easier to use and customize.

Anybody know about any good Spaces add-ons out there?

Question for next week:

My University's G5 (running 10.3) greeted us this morning with all of the fonts replaced by a strange character. It will display text in some boxes, but not on the menu bar or the desktop, etc. I can't really explain it, so I took a screenshot:

http://img128.imageshack.us/img128/474/picture4mi9.png

I've checked to make sure all the fonts are in the right place; they are (and seeing as you can read text in some instances, I know everything is where it should be)... so what's going on? How do I make it stop? I've been fixing Macs for close to 10 years now and this has me stumped!

http://www.derlien.com/

Disk Inventory X - it shows you the entire contents of your hard drive and how much space each file takes up. We live by this at my University TV station, where we use it to find all the large scratch files newbies have somehow hidden away to odd places on the hard drive/network.

Ditto to Dave: I've removed the Widgets thingamabob from the Dock, and left it with no assigned hot-keys. On the off chance I need a widgety thing, I use the ones on my Google homepage. Sacreligious? Probably. I don't mind.

Would make a great replacement for my 3G iPod, which just gave up the ghost last night after flawless performance since I got it!

Whenever MS gets around to punting out office '08, I'll still be using NeoOffice, which runs dandy on my MBP, can save documents in .doc format for my MS-tethered friends, and has the low low price of nothing at all. Given all these advantages over Office, I have a hard time being excited or even interested in what Microsoft is doing.

It just looks like an Asgard computer interface. Stargate, anyone?