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So Pleased Snow Leopard Isn’t Buggy from Alex Muller on Vimeo.

Check what happens when window focus is changed.
Gosh, releasing a buggy OS. That would’ve been a mistake.

Rumour (well, the YSTV quotes board) has it that I once said, when asking for confirmation on something television-related: “I have the attention span of a raccoon!” I think I've started to have problems with the tiny length of time I can keep focused on a task…

Something that I've been noticing increasingly lately is that the more “stuff” that gets thrown at me, the more I’ve reduced the amount to which it can bother me. When I started out with a Mac Mini and 4:3 display a couple of years ago, I had Google Notifier set up to make an obscene noise, show me my unread email count and display an overlay with the new message summary. I had system wide notifications set up for IMs, tweets, iTunes changing. In short, my computer was really annoying.

Since then, I've switched off pretty much everything. Tweets appear in the background, and I'll read them if I want. New instant message conversations show a tiny exclamation mark in the menu bar. Google Notifier… well, I actually just quit Google Notifier. I want to see how long I can do without it, but hope this is the start of something productive. Honestly, didn't realise how much all that stuff pained me until I got rid of it, and I don't think I'll be going back.

So consider this a poke for you to do something about your pain-in-the-arse computer; the revelation that the world won't implode if I don't reply to email just hit me, and it feels good.

Here’s one I’ve never seen before, never even seen it mentioned, and it was pretty cool to happen upon. If you right click on a user in System Preferences » Accounts, you get a sheet that looks a little like this:

Is it just me, or is that big red WARNING: one of the least Apple-esque things on the Mac?

Here’s hoping Tweetie for Mac fills the void.

I’d known this for ages, but only just consciously realised that there was a way to get rid of those tweets that make me sigh painfully to myself. These regex expressions are what I’ve put into Twitterrific’s built in tweet filter.

New blog post.*http

I hate these notifications of blog updates on Twitter. This is exactly what RSS is for, and it works just fine. If I might like your blog, put a link to it somewhere (ooh, how about that section on Twitter that’s handily labelled More Info URL?) and I’ll check it out in my own time and decide if I want to subscribe to it.

^@.*http.*twitterfall

I absolutely love Twitterfall as a product and use it whenever there’s breaking news or events, but following the two developers means a whole load of replies to people I’ve never met advertising their service. Using this is an easy way to keep up with the interesting stuff they post, while getting rid of the links I don’t want to see.

twizmaster and [mM]ac[hH]eist

These two annoy me. The former is an account that’s used as a Twitter quiz service which people reply to with their answers (and reply to all too much). The latter? Search it using search.twitter.com and see for yourself.

And how to implement them…?

The easiest way is to use Secrets.prefpane and add them to the Filter Tweettext option (separated using the pipe character, as they’re regular expressions.