It’s called Mentaltown, and it’s a pretty nifty use of photo and video to tell local stories.

And it’s generated through iWeb, and so far as I can tell, that’s where a very odd bug comes from, which I’ve never encountered before. (Screenshot after the jump.)

Firefox freaks out like this every time I load the site, and I’m trying to figure out why. I suspect there’s something unconventional in the way iWeb handles automagic RSS creation, but I’m not sure.

I am pretty sure rss.mac.com’s robots.txt file isn’t malicious, but if I accept the link, iTunes tries to subscribe to robots.txt, then complains that there’s no podcast. Which is, um, not particularly bright.

Don’t you love computers?

Woot, I say.

Screenshot after the cut, for extra nerdy goodness.

Commenter Eyeraw, in the aforementioned post, says:

Delete this program file Р“FontCacheTool”, it then let me start up properly without these prompts. Maybe just move it to your desktop in case you ever need to put it back (god knows what it does).

And it works.

Glee.

You see, every time I attempt to open MS Excel, MS Word, or MS Powerpoint, I get to play a game.

It’s a game called “The font foo is corrupt and should be removed.”

The only way to play the game is to click “OK” (there isn’t any other option).

What fun!

There’s about a ten second delay between each of these dialog boxes, so you get to learn patience.

And everyone knows that patience is a virtue.

I feel rather grateful to the MS Office for Mac team, for giving me such an opportunity to practice my patience, as well as my mouse dexterity.

Sometimes, I take a break from clicking, and I hit “Enter” instead.

It’s nice that they allow that.

Because, you know, some choice is good.

The option to, oh, I don’t know, opt out of this game might be nice, though.

Because I really do have some work to do.

And while this game is a lot of fun…

…it’s getting kind of old.

What’s more, my fonts aren’t corrupt.

There’s just something that Office doesn’t like about them.

And it doesn’t provide a list of the “corrupt” fonts, anyway.

Nope. I just have to write the names down in a textfile.

Because I wasn’t doing anything more important, anyway.

And in situations like this, the appropriate thing to do is always to use the human as a memory aid.

Because we’re so good at that sort of thing.

And computers are terrible at remembering huge lists of information.

And, of course, it’s so nice that I get the chance to tell the computer to go ahead after every single font variant on my system.

I only have a bit over 500 fonts, after all.

So it’s nice to be reintroduced to some of them.

Now, Microsoft Office’s knowledge base knows about this game.

They think you should delete a cache file.

So I did that.

It reset the list of fonts.

So now I get to play this game in MS Word again.

Because I’d already beaten it once, you see.

It was an exercise in grim bloody-mindedness.

It took me four hours.

And I’m just about at the end of my patience.

I don’t think I’m going to be able to open this excel file.

And that’s a pity, because I need it to get some work done.

Now, user interface is a very high priority with Microsoft.

This is very obvious.

For example, I really liked the “Product ID” field in the support form with the Enter keystroke that defaults to “Back” instead of “Continue” when you’ve finished typing in your three hundred and twelve product ID number.

That was a nice touch.

But it seems to me that the mac office team has really dropped the ball, here.

Not that this isn’t a fun game…

But it’s beginning to get a bit old.

And while I don’t normally like to cheat,

I’d really like to get past this.

So, MS: could you fix this please?

Take your time.

I’ll be here, all week.

Clicking “OK.”

Thanks.

Note: Obviously, I’ve repeated 10 screenshots here, instead of having individual pictures of the dialog boxes, As they appear.

That’s because I’m lazy.

Sue me.

FWIW, I’m still clicking OK, and I’m not through “E” yet, even after renaming the screenshots and uploading them.

1. Add ~/Library/Printers/ to your Quicksilver catalog.

2. Select any document you want to print with Quicksilver (b42 tip: select anything and hit command-escape).

3. Tab into “action” and select “open with…” and tab into the third field.

4. Type the name of your printer. Hit Enter.

5. Watch your file come out of the printer, and get right back to what you were doing.

(With a few clever preference modifications (such as changing the spacebar behavior to “Jump to Argument Field” under “Command”), I’ve gotten this down to select SPACE {$printername} ENTER.)

The point of this, and every other Quicksilver trick, hack, or silly widget, is that it lends itself to easy habituation, and thus becomes invisible.

In english, that means that after using any particular action a couple of times, it disappears into the background of conscious action, and becomes a habitual gesture… much like downshifting to second gear before turning your car onto another street. It doesn’t require a lot of conscious monitoring or decision making, and it can safely be done blindly, without your having to shift mental gears. So to speak.

Many people don’t see the point of things like this trick, because this is extra, widgety stuff that adds on to Quicksilver. It doesn’t become helpful until you’ve gotten into the thoughtless habit of using it for dozens or hundreds of tiny operations a day. Once you begin to take it for granted that you email someone by typing their name without worrying about whether Mail.app is even running, or that you open a new web browser window directly to the page you wanted with a couple of unconscious keystroke gestures, being able to print a file the same way isn’t a big deal.

But I have. And it’s one more computer operation that I can forget about, because it’s become invisible. It made me happy, so I shared.

Got any other little add-ons to the Quicksilver zeitgeist that make you happy? Share.

Email, as has been thoroughly discussed already by people far smarter than I (smarter than me? I always get that wrong…), is important to keep tabs on, but keeping tabs on it can itself throw you off your stride. What to do? Well, as Merlin noted, you can set Mail.app to check your mail only every half-hour instead of every minute, which decreases the number of interruptions. This has proved a winning strategy around Chez Josh.

However, every half hour, when that Ding! sounds, my inner Pavlov’s dog can’t resist jumping for the little postage stamp in the dock, its tiny red badge shimmering with tantalizing promise… oh.

It’s a forward of that fark mockup of the supposed home computer by the RAND corporation, a rather tempting offer from a Nigerian national, some german right-wing screed, and an invoice from my hosting service. Nothing that needs a reply, I suppose… now, where was I?

If you’re easily distracted and over-stimulated, these interruptions can be a major source of trouble, as it’s difficult to recover from them. For that reason, I’ve started using a bit of software called Mail.appetizer, by Bronson Beta software. Although sadly incompatible with Mac OS 10.4 Tiger, this little software gem has managed to deliver me from distraction on the mac for several months, now.

Its function is very simple: it displays a growl-like bezel in the corner of the screen, which displays the subject, sender, and content of whatever mail has just hit your inbox.

If you ignore it, it fades to the next message, and to the next, and to the next, and to the next, andand so forth. If, however, you see something you want to address immediately — like your boss or editor asking why your article is overdue, for example — then you can simply click the subject heading, which opens the offending message, to be replied to, forwarded, or agonized over.

That last bit of functionality is what really gets me excited about this king of application. “Ambient displays” get a certain amount of press, and in truth seem a rather good and necessary idea. This is due to the simple and important fact of human-computer interaction in the year 2005: The foreground of our attention is full. It follows that a good way to convey information is to put it in the periphery of our attention space, from where it can be brought to the foreground when needed.

The last bit turns out to be the rub. What separates the “amusing toy” from the “simple but brilliantly useful hack” is whether, once the ambient display has been noticed, I can immediately pull the full detail of the information available into the foreground of my attention.

Oh. The weather is bad? How bad?

Oh. Traffic on my blog just jumped? Where and how much?

A patient’s vital signs just dipped south? Whose? What happened?

A dial gauge on an old-fashioned medical instrument provides this level of detail on demand, as well as an ambient display; is it pointing generally upwards? Good. Way off to the left? Look closely. There, you get a reading to the whateverth degree that the dial can display. Right there, no extra effort needed.

I think this is the real opportunity for dashboard widgets in Mac OS 10.4, to create little ambient displays that have the capacity to reward attention with detail. Ever since seeing the first Konfabulator widget, I’ve wondered what it would take to hook up a little LCD and enough guts to have little off-computer widgets on my worktable, on the refrigerator, or on my corkboard. Does anyone know whether that’s something that could be built without breaking the bank?

Anyway, that’s the principle at work in Mail.appetizer, and for now it’s solved email for me. Found another ambient thingy that really works? Let me know in comments.

[Edit - spelling]