Hal O'Brien

From Kottke (omitting the snark):

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If you've got a Mac, the "droid" sound that Android phones make -- yep, the one from the commercials -- can be produced in the following manner:

1. Open Terminal.app
2. Type say -v "Cellos" "droid" at the prompt

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I can attest this works on my MacMini. And it doesn't even generate a mac snow crash.

Speaking of which... A cow-orker turned me on to the electric sheep screensaver, which is fairly cool. The way it ties into the mac's monthly-or-so snow crashes is, running it seems to defeat the power saving. So it might inhibit whatever it is the mac is screwing up on the sleep/wake cycles that induces snow crashes.

(NB: the electric sheep screensaver should not be confused with Patrick Farley's Electric Sheep Comix, or with Farley's awesome story, The Spiders. Because, cool as the screen saver may be, it doesn't hold a candle to Farley.)

EDITED TO ADD: Regarding the snow crash, that would be no. I just came to the machine to find a) it had blanked the screen in power-save, and b) a snow crash upon wake.

So when minimax was doing the bizarre newfangled progressive scan mac snow crash last week, I noticed the video cord and its adapter were hanging loosely on the back of the machine. Mind you, plugging it in solidly didn't appear to have any effect, but still.

So today I received and have plugged in a new DisplayPort-to-DVI cable. It's half the length, needs no adapter, and is generally less clutter.

We'll see if it forestalls any more snow crashes. Since it was a $10 part, wouldn't that be amusing.

As promised:

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