character

On today of all days, sketchy-looking would-be 3D printing company Massive Dynamics puts out a comically vague press release. Is this yet another apparent attempt to pump its penny stock, or the April Fools' prank from a master troll? Maybe it's both.

Before you read any farther, I will direct you to this piece of excellent reporting by Rose Brooke and Dan O'Connor at the 3D printing blog Personalize.

You do yourself a disservice by not reading their article, but here's the gist: Rather than report blindly on yet another press release from an aspiring 3D printing … Read more

A while back Twitter announced that any URLs being shortened by its t.co service were going to cost users two extra characters. When you only have a 140 characters to begin with, the extra characters could be disastrous when trying to get your point across in a tweet.

It seems Apple didn't take the change into account with its integration of Twitter in OS X Mountain Lion. I discovered this when attempting to tweet a link from Safari. According to the tweet sheet, I had composed a perfect tweet, using up my entire 140-character allotment.

But every time … Read more

Twitter said today that it will implement a change in February that will extend the number of characters used in its automatic t.co link shortener by two.

Such a move may seem insignificant to the average Twitter user, but it does mean that there will be two fewer characters available under the 140-character limit in a tweet.

Twitter had no comment on the rationale behind the switch, but on its blog for developers, it simply spelled out the plans. "We're going to be extending the maximum length of t.co wrapped links from 20 to 22 characters … Read more

The OS X Character Viewer is a system-wide text entry service that allows for quick access to numerous special characters from fonts in your system. While the use of keyboard modifier keys (Shift, Control, and so forth) allow for quick access to some common alternative characters, there are numerous Greek, currency, math, and emoticon symbols that can be accessed through the Character Viewer panel in OS X.

This panel can be accessed from the Edit menu in most applications, but can also be opened using keyboard shortcuts or the input menu, as outlined in this previous article.

The basics of … Read more

The OS X character palette is a convenient option for accessing multiple unicode symbols that are part of modern font collections. Not only can you use fun items like emoticons, but you can also enhance writing with scientific and mathematical symbols, foreign script characters, symbols, and even Braille.

Having these characters in the character palette makes managing them far easier than prior approaches in which unique symbol and dingbat fonts had to be used.

If you would like to use the OS X character viewer, it can be accessed in a few different ways:

The Talking Moose is a desktop utility that features a funny animated cartoon-like moose that will pop up when least expected and deliver a funny line, a witty quote, or insult the user. There are versions of The Talking Moose for the Mac and mobile devices as well as Windows, and the moose even has his own Facebook page and Twitter accounts.

The Talking Moose has been around in electronic form since 1986 and was one of the first animated figures on computers. Once installed the user will see the interface with links to the official Talking Moose Website and … Read more

If you need to use a special character when writing, you've got a lot to choose from -- so many that you may not easily be able to find the right one! Fortunately, there's a great webapp called Inunico.de (the name refers to the Unicode system of text characters) that lets you search for the characters you need.

Just point your browser to Inunico.de and enter any search term you like. Characters matching your term are shown beneath the text box. You will likely see many that don't look like empty boxes; these are characters … Read more

Have you ever found yourself needing a name for a character in a story, a play, or a novel? Well, writers in the U.S., at least, can now breathe a collective sigh of relief and turn to Character Name Generator, freeware from Bad Wolf Software.

Once installed, the software's interface is quite simple and very easy to understand. To produce a list, you pick a gender, set the desired popularity of the first and last names, choose the age group, and then click on the Generate Names button. The tool will then provides a set of 11 names … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week people wrote in with questions on how the Java vulnerabilities and Flashback malware seen on OS X might affect Linux systems and older versions of OS X, how to set up Time Machine to work with networked volumes, and the options for showing invisible characters when composing word processing documents in OS X. We welcome alternative approaches and views from readers, so if you have any suggestions, post them in the comments!

Question: Setting up Time Machine on any networked volume MacFixIt reader … Read more