Joshua Topolsky

If you’re like me (and let’s be honest, you’re exactly like me), you use a bunch of apps which add items (or menu extras, or menulets) to the right side of your menu bar. Unfortunately, due to some screwy API issues, not all of these icons can be moved, which is frustrating if you like things to be in specific places. Since you’re just like me, I know that you do.

Just loading apps (or particularly when booting, loading at startup) doesn’t do the ordering trick, because it’s solely dependent on how quickly apps load. There doesn’t seem to be a real way to stagger them, even by rearranging your startup apps.

Long story short, last night I kinda / sorta figured out a solution — a simple AppleScript which tells your computer to load a succession of applications with brief pauses in between. Like so:

It takes a little tweaking and experimenting, but you can get the timing just right pretty easily. Save the script as an app (Save As…), and stick it in your startup apps list. All done.

Still, you can’t rearrange, and if you have to quit one, you pretty much have to quit all — but for the most part, this does the trick without me having to think about it.

Now, if someone could just code a quick utility that makes all of those icons movable…

Some of you may be wondering why you’re not seeing the latest piece of Digg’s news-puzzle — the DiggBar — on Engadget. Let me explain.

If you’ve seen the tool in action, then you know that it appears to offer an easy way to read an article you might want to Digg by providing you with a dropdown toolbar and a shortened URL — all courtesy of digg.com. It’s certainly a super solution for making users aware of related stories on the site and generally keeping them in the Digg ecosystem… but that’s part of the problem.

In Digg’s efforts to keep you swimming in their stream, they completely obscure the original URL you’re supposed to be looking at. And no, not just the URL you follow from a particular Digg on their site — all the URLs you visit (via clicks) until you kill the bar. Additionally, if you’re browsing around a site under the bar itself and you kill it, it transports you back to the original URL you landed on, thus completely breaking continuity and making it almost impossible to know where you’ve actually browsed to.

Maybe that’s okay for users who aren’t really paying attention to where they’ve arrived or where they’re going while reading news — but we consider that information valuable, and don’t wish to obfuscate it.

In our opinion, the DiggBar takes Digg’s approach to news gathering and dissemination one step too far. By hijacking URLs, they complicate an end-user’s experience on our site, and from a publishing standpoint, we think it’s a step backwards to mask the content you’re visiting with shortened URLs from an unrelated site. See John Gruber’s excellent piece on this which gets a bit more technical, and this Search Engine Land post which gets really technical.

Ultimately, this is both a technical and philosophical decision. We believe that the work of content creators should be protected and treated as the unique product that it is, and that an end-user’s experience shouldn’t be tainted with a “catch-all” tool which diminishes context.

So here’s how our solution works: If you follow one of our links from Digg — and you have the DiggBar active on your account — it now redirects to our original URL. You’ll see the DiggBar for a moment, but ultimately end up at the original content you clicked on in the first place.

Which is how it’s supposed to work, mind you.

I just want to get a hold of the big guy and ask him (or her, whatever you prefer) why my blog got all hacked and whatnot. Not only is that not classy, it’s super annoying, stupid, and totally not-awesome (as we say around here — Australian accent only).

Anyhow, the point I’m trying to make is this: stranger or bot who is responsible for this hack, if I ever find you, I will kill you, your family, and anyone who has ever met any member of your family. Then I will kill your pets no matter how cute they are. Then I will blow up the planet Earth.

Gino Felino (Steven Seagal) is an NYPD detective from Brooklyn who knows everyone and everything in his neighborhood. He grew up in the neighborhood as a poor kid surrounded by wiseguys and made men but decided to become a cop. Gino has ties to everyone in the neighborhood, including the mob, and he has an understanding with them that neither will harm the other.

In the opening scene of the movie, Gino and his partner Bobby are waiting to bust up a multi-million dollar drug deal. Gino sees a pimp beating up a woman and intervenes; Gino promptly disposes of him. When he throws the pimp through the windshield of his car, we see red pimp shoes sticking out and then the iconic shot from the point of view of inside the car of Seagal scowling.

Shortly afterwards, we see the film’s main villain, Richie Madano (William Forsythe), murdering Gino’s parter Bobby Lupo on 18th Avenue in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in broad daylight in front of his wife, Laurie, and his two kids. Everyone knows that the killer is Richie, a crack addict who has been Gino’s and Bobby’s enemy since childhood.

Gino knows Richie is not going to leave the neighborhood and he tells his captain (Jerry Orbach) that all he needs is an unmarked police car and a 12-gauge shotgun. His Captain gives him the clearance, providing Gino with a Remington 870 pump action shotgun and a brand new 1988 Chevrolet Caprice 9C1 from the Brooklyn 65th precinct. Gino visits his mob connection Frankie and his boss Don Vittorio to tell them that he is going to find Richie, while they want their own revenge on him for killing a cop on their streets. Gino starts the hunt for Richie at a bar run by Richie’s brother Vinnie Madano. Vinnie and his friends all refuse to provide information, so Gino assaults all of them until they (including the local legend known as “Sticks”) are all left bloodied on the floor. He still doesn’t know where Richie is, but their attitude problem has been taken care of. This scene is also known for its use of the Sicilian terms “Fanocch” (short for fanocchio, meaning faggot) and “Minchia” (dick) several times. Furthermore, Seagal also utters the movie’s most famous and dramatic line with “Anybody seen Richie? Anybody know why Richie did Bobby Lupo?”

Pretty sad news about the Designers Republic. Apparently the company has folded (in its current state at least) due to a perfect storm of bad events. Ian Anderson says that he’ll resurrect the brand in some form, but I’ve got to say I’m seriously depressed to hear the news. For those that don’t know, the design house essentially invented “modern” design (that is, a ton of what we’ve seen since the mid-90’s), and the rave years wouldn’t have looked the same without them. Should be interesting to see what happens next, but I also feel like this is likely the natural order of things — most artists don’t go on doing groundbreaking work or stay as cutting edge as they were when they started. Why should it be any different when it comes to design? Well, we’ll always have 1994.

By now you’ve probably seen the story reported by Gizmodo that Steve Jobs (and Apple) have pulled out of Macworld this year because of Jobs’ dire health condition. Apparently, this piece of info — brought to the site’s doorstep by an anonymous source — has caused quite a stir. Like our own misreporting on Apple in 2007 (a report backed up by internal documents and direct Apple employee feedback), the company’s stock took a noticeable dip, mainstream media outlets picked up the story, and the requisite sensational Digg headline went straight to the front page.

Here’s something about the story you probably don’t know: We received a similar tip from the same tipster weeks ago — a reliable contact who just recently provided us with leaks of new Apple hardware before it was announced. This is a rock solid tipster when it comes to images of gear, but beyond that, we don’t know anything about the person. They may be a dock worker or technician… or they might be Jobs’ personal assistant. It’s unlikely that it’s the latter, but the point I’m trying to illustrate should be clear: the source of this rumor can’t be verified as having a single credible piece of knowledge about Steve Jobs’ health.

Now, I’m not saying they’re not right — they could be Jobs’ personal doctor, and they could be at his bedside right this moment. What I’m saying is that we don’t really have any reason to speculate about Steve Jobs’ health except to say that about six months ago some people who saw him said he looked thin, and in 2004 he had (and recovered from) pancreatic cancer. Your metrics may be different from mine, but that doesn’t place someone on their deathbed or make them too unhealthy to speak to a large group of people. Apple has reasonable excuses for not wanting to be part of Macworld any longer that are far less exciting than imminent death.

To give you an idea of how rumors are treated at Engadget: if someone writes to us and says they’ve seen, oh… say, the Zunephone, yet provides no physical evidence, and no credentials that we can verify which would give them access to that kind of information, we simply don’t run the story. And getting a photo of a piece of hardware versus knowing the specific details of a very private person’s medical health are two very different things.

Part of the problem here lies with Apple, of course. The company has so furiously cultivated a culture of secrecy that it makes it near impossible to get a straight answer out of them unless it’s expressly on their terms. From developers down to Apple’s PR, words and actions from Cupertino can be opaque to a point of frustration. A protectionist view of proprietary systems and new developments is one thing, but withholding reasonable information from shareholders and making fervent fans jump through arcane hoops gets tiring. Speculation doesn’t spring out of what we know — it comes from what we don’t know. Like Joe Nocera noted in his NYT article (yes, the one where Jobs called him a “slime bucket”), only on Jobs’ terms — off the record — could he be privy to information which would put rumors about the CEO’s health to rest once and for all.

But ultimately, no one is asking you not to speculate or question a company’s motives or actions — that curiosity is what drives some of our best stories. What I am asking is for you to use a bit of common sense when it comes to rumors without some verifiable information that backs them up. Just because someone says it, and just because it’s written, it doesn’t mean it’s true — and that’s doubly the case if you read it on an LCD display.

But look on the bright side, AAPL only finished $.32 down yesterday.

Pure, pure brilliance. The Dark Knight as an NES game. I want to play this so badly.