Zathras' Great Machine

Current experiments in computing

The experiment with Apple Mail is done. A decision is pending... in the meantime, I've begun to study PowerMail and will probably be writing a review of it in a couple of days or so. Actually, I could probably already write one now, but I want to be sure to put it thoroughly thru its paces before I post a review for all to see.

Denise and I spent some time last night experimenting with DVD ripping on my PowerBook. It works -- sort of -- but it's a time consuming hassle. So far as we've been able to discover, there are no apps under OS X that make ripping DVDs as simple and straightforward as CD ripping apps typically make it. We'll keep researching and see what we can find out.

I've been using 800x600 resolution on my PowerBook, but I want to start using 1024x768 instead -- 800x600 works fine, but images and text are sharper and cleaner at 1024x768 because the OS has to dither everything at the lower display. I'd also like to have the extra room on my screen, and somehow, the higher resolution just looks... I don't know, more modern or professional or something like that somehow. The only thing is, it's going to take some experimenting with fonts to make everything easy on my eyes... I'm getting to be the age now where smaller fonts are harder on my eyes.

A related annoyance in this area is that fonts are not displayed consistently across applications in OS X. As nearly as I can tell, this happens in apps that haven't been fully written (or rewritten) for OS X. For example, Safari, iChat, Apple Mail, PowerMail, and even Internet Explorer (all modern apps) show fonts correctly, but AOL Instant Messenger and Eudora (which obviously suffer from a lot of legacy code) don't.