We all have a smart phone. A tablet. A laptop. A plethora of different interconnected devices that allow us to share, create and consume things 24 hours a day. But what has the future to offer us?

Go back as little as 10 years and the outlook is quite bleak. There are devices capable of picking up your emails on the go, downloading and displaying webpages, albeit the now long forgotten WAP ones. The technology is there but the thing most lacking is access to affordable data plans to allow us to get at those things.

Whenever the rumour mill starts churning out some fantastical ideas about what the next new (usually Apple) product is going to do (cf. unicorns), it's usually joined by a slew of "concept" designs for said products.

Fun as this may all be, there's something that always annoys me about the whole thing; why are a good portion of these conceptual devices semi- or completely transparent? What is it about the types of people that create these concepts that make them think a transparent device would be product design Nirvana?

As some - or perhaps none - of you will have noticed, this blog has been unreachable for the better part of the year.

I had neglected to upgrade WordPress from one of the dot releases and as a result was the target of those pesky hack0rz via an exploited security hole in WP. This in turn triggered a malware warning via various browsers and search engines, my solution: move the blog to a non-web accessible folder to be dealt with when I had a spare moment.

Fast forward 6 months or so and I'm just getting around to fixing all the problems - upgrading WordPress to the latest release, upgrading (and removing unused) plugins and sanitising all the PHP source files that ended up with malicious code embedded in them.

I'm confident that I've caught all the issues and that the security holes in the blogging software are all patched (for now). So back to some procrastinating whilst trying to dream up new blog post subjects.

Absent-mindedly present,
- Chris

LittleIpsum from Dustin Senos is a handy little tool for anyone doing design or programming work who's constantly in need of some lorem ipsum to pad out visuals.

I usually use lipsum.com which has a decent background on Lorem Ipsum as well as a configurable generator.

LittleIpsum on the other hand is a nifty little Mac OS X menu bar app that allows you to quickly grab a couple of words, sentences or paragraphs of lorem ipsum.

I've just installed a fresh copy of Lion on my machine and much to my dismay I have to set up all of my many mail filtering rules again!

Bugger that, instead I had a dig around and decided to copy across the rules from my previous installation. All the rules you've set up are stored in a .plist file within Mail's data stored in your Library folder.

In Lion you'll find the rules at:

~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/MessageRules.plist

Under Snow Leopard:

~/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist

So all you need to do is copy/paste the relevant file from your old machine to the new one.