neuro.me.uk

For the last couple of years, I’ve fallen more and more back in love with Macs. One of their foibles is that Apple have decided the standard British English, or UK, keyboard layout should not match that of every other computer manufacturer on the planet. Various characters are just in the wrong place, such as quotation marks, backslash, hash mark (or pound, for my American friends), tilde, and so on. In Tiger and Leopard, I used Phil Gyford’s awesome instructions and the associated .rsrc file as to how to sort this defect out, at least in software.

So now Snow Leopard is out, and it’s fab and lovely and nippy and dices and slices and so on. An immediate downside (apart from having to manually upgrade Xcode to 3.2, and reinstall MacPorts from .dmg to make that bit work again) is that the trusty icle .rsrc doesn’t work any more. Well, it works, but it doesn’t stick; OS X keeps switching back to standard British English, which means when I try to type out quotes, it comes out with at signs. This is ungood.

However, the Internet to the rescue! Some kind soul has posted new keyboard layouts for OS X to correctly map the British English key layout. Just download and extract the zip file linked to from that page, copy the files from inside the zip to either /Library/Keyboard Layouts off the root of your hard disk, or ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts in your home directory, then log out and log back in again. Go to System Preferences > Language & Text > Input Sources, then tick British (PC105). If things don’t seem consistently correct, try British (PC105 alt).

Bosh, sorted, and I can touch type again!

Update 2010-02-13: apparently this works on Dell Mini netbooks too, so Hackintosh people can get the benefit as well. Bonus!

I’ve been playing about with OS X on a Dell Mini 9 netbook. A major hassle is that it only has 8GB of on-board disk space (albeit on a lovely silent SSD). I bought a 16GB Class 4 SDHC card to use for my home directory, but it turns out OS X only automatically mounts external drives — such as USB drives, Firewire drives and memory cards — after you’ve logged in, which is too late for the OS to find your home directory, so you don’t get all your normal desktop customisations: preferences, dock icons, wallpaper, etc. However, after some magic googling, I found the solution:

sudo cat << EOM > /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount.plist
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin</key><true/>
</dict>
</plist>
EOM

Reboot. Sorted.

I was flicking through the iTunes Store this morning and noticed something odd … some words in reviews and track titles had asterisks in them as though they were swear words (e.g. ‘b*ll*cks’). But they didn’t appear to be swear words. iTunes uses allmusic for the bulk of their album and single reviews, so luckily it’s possible to go back and ‘decode’ some of these words. They include: “porno”, “teen”, “cream”, “sexy”, “hot”. Strangely, variants like “sex”, “creamy”, “teenage” aren’t being censored. This seems to be a blanket effect on iTunes — Katy Perry’s current single “Hot ‘n’ Cold” is listed on the UK iTunes Store main page under ‘Top Songs’ as “H*t ‘n’ Cold’.

This seems to me to be really odd behaviour. They’ve done the same thing to some common swear words, but to censor “cream”? And it’s inconsistent to boot. Look at the review for Tenacious D’s eponymous album. The tracks “Fuck Her Gently” and “Cock Pushups” are censored with asterisks, but the title “Sex Supreme” in the review is not. The Roots’ track “Pussy Galore” has its title censored, but not the name of the band Pussy Galore.

And it’s not even like people at Apple don’t swear.