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There’s a bug in OSX that fusses with your sound balance settings.  I’ve noticed that at random, the balance slightly shifts to one of my speakers.  Thankfully, there’s an easy fix to this, balanced:

Bugs in Mac OS X or other running programs might break your output’s balance settings. balanced listens for CoreAudio’s volume change notifications and adjusts the balance if needed. This first version of balanced has no preferences file and adjusts the balance in a 50-50 manner.

emma :: Feb.04.2007 :: tech, misc :: 3 Comments »

For the Mac users out there, check out VirtueDesktop, a freeware app that lets you make distinct virtual desktops and switch between them with ease. (Yes, I know that OSX Leopard is supposed to have a feature like this, but why wait? Get it now!) This isn’t so much a necessity now that I’ve brought my 23-inch cinema display back home with me, but I imagine it will be very useful for when I’m on the move and have only the 12-inch PowerBook. And yes, even my 12-inch PowerBook can handle VirtueDesktop running in the background.

(Props to Nathan for referring me to this.)

emma :: Feb.04.2007 :: tech, misc :: No Comments »

Thanks to Aaron, line breaks are now uncollapsed.  Hooray!

emma :: Feb.04.2007 :: misc :: 4 Comments »

One of my favorite talks at this year’s LSA Meeting in Anaheim was Florian Jaeger’s talk on that-reduction (abstract, handout) in relative clauses and complement clauses. He showed (that) the probability of the reduction of ‘that’ correlates with the probability of a certain verb being followed by a relative or complement clause. So that-reduction occurred more often following a verb like ‘believe’ than a verb like ‘know’. Very cool.

I’m just finishing up my personal statement for the fellowship application for the LSA Summer Institute. The application limits the word count of the personal statement to 500 words, and when I was done with the almost-final draft, I was at 534 words. So what did I do? I went through and reduced ‘that’, of course! (I made other cuts, but eliminating ‘that’ in certain relative and complement clauses helped quite a lot.)

emma :: Feb.04.2007 :: syntax, linguistics, nerdiness :: No Comments »