Techie things that impress me of late
Gotta love Widgets! One of the things that I was looking forward to having when I finally bought a Macintosh was their Widgets feature. These are mini-apps sit on your desktop and perform various functions like the calendar, clock, weather station, and to-do list shown in the pic at right (damsel not included). I started with them via Yahoo! when they were recommended on the TWIT podcast.
Apparently they own Konfabulator, the company that invented them. The list of Widgets available seems nearly limitless and range from the silly (a werewolf monitor) to the valuable (electronic sticky notes) to the merely handy (Wi-Fi signal strength monitor). Many of the functions that the widgets do for me were once done by the sidebar of Google's Desktop Search. It's gone now as I seldom used the program's main function and the widgets are much, much cooler.
As mentioned, I learned about this from TWIT - This Week in Tech - the podcast by Leo Laporte and a few of his ultra-geek friends that even a geek-in-decline such as I can enjoy. It's become a regular staple of my podcast playlist. I listened to a few minutes once or twice, but I didn't give it a serious whirl until Mike Norton of the GiT -- God in Tech -- podcast recommended it. I may not understand all of it, but it is amusing at times and I learn new things in almost every show. For example, did you know that you can hack an elevator? Yup, you can.
Right now (i.e., as I write this while listening to some podcasts), Mike is recommending in GiT Episode 1o that techie folks should check out Digg. It's one of the geekier sites I've seen. I'm not surprised as it is run by one of the regulars Laporte's podcast. This is why I sometimes wonder why I have a television. I like exploring and learning and having a generally good time with this stuff.
