Is it a Wintel box, or is it a Mac?

subbes posted a screenshot of her desktop in her journal just now.

My first reaction was envy, after having seen Perl geeks with iBooks or PowerBooks at recent YAPC::Europes... but then I saw a couple of things which didn't quite fit. First, the task bar at the bottom (or is it called "dock" in OS X?) wasn't wide enough, and second, there was a display showing space free on "C:" and "E:", which seemed unlikely... then I read the post.

Looks pretty well done, by the little I've seen of Aqua so far, but it did confuse me quit a bit at first!

(As someone else pointed out, "that's wrong!")

Nifty!

For those of you who don't read news, LJ now has (again) a page showing the latest posts. Interesting to see a snapshot... a bit like metaspy. (Story here.)

(Oh, and shame on you; go subscribe to news now! :D)

Secret code

Sometimes I write down numbers (such as TANs) which I don't want other people to read, in (Sino-)Korean—or for extra obfuscation, in another language such as Niuean but with Korean or Arabic characters.

Recently I got the idea that I could use the combination of Lojban (language) and Arabic (writing)... the numbers are all only one CV syllable in Lojban, and represented in the transcription I use by one Arabic consonant letter and one diacritical mark: پً pa رِ re شٍ ci وُ vo مٌ mu خً xa زِ ze بٍ bi سُ so نُ no (1 .. 9, 0).

The letters are unique if you're just looking at the numbers, so you could just write the consonants next to one another and possibly pronounce it as a word... applying this process to my telephone number gives زخوزنشبخ. One possible pronunciation of this is [zəˈxuːz nəʃəˈbax]... which, at least to me, sounds more Hebrew than Arabic. (Perhaps I should spell it זכוז נשבך instead, or זְכוּז נְשְבַּך fully pointed.)

Nifty :D