What it looks like to be you 2

In light of not being able to get all our Mac dreams to come true, we fell back on another solution.

Btw, if you use a 10-switch adapter to connect a VGA monitor to the Mac, the Belkin manual for their adapter is excellent. Mode 1 worked excellently for us.

We love snugtech’s Safari browser tester!It’s not as public as some other previewers we have come across and it’s dead easy. So, hooray.

What we love about snugtech is that it’s private. We have been racking our brains to find another site we saw once that previewed with Safari similarly, although (and this is a bad choice) it displays results publically. Behold, we have found it (when snugtech went offline for a bit): iCapture. Dan Vine, the creator of iCapture, also has a nice utility that allows you preview on IE, if you don’t have that browser (Mac users, I am looking at you): ieCapture (currently in alpha test).

Something we’d forgotten in terms of coding out a style sheet is making IE-specific attributes. Last year, we used Eric Meyers’ asterisk hack, and that is what we had forgotten. Today we used a variation on that theme from cavemonkey50, which he is calling an underscore hack. They have the same effect. In short, what you do is add a special character (say, an asterisk or an underscore) in front of an attribute, and only IE will read it.

How it works. Two things make it possible: 1) the cascade part of CSS, and 2) IE’s stupidity (to put it bluntly). So define your attribute for all browsers but IE first. Then redefinte your attribute with an underscore in front of it. Other browsers will see this as poorly formed and skip it. But IE will blindly read it, accept it as a redefinition in the cascade, and use the second malformed attribute instead.

handy tools

Work Happy (via lifehacker) offers up a nice toolbar tool called foobar from Matrix Software. It’s a handy collection of tools that life down in the toolbar zone. The thing we really like about it is the time tracker.

But, oh! We fawn and we drool for FolderSize, which grants us a long-desired ability to see the size of a folder without hopping down into the folder properties. Swoon!

We have been on the lookout for tools and apps for our new/old Mac. Todayt, the mighty lifehacker gave us a collection of apps, some free some not. Some, then, we shall use and some we shan’t. Essential OS X Applications from MacSpecialist.

A site called Flagrant Disregard offers up a bunch of flickr “toys” which look interesting. Essentially, they are tools to mess with pictures on flickr. Nice.

And lastly today, we have a bunch of parenting hacks from parent hacks.  No, it’s not a site of parents who are hacks, but you know, hacks for, like, your kids… if you were Mr. Smith and your kids were Neo. Or something. Anyway, we like them.