iFill (currently in beta) allows you to capture Internet radio stations and store the resulting songs on your iPod, with fairly good delineation of the individual songs.

I'm pretty pleased with this technology: basically you tell iFill what stations you're interested in, how much space you're willing to take up on your iPod and just let it go.

iFill is currently free (with registration required) and is definitely worth checking out - just be careful if your ISP has a bandwidth cap.

iFill @ Griffin Technology

I remember, with great fondness, spending hours upon hours playing Zork and Adventure...

New Interactive Fiction For The iPod: "Those of us who recall the arrival of the home computer back in the late 70s / early 80s remember a type of entertainment software that was available for every make and model. Interactive fiction. ..."

(Via iPod Hacks.)

Following in the vein of useless yet somewhat amusing Dashboard Widgets, I offer up my first creation. This widget uses the original BSD UNIX fortune program to deliver (you guessed it) a new fortune every time dashboard is entered:

I suspect that this widget will be of most interest to 40-something UNIX hackers who continue to remember the old days with a certain fondness...

Download BSD Fortune Widget

A little while ago, our ISP decided to switch from a perfectly functioning direct TCP/IP connection to PPPoE. I asked them why they were doing this and received a less than coherent response which basically boiled down to "we can manage things easier". Fine for them, but of course it caused problems for their customers.

One of the problems is the MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) setting commonly required for PPPoE (1492) which is not the default MTU setting for Mac OS (1500). When this setting is mismatched, one typically experiences problems which manifest themselves as timeouts on some web page loads and the retrieval of email.

The ISP's tech support didn't know anything about this, but after a small amount of digging I came up with the method for changing the MacOS MTU setting following a reboot. Without further ado, here is the procedure for others who run into this problem. This procedure applies specifically to the AirPort connection.

• Launch Terminal
• Browse to the following directory: /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/Kicker.bundle/Contents/Resources
• Use your favorite text editor to edit the file: enable-network
• Add this line before the 'exit' line: ifconfig en1 mtu 1492
• The AirPort card's MTU will now be set to 1492 when the system boots.