Cool Mac Gear

Thank you, Mr. Raven
Several times this week I've been rewarded by the timely visit of the big black birds, and yes, they do make a noise just like the QuickTime audio file embedded on this page. Actually, they have a whole repetoire of clicks, rattles, and croaks. Seeing one close up, big, black, and scruffy, gracking away and not the least bit scared of you, is an opportunity to leave the world of illusion (another aspect of what I call the "oatmeal of the known") and let yourself be directly addressed by, well, maybe something you never knew existed.

For Native Americans, raven magic gives the courage to enter the darkness of the void, the Great Mystery, the source of everything not yet manifested. As Jamie Sams and David Carson write in Medicine Cards (St. Martin's Press, NY, ISBN 0-312-20491-4):

"Do not try to figure it out, you cannot. It is the power of the unknown at work, and something special is about to happen...Or will you limit the power of the Great Mystery by explaining it away?"

We live in a universe of lies. The keyboard I'm typing this on feels solid enough, yet if the molecules that make it up were the size of the earth and the distance between them proportionately enlarged, you could send entire galaxies through their midst and never risk collision. Solidity itself is a convenient illusion, nothing more. So is everything your mother ever told you, incidentally. And when it comes to Microsoft? Don't even ask!

Easy-peezy, lemon-squeezy
Millions of dollars, months of court testimony, and thousands of reams of paper have been wasted defending the premise that interfering with the "integrity" of the Windows operating system will bring the temple of our contemporary way of life crashing down in an avalanche of bricks, dust, and financial ruin. All last week the handsomely paid executives asserted once more (under oath!) that Internet Explorer, for example, CANNOT BE REMOVED from Windows without causing disaster. This, however, is a crock.

There is in fact an Australian Web site that gives away a program for doing just that. (They sell higher-powered versions that do more, but this isn't the point.) Anyone visiting the 98lite.net site can download software that neatly and cleanly excises everything Microsoft says you can't remove. [NOTE: be sure you use "net," not "com." For more info visit here.] What's more, savvy Windows users have been doing this for years, even without the helpful app from 98lite:

"I've set-up 2 PCs few years ago with 98Lite and they work perfectly. To get an idea, an old Pentium 75 is running faster with 98Lite than a 133 CPU with W98+IE. The browser is now Opera, and it's totally fine. I never understood why this incredible product doesn't get more attention."

"Many Windows 95 users did not appreciate the bloat of 98 or the obnoxious omnipresence of Internet Exploder. 98 was perceived as a bug-fix for 95 that included some bugs of its own, fixable bugs. Microsoft claimed that IE was integral to Win98 but it was clear that it had been added pretty late in the development process and was easy to disable or remove.

As you probably know, Win95 components were substituted for Win98 components to accomplish the removal while retaining functionality. This was classic hacking.

This became a standard trick for running Win98 under Virtual PC back when VPC was really slow. It's still the version I prefer since it's less slow and more stable than the full Win98. Now that VPC is faster and RAM and drive space are plentiful it's not as much of an issue. Of course, it also requires a Win95 install CD (or running version) to scavenge the alternate files and since most of us were transitioning from 95 to 98 back then we had both versions at hand.

I used the 98lite utility once a few years (and versions) ago and it worked fine. Since the changes it makes are simple, I've just kept the Win95 files handy and do the swap manually when I have to arrange a new version of Win98. The old instructions are still up at http://www.98lite.net/iextract.html if you're interested in how it all started."

* * * * *

"It's a nifty little program - as mentioned, I've been using it for a couple of years now....I find Win98 or WinME barely tolerable in Virtual PC without 98lite - Win95 is much snappier. With 98lite, you get all the updates and functionality of Win98, but without the IE shell 'enhancements,'which IMHO aren't enhancements at all! When I look for files, I don't want to look at web pages. When I look at web pages, I don't want to look at files!"

I asked a well-known Mac personality whether he'd ever heard of this and he said sure, but he doesn't give a hoot because it "isn't relevant to Mac users." Oh? What about the Virtual PC angle? And especially this:

The biggest software company in the world, one that Apple is supposedly beholden to for its very survival (for deigning to support the Mac), lies through its teeth as a matter of policy about something that a piece of freeware can accomplish in a heartbeat, even to the point of having the chairman of the board swear on a Bible and LIE AGAIN IN PUBLIC, and this isn't relevant??

Not to get too heavy about it (hahaha), but under the circumstances, isn't buying Microsoft Mac apps a bit like buying rat poison from I.G. Farben during the 1930s and '40s? And why on earth is the Holy Inviolability of Windows given the slightest credence whatsoever in a federal court of the United States of America?

Whip me wi' dat mushrat, momma
By now you may understand why I don't watch television news. That's right, not any. I don't even listen to NPR most days. Whatever I "know" these days comes from the Internet and a few newspapers. And as for the rest -- everything that goes inside my heart and head -- I'm striving mightily to just experience everything. To let it be. To watch the thoughts roll by and not hitch a ride. (The preceding paragraphs show the effect of ignoring this wisdom.) This is almost impossibly hard most of the time, but I am trying.

[If I had been raised by plants, things would be different. As it was, I was conceived and birthed by humans, wonders of imperfection with a gift for self-abuse, doomed by a belief in a world of illusion to lives of pain and suffering.This is the What Your Momma Told You part, but don't worry: there's lots of sex and cherry pie along the way. The thing is, the catechism -- secularly speaking -- is crap. "Whoa!" That's right. And the real subject of this essay isn't Microsoft at all...]

So let's hear it for the void. I'm kinda getting into this a little more each day, you know? I'll bet that if enough of us stop hanging on so tight, we'll get a cool surprise. Something different, something hopeful, something happy, all those things in seeming short supply these days, something so new you won't even know it's here until it's gone again, perhaps. To help out, you might consider turning off the TV news so you can live outside of it instead of inside of it . A nice bonus is that you'll never have to listen to "him" or "her" or "them" again. Wow! The benefits are incalculable -- I know this for a fact because I can't figure anything out at all.

Until next time,

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr (creator of Fotofeed's daily image from New Mexico) knows full well he's weirder than horns on a snake, but make him a pallet on your floor and he'll tell you what a mushrat is.

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Apr. 22: "Earth Day All the Time" Apr. 15: "Oh, THOSE Taxes!" Apr. 8: "Turn Left at the Llamas" Apr. 1: "April Drool" Mar. 25: "Tuzas on the Curb" Mar. 18: "Holy Ghostbeak" Mar. 11: "Lord of the Turkeys" Mar. 4: "The Heart of the Matter" Feb. 25: "New Stuff: Browsers, Servers, etc." Feb. 18: "Mascot Lore & More" Feb. 11: "Killer Email & Wiccan PotLuck" Feb. 4: "Meanies, Guerillas, & Subscription Copycats" Jan. 28: "Full Moon Frenzy, w/ PowerMacs" Jan. 21: "iMacs & Webmaster Schadenfreude" Jan. 14: "Was It Only a Week Ago?" Jan. 7: "Useless Column" Dec. 31, '01: "I Want a Refund"

AUDIO CREDIT: embedded 44k file, European Birds -- Sounds and Sonograms.