in no particular order - here are some notes on the use of OSX for my UNIX dweeb friends who are making the jump. essential tools / things to get: go and get the developer toolkit (aka Xcode) - this will get you a working compiler and a kick ass development environment. unfortunately, i haven’t had a lot of time to monkey with Xcode for its primary purpose of developing mac apps....

i recently ran across a number of references to hiram bingham’s, Inca Land, which is available for free from project gutenberg. this of course prompted the search for an appropriate ebook reader with hooks to project gutenberg. behold eucalyptus, which will download books from project gutenberg on the fly and give you a killer interface for viewing the contents of the book. insane attention to detail is visible everywhere....

i just whacked a nascent relationship with shelfari. i had poked at shelfari a year or so ago, but i was non-plussed with the manner in which i could interact with my “bookshelf”. in poking around various facebook applications, i was looking for something that would have some interesting integration with the social networking component from a reading perspective. it would have been nice to simply export my reading list from delicious library into something that would facilitate sharing my library with friends and family....

before i dropped vonage a month or so ago for the comcast triple play. i used to use this shell script bound to a quicksilver action to dial my phone. eliminating the need to deal with the pesky phone dial pad. this grabs the phone number to dial from your system clipboard. (via the use of the pbpaste command. users of non-OS X platforms should adjust to something appropriate. i seem to recall that gnome had something similar....