I bought a Mac Mini today. What’s recommended reading for someone coming back to the Mac universe after a long absence? (My other computers run Red Hat 9 and MacOS 8.1.)

Monday: I bought David Pogue’s Missing Manual. It appears to be about twice as dense as its competitors.

An interesting item from Larry Elder:

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s website displays this oft-quoted “fact”: “The risk of homicide in the home is three times greater in households with guns.” Their website fails to mention that Dr. Arthur Kellermann, the “expert” who came up with that figure, later backpedaled after others discredited his studies for failing to follow standard scientific procedures. According to the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Kellermann now concedes, “A gun can be used to scare away an intruder without a shot being fired,” admitting that he failed to include such events in his original study. “Simply keeping a gun in the home,” Kellermann says, “may deter some criminals who fear confronting an armed homeowner.” He adds, “It is possible that reverse causation accounted for some of the association we observed between gun ownership and homicide – i.e., in a limited number of cases, people may have acquired a gun in response to a specific threat.”

I wasn’t aware that Kellermann had retracted.

I hope soon to buy a Macintosh, and copy my files (4.4 GB) from the present Linux box. Is it easy to do that with an Ethernet line?

For my sins I’m entering thousands of addresses into a LookOut contacts list, and find that each one takes a surprising number of mouse-clicks. It would go much easier if I could simply type them into a textfile and convert it somehow; is there a way to do that?

I moved from Mozilla to Firefox and found that the font menu has changed. I don’t know where each app looks for its fonts; they’re not neatly integrated in Linux as in MacOS. I don’t like any of them as well as Lucida, but they are apparently TrueType and render nice and smooth, with the interesting side effect that it’s much easier to read light-on-dark. But none of them have a complete Greek alphabet! Most Greek letters show up looking like Syriac, whatever font I choose. Argh. How am I to do math?

Any month now I’m going back to Apple’s warmer embrace. All I really wanted from Linux was the ability to write Unix-style filters, anyway.

Most (according to casual sample) of the comic strips hosted at Keenspace have had their archives disappear, in whole or in part, this week; as if Keenspace had been taken over by Blogspot.

Comcast’s DNS has been flaky of late, making me wonder: why doesn’t the browser cache IP addresses?