Bean, a free word processor.

Bean has been updated. It's a simple word processor for OS X that many people like because of it's small footprint and low requirements yet it has enough features to be handy. It's actually quite nice for things like NanoWrimo or using on older hardware.

Features

Bean is a small, easy-to-use word processor that includes:
a live word count
a Get Info panel for in-depth statistics
a zoom-slider to easily change the view scale
an Inspector panel with lots of sliders
date-stamped backups
autosaving
a page layout mode
an alternate colors option (e.g., white text on blue)
an option to show invisible characters (tabs, returns, spaces)
selection of text by text style, paragraph style, color, etc.
a floating windows option (like Stickies has)
easy to use menus
remembers cursor postion (excluding .txt, .html, .webarchive formats)
all of Cocoa's good stuff (dictionary, word completion, etc.)

What Bean doesn't do

Bean doesn't do footnotes, customized headers and footers, columns, pre-defined text styles, floating graphics (but it does do in-line graphics).
Also, no OpenDocument (.odt) format support (but it's coming with OS X Leopard).

Give it a try and see if you like it here. Oh, and it's free.

Cheap G4 iBooks

otherworldcomputing.com has a few used G4 iBooks for sale for around $500 USA. They get these specials in every few months it seems. I've bought one G3 iBook from them and one G4 iBook because at $500 or less (the G3 iBook was around $250 I think) they're -as far as I'm concerned- disposable electronic typewriters that can also do email and surf the web.

They're dinged up, scratched and usually the keyboards are a little warped but they run Mac OS X 10.4.x, Pages (albeit slowly on the G3) and can take a beating overall.

The G4 iBook I just bought has a battery that "ioreg -l | grep -i IOBatteryInfo" tells me has only been power cycled 23 times, the screen has one tiny dead pixel way off to the side and the keyboard was a tiny bit warped which was easily bent back into shape.

I love these things because I don't care if they live or die and I ALWAYS back up my new writing with Mozy AND to a tiny flashdrive at least once a day. I take one with me everywhere because I never know when I'll need or want a typewriter.

The Grandiloquent Dictionary

I'll freely admit I'm a sciolistising lexiconophilist, heck, I even know the difference between hypnopompic and hypnogogic but if you want some really fun words check out the Grandiloquent Dictionary.

Rummaging around the site I get a distinct whiff of sniglets but of the handful of words I randomly tested several were listed in a few online dictionaries. They even have a convenient pdf to download.

But I'm no logastellus, that's for sure. Logophile sure...

Worthless Word of the Day

I'm a word junkie (yes, there's a word for that heheh) so one of my daily sites is the Worthless Word of the Day.


I highly recommend it for such morsels as:

suffisance
cumulose
obscurantist
subreption

and the hilarious:
helliferocious & ambisinister

p.s. no, it's not wordphile, it's logomaniac.

Quotation and Punctuation Marks

I've always been terribly confused with how punctuation works when it's around quotation marks. Do they go on the inside, or outside and how on Earth can you always know? I did a search for it and found this on some quotation marks page:

Inside or outside
Punctuation marks are placed inside the quote marks only if the sense of the punctuation is part of the quotation (this system is referred to as logical quotation).
Correct: Arthur said that the situation is “deplorable”.
(When a sentence fragment is quoted, the period is outside.)
Correct: Arthur said, “The situation is deplorable.”
(The period is part of the quoted text.)
Incorrect: Martha asked, “Are you coming”?
(When quoting a question, the question mark is inside because the quoted text itself was a question.)
Correct: Did Martha say, “Come with me”?
(The very quote is being questioned, so here, the question mark is correctly outside; the period is omitted.)

From the quotation marks wiki page we find this:

In both styles, question marks and exclamation marks are placed inside or outside quoted material on the basis of logic, but colons and semicolons are always placed outside[2]:
Did he say, “Good morning, Dave”?
No, he said, “Where are you, Dave?”
In the first two sentences above, only one punctuation mark is used at the end of each. Regardless of its placement, only one end mark (?, !, or .) can end a sentence in American English.

So it's fairly simple: if what you're quoting has punctuation, put it within, but if it doesn't, put it on the outside.