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Stacks 1.0, a new page style plugin for RapidWeaver

"If you were anywhere near the internet, or indeed any medium capable of relaying news of any kind, you'll know that there was a bit of fuss kicked up over a new slab of tech called the new iPad. Launched at the Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts inSan Franciscoyesterday evening by Apple CEO Tim Cook, the new device caused both "Wows!" and head scratching in equal measure, mainly due to the improved spec line up and bizarre choice of name (The new iPad? What are they gonna call the next one? The newer iPad?), but the main question being asked was "how's it better than the last one?". Well, we're gonna do a little head to head to find out …"

The figure of Apple founder Steve Jobs still seems to be highly respected, although he had died on October 5, 2011 last. To the extent that there are people willing to pay dearly to hunt and a stack of memos written by Jobs.

As a Mac sysadmin, I've had the need to manipulate the dock on hundreds of systems at a time. I used to cobble together terrible shell scripts to do the job, but now thanks to plistlib and python, plist manipulation is really easy. I am releasing this utility free under the Apache 2.0 license. Hopefully some other sysadmins will find it useful. dockutil is a command line utility for managing Mac OS X dock items. It can add, replace, list, move, find, and delete dock items. It supports Applications, Folders, Stacks, and URLs. It can act on a specific dock plist or every dock plist in a folder of home directories. It is compatible with Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard.

Even though the unit you see in the picture is still just a pre-release model, it's hard to deny that the HTC Touch HD does look better than the iPhone 3G thanks to its bigger and brighter display.

HyperDither is an OS X image processing utility that converts color or grayscale images to 1 bit black & white using a sophisticated dithering routine. Way back in the early days of Macintosh, Bill Atkinson (of HyperCard, QuickDraw, MacPaint & nature photography fame) developed a very elegant dithering filter to convert greyscale image data to the 1 bit black & white Mac video display. The dithering produced by this routine was much higher quality than the now-a-days ubiquitous Floyd-Steinberg or "Error-diffusion" filter (used by QuickTime, PhotoShop).

The dither matrix was implemented an option in Apple's HyperScan software (A HyperCard stack with some XCMDs/XFCNs) that would connect to a flatbed scanner. HyperScan, and hence the most-excellent Atkinson dithering routine, has been unavailable for many, many years-but not forgotten! I was able to email Bill Atkinson in January, 2003 and inquire about the details of the algorithm; he was kind enough to respond with a brief write up of the routine-15 minutes later I had it up and running.
It's taken a few spare afternoons since 2003 to pack everything into a nice little application with documentation and an icon-better late than never!

This article is packed with great tips that you won't find in other introductory tutorials. Therefore it is a bit heavy to read, and worth dipping into even if you have used Macs for a year or two.

KRD100 series inclined impact tester is a testing machine that evaluates the ability of loads to withstand inclined impacts or crushing forces due to the force of gravity. These impacts and forces can affect the stability and safety of the packaging products. KRD100 series can prevent these problems from affecting the goods being transported and loaded, thereby avoiding shock damages. It can simulate packaging and packaging containers, horizontal shock and bump environment in the process of transportation, handling, stacking of shelves, sliding of motors, loading, and unloading of locomotives. This testing machine is suitable for incline impact tests in the industries like packaging technology centers, manufactory of packages, transportation, scientific research institutions, etc. It complies with the international standard ISO 2248 and ISTA relevant standards.