Be careful what you put on your wish list. You may actually get it.

OS X 10.3 Panther allows you to send faxes from any application through the app’s print panel. Here’s an O’Reilly article on faxing by Wei-Meng Lee that, once again, I should note for future reference. I suppose I should plug the modem back in at some point. Though you can also fax through your mobile phone via Bluetooth, which is pretty cool. (As far as I can tell, faxing via a modem-equipped Base Station is not in the cards.)

Someone scanned the first Opus Sunday comic (via Jerry). Wouldn’t make a practice of doing that, mind you. Have yet to find out who carries it locally; couldn’t find a Saturday Citizen (Canadian papers run their thick, colour-comics-inclusive weekend editions on Saturdays) around the shop. (No, journalists don’t buy their own papers, silly.)

If you haven’t had the chance to read Larry Niven’s classic riff on the logistics of Superman’s sex life, here’s your chance: “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” (via Jerry Kindall).

I should note this O’Reilly Network article on regular maintenance for Panther for future reference. In two years I have not once repaired permissions or forced periodic maintenance in OS X — and, astonishingly, I appear to have gotten away with it. So far.

In Quyon last night to cover a public meeting regarding a proposed engineered landfill site, about which I hope to have a nice article next week. Quyon has a good spot for cellphone signal strength by the Lions Club and ferry dock: I was able to call home without difficulty. But by the time I hit Clarendon Street (Quyon’s main drag), the call began cutting out. In the Pontiac, at least as far as Rogers AT&T Wireless’s network is concerned, all cell towers are on the Ontario side; it may be a matter of being on the wrong side of buildings — something that is less prevalent in cities where there are more cell towers in more directions. Or does that make any sense? I’m just guessing.

Next spring? Oh, for crying out loud — how can SanDisk be almost a year behind schedule on their 802.11b SD card for Palm OS 5? This is something I’d buy just about instantly — in theory, the Bluetooth on my Tungsten T2 is more useful on the road, especially since there aren’t many WiFi hotspots in rural western Quebec, but it’d be nice to surf the web on my Palm at home. (Otherwise, I’d have to figure out how to enable Internet connection sharing via Bluetooth on Panther — the original hack under Jaguar appears to have been disabled as of OS X 10.2.6.) Serious grumblage.

Polytropos is much more coherent than I was in his review of the extended edition of The Two Towers (via Electrolite).

Newsweek gets the jump on breathless Return of the King coverage, with the usual amount of behind-the-scenes movie-making inside baseball, which is all you get because the movie isn’t out yet (via Slate). Entertainment-industry journalism: feh.

Don’t miss Paul Wells’s rant about the misplaced priorities of the journalists working in the Parliamentary Press Gallery. And oh, does he have a point. Political news coverage has always been too horserace-ish at the worst of times, but, as he points out, obsessing about the details of Jean Chrétien’s departure date, the makeup of Paul Martin’s cabinet, or the guest list at the Irvings’ fishing lodge, to the exclusion of all else that goes on in official Ottawa, is a bit much. His list of what the media has ignored is particularly telling.

While I’m on the subject of the weekend, we were also in Toronto for Markus and Cindy’s wedding Saturday. A nice small affair in downright opulent surroundings — an officer’s mess at a military college. Downright nice folks, which cast some discussions about friends and friendship that Jen and I had been having that very day into sharp relief.

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Back from a reptile expo weekend in Toronto, where, naturally, we sold hardly anything — three garters for me, two corns for Florence, and Jen only sold a ceramic because some eager-handed little terror broke it. At least Jenny sold some boa constrictors. I’m getting inured to slow sales at these shows: I think it’s a result of too many vendors — lots of breeders selling at the show who’ve been at it for less time than even I have — chasing too few customers with too little money and too many animals already. At some point the economics of it will shake out some of the breeders and supply will start to approach demand again, but in the meantime it’s going to be a lean time.

More on the run-up to the launch Sunday of Opus (see previous entry): a transcript of an online chat with BB himself, and a parody interview with Opus by MeFite Wendell (via MetaFilter).

Brighthand has a review of the Palm Power to Go, an external battery pack for Universal Connector-equipped Palm handhelds. At US$100/C$150, this clearly isn’t for everyone — not when car chargers and AC adapters are so much cheaper. Palm-branded accessories are usually pricey in any event.

But it sounds like a good idea in certain, limited circumstances. I can think of two: where you are using it heavily for prolonged periods, and it’s inconvenient to recharge it by other means (i.e., you’re using it with the battery pack clipped on), or you’re in a location where charging by other means is simply impossible — say, out in the field somewhere. Ed’s review has some other scenarios.

I hereby nominate Rupert Boneham as patron saint of everyone who ever made the mistake of thinking that hard work on behalf of a group would make them be accepted by that group. Boy have I seen that before. (Someone photoshop him onto a “Think Different” poster, hmm?)

So my copy of the four-disc, extended edition DVD of The Two Towers arrived in the mail Wednesday. Bloody fast shipping time for Shawville: Amazon only announced it had shipped two days before. I picked it up from the post office around noon.

Guess what I did Wednesday afternoon? If you guessed that I sat, rapt and slack-jawed, in front of the screen for four hours straight … well, you’d be dead-on.

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Newspapers love to cover their competitors’ bad news, but there’s a fine line between being fair, albeit enjoying it, and just being mean. A local case in point: this week, our competition published an article about a lawsuit between my paper and its former editor. (Nothing like having your competitor airing out your laundry.) This, after using a readership survey meant to show that people read community papers to claim, on the front page last month, that they “beat” us — a misuse of the data, and not exactly true. They’ve been running a table showing it in every issue since. They even argued that municipalities were wasting taxpayers’ money if they advertised with us! It’s one thing to compete, quite another to wish for your competition’s humiliation and destruction. Not nice.

Bill Palmer almost gets it right about people who want a headless iMac — i.e., an affordable, consumer-level Mac without a monitor. It’s only partially about monitor choice, which, Palmer argues, Apple has addressed by providing four screen options (one CRT, three flat panels) across its consumer line.

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Any time an interview with Berke Breathed is published, it’s worth linking to. Immediately. Not only is the imminent launch of Opus (oh frabjous day) the biggest thing to hit the comics industry since Bill Watterson retired, but Breathed’s corrosive shots at the comics industry (watch out, lasagna-eating pussycats) are, as always, a must-read. (Via Boing Boing)

For a site that declares its hostility to Mac zealotry and positions itself as a debunker of the Reality Distortion Field, MacNET doesn’t exactly go out of its way to be balanced. Instead, it tends to go off the other deep end. And no clearer case in point could be its reactions — two of them — to Apple’s latest product releases, the 20-inch iMac and the dual 1.8-GHz Power Mac G5.

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