Apple in its wisdom created launchd. They had good reasons for doing so, but there are downsides. One of them is they’ve replaced what used to be a single line of text in the crontab which usually had less than a few dozen characters into a 20 or more line xml file. They’re sort of a pain in the ass to write. Enter Lingon, a graphical user interface that greatly eases the creation and installation of the launchd configuration files. Free, open source, and works like a charm. Next time you’re trying to automate stuff on your mac and get frustrated with launchd, check this out, it will save you a lot of trouble.

Check out mp3tunes.com, a new business from the guy behind mp3.com and other dot.coms. For $40 a year you get unlimited file storage and unlimited throughput on 128k streaming from their site – upload your entire music collection and listen to it no matter where you are. If you’re not already running your own home streaming solution, this is a really interesting option. Granted, 128k is on the low end but for the price it’s incredible, especially when coupled with unlimited storage. They also have a synching tool to help you migrate your music collection to their servers. This is really a pretty good deal for anyone interested in having their music collection hosted online who doesn’t have the means to bring up their own hosting solution. There’s also a free version of the service which is limited to 56k streams, which might be worth testing for podcasts and other material where sound clarity is not as much of an issue. I’m left wondering how long it will take the RIAA to get steamed about this and call out the lawyers, I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Check out the wikimatrix.org, which has tools that allow you to compare the feature sets of the most popular wiki engines. It’s hardly comprehensive (compare it to c2’s list of known wiki engines for example), but it has the major ones and even a few I wasn’t familiar with, and the site’s brand new so hopefully they’ll be adding more engines over time. If you’re in the market for a wiki, this is a useful resource.

Yeah, I know – news of this is all over the web, and you all knew it already. Except most of the regular readers are not neccesarily quick on the new version uptake, so here’s a friendly poke – go update to the latest firefox. Just the changes to how tabs work make it worthwhile (you can now drag and reorder them without using a buggy extension). And here’s something fun for you to check out after you’ve updated – an interactive demo using svg.

[demo found via digg]