I love me some custom drive icons in OS X. The only ones I haven’t customized are JungleDisk (which is a “cloud” drive, so no physical representation) and the drive that came with my Mac Pro (”Backup”) because I’ve never seen what it looks like. The rest were custom icons that I made myself, from images of the drives I found on the web.

My tools for creating these images are Photoshop and Pic2Icon. In Photoshop, I use the magic select want to select the background (it helps to start with an image of the drive on a clean white background). Using that plus some manual selections, I delete the image background, leaving the drive against the checkered transparent Photoshop backdrop. Then I do Image → Trim to crop it to the minimum dimensions. Then, I resize the image to 256 pixels on the longest size. Export to PNG, maintaining transparency, and our image is ready to be converted into an icon. I simply drag the PNG onto Pic2Icon which extracts the image and adds it as an icon, to the PNG file. Last step: View Info on the PNG, click the icon, Cmd-C. View info on the drive, click the icon, Cmd-V. Done!

The “SSD” drive got a special text overlay, to convey that the two drives are striped into one, but otherwise, they’re really accurate physical representations. And yes, I’ve done the same with all of my Compact Flash and SD cards, as well as my USB thumb drives.

It’s the little things that make me happy.

Then you’re not looking hard enough. A critical reviewer should be able to determine qualification differences between any two individuals. Giving up and picking between them based on race or gender is lazy.

Saying that the point of life is reproduction is admitting that you think life is a meaningless slog.

Automattic isn’t going to get fancy SoMA offices, throw huge parties at SxSW, or “get big fast.”

I attended a kick-ass party partially sponsored by Automattic this year at SXSW, and I dropped by their new SoMA office space a few months ago. Doh! But to be fair, their growth wasn’t fast—it seemed natural. It’s just amazing how much three years of natural growth can change things!

Here is my result for 2009:

And here are my 2005 and 2006 results for comparison:

My overall trend is to move deeper into the libertarian zone, and closer to anarchy, but my movement has slowed down. You won’t find me appreciably go into the anarchist area, because I do believe that a state is a necessary evil (to be kept small and contained—only as big as is needed to protect human rights and protect against foreign invasions).

I like this test because it isn’t just a two dimensional “Socialist/Democrat/Moderate/Republican/Conservative” test. It tracks economic permissiveness (vertical axis) and social permissiveness (horizontal axis).

I’m pretty sure that if you answer (like I did) that two consenting adults should be allowed to agree to a duel to the death you’re automatically thrown into the upper-right quadrant.

Let me know your results if you take the test! It only takes a few minutes.

Are you a publisher who would like to prevent the DiggBar from “framing” your sites? Are you a Digg user who would like to permanently get rid of the DiggBar and instead go directly to the web sites linked from Digg? I made a screencast to set you on the right path.

Here is the standard “frame busting” technique I talk about in the video:

<script type="text/javascript">
if(top.location != location) {
	top.location.href = document.location.href;
}
</script>

And here is the link to John Gruber’s “special message” PHP code, and go here to change your DiggBar setting in Digg.

Update: Digg is updating how the DiggBar works. Their solution resolves all of my complaints. Good job, guys.