Concern

It’s kind of an obvious hack, but to “disable” the translucent menu bar in Mac OS X 10.5, you can just change your desktop background to have a little strip of a solid color (or a gradient) along the top.

Now you could pay for an image editor, or wait until the Gimp works again on Leopard, or five-finger bittorrent a copy of Photoshop, but it’s easier to just install ImageMagick (through MacPorts), and do it as a batch.

I have a folder of pictures, all the right size (1920 by 1200 pixels), that I use for desktop pictures; I made a little gradient image, and then let mogrify do the work:

rigel:~/Pictures$ mkdir "Backup of Desktop Pictures"
rigel:~/Pictures$ cp Desktop\ Pictures/* Backup\ of\ Desktop\ Pictures
rigel:~/Pictures$ cp gradient-menu.jpg Desktop\ Pictures
rigel:~/Pictures$ cd Desktop\ Pictures
rigel:~/Pictures/Desktop Pictures$ for file in *.jpg
> do mogrify -draw 'image Over 0,0 1920,22 gradient-menu.jpg' "$file"
> done
rigel:~/Pictures/Desktop Pictures$ rm gradient-menu.jpg

I have, after a number of years (nearly six, by my count) and terabytes of spam, disabled my once-primary email account on the metastatic.org domain: rsdio@metastatic.org. Very few people use that address to actually contact me, and it was primarily a place for mailing list messages (my gnu.org domain used to forward there). That address had, unfortunately, become entirely overwhelmed by spam. 99 percent of the traffic there that wasn’t mailing list messages was spam.

I’ve also unsubscribed to almost all mailing lists I used to read; I’ve replaced the important ones with Gmane RSS feeds. So I’m not ignoring you, but my inbox is.

If you really need to send me email about something, you have a variety of options available.

Click on this picture to see the full frame:

Go on. I dare you.

You probably didn’t hear, unless you live in Northern California, that Highway 17, the main highway that connects Santa Cruz and Silicon Valley, was completely blocked in the Northbound direction this morning when a big rig crashed into the center divider. I was stuck in this mess for 2.5 hours, and got to watch the truck driver get loaded onto a medical helicopter (he did not sustain any major injuries, from what I hear). I finally gave up and took Summit Rd and the Soquel/San Jose highway back home.

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1. Box of Kleenex in the rear window sill.
2. Various stuffed animals in the rear window sill.
3. Children’s stickers stuck to the inside of rear passenger windows.
4. “W” or Kerry/Edwards sticker.
5. Trash bags of clothes filling the rear seats.