It has been a while since I last used Flock.  In the past I stopped using it because I felt that the blogging editor needed a lot of improvements.  I would have liked to see a full WYSIWYG editor rather than the simple editor that they offered.  Today I decided that I would download the latest version 1.0.1 and see what improvements they had made.  To my surprise I found that they had actually done a lot with the browser.  There have been quite a bit of features added to it.

Flock has definately come a long way and I look forward to seeing where they go from here.  I will be using this browser again for a while and see if I can force myself to get used to the blogging editor.  If you have not tried Flock, I suggest you go download it and give it a test run, it is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.  Now let’s move on to discuss some of the cool new features.

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It was not that long ago that everyone was running around trying to figure out how to customize the Leopard dock.  Well the good guys over at Panic have released Candybar 3 which is for Leopard only.  It will allow you to change your dock, along with a ton of other icons such as hard drives, trash, etc.

There are also many free Candybar iContainers over at Icon Factory.  Although I do personally think Candybar Wrappers would have been a better name for them

I have been thinking about setting up a raid server in my closet that will run on Wi-Fi.  I would like to do this because any computer in the house would be able to access the share.  When I first started to think about getting a backup system I thought about getting a ReadyNAS NV+ which is a device you can put up to 4 hard drives in and have RAID 5 which is a great bonus.

I searched around and found that the ReadyNAS NV+ costs $1,049.00 (directly from NETGEAR) as an empty unit (meaning no hard drives).  I found this to be quite expensive for lack of growth that it offers.  You can only have 4 drives, they can be no larger than 750GB each.  You are limited to 3TB of storage space.

I have been pricing out all the hardware I would need to setup a massive RAID system and actually it’s a lot cheaper than I thought it was going to be.  The main PC components such as case, motherboard, processor, memory, power supply only run about $450.  The kicker though and what is stopping me right now is the fact that if I do this I want to do it right.  I have been looking at a 3ware SATA II RAID Controller card that will support up to 16 SATA II drives.  It is quite pricey though.  It is $749.99 just for the PCI-X card.

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Florida must have some really dumb residents.  Either the police force or just civilians.  I was reading this article and it is not funny because they found 60 pounds of marijuana on the side of the highway.  What is funny about the entire thing is the last paragraph.

Anyone missing their bags of marijuana or knows how these bags made their way onto the roadside is asked to contact the Florida Highway Patrol at (813) 631-4020.

Is this statement coming from history of people calling in and trying to claim illegal stuff? Are the cops just dumb enough to think that someone will call in and say "Dude You Found It, Thanks Man".

No disrespect to Florida residents but you have to see the funny side to this.

In Leopard we all know that you can open a finder window, select a file or folder and hit the space bar to enable Quick Look to get a preview of the file.  However by default if you have a folder selected it will show you an image of a folder.  This is not very useful.  I would like to see the contents of the folder when i enter Quick Look.  This is where Quick Look plug-ins come into play.  The developers over at Apple made Quick Look support an open architechture so that developers could create their own plug-ins to support more file types.

Taiyo (a Japanese developer) has written 2 such plug-ins.  They are both really useful.  The Folder Quick Look Plug-in will allow you to view the contents of a folder, I think Apple should have had this as the default behavior.  The Zip Quick Look Plug-in will allow you to see what files are contained in the zip file that you selected.  Very handy if you do not want to extract something when you are not sure if it is the correct archive.  All you have to do is download the zip files and place the *.qlgenerator files in the /Library/QuickLook/ folder and they should work automatically.