That's a lot of beeping.

Re: Firefox tab behavior, see Accessibility features of Firefox and in particular accessibility.tabfocus. I believe the value you want is 7.

Re: compiling wget from source. Surely there are binary ports? Macports or something?

Re: FLAC in iTunes. I believe Native FLAC in iTunes/QuickTime is your best starting point for further exploration. Let me know how that works out for you.

Other things you may enjoy: iTerm, VLC, Perian, MegaZoomer, and OpenSourceMac.org.

MacPorts is worth installing/using (sometimes outdated packages, but at least it handles dependencies).

Also, on PyXML, I've been enjoying lxml, though the cool kids tell me to use Amara.

How to access all form controls from the keyboard:

Go to System Preferences > Keyboard and Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts. on the bottom half of the dialog, you'll see Full Keyboard Access. Click the All Controls radio button.

How to (possibly) improve your trackpad experience:

Go to System Preferences > Keyboard and Mouse > Trackpad. There's a checkbox for "Ignore Accidental Trackpad Input". You might want to configure other options too.

On Case Sensitivity:

I thought I saw something on the net about how to convert the filesystem so that it's case sensitive, but I haven't been able to dig it up.

One thing you might want to consider is setting up a disk image - this can be configured by Disk Utility to grow as required, and even to be encrypted when it's not mounted. And, back to the topic, you can also create disk images where the FS it uses is case sensitive. So maybe it's worth it to create a case-sensitive sub-system to work in. In practice though, almost no Mac user I know has talked about using this in practice, and *I* have tried using it, but found the effort of opening and closing the volume all the time to be more effort than I really wanted. Still, maybe you'll find some ways to make it work that no one else had thought of.

To compile from source you may want to check out MacPorts or pkgsrc.

As for case-insensitive file systems, here's a good point a BeOS user trying out OS X made about them:

Case-sensitivity seems like a great idea to UNIX-heads. These are people who want every possible command and workflow to have a distinct, deterministic result -- the kind of thinking you expect from an academic/research environment. Synonymous workflows that arrive at the same result are anathema to science. Students filling up directories with lab data like for there to be a difference between "a.dat" and "A.dat" and sorts them according to ASCII value rather than orthography. It's a sure-footed, obedient scheme, one where the computer does exactly what the user wants it to do -- because the user is one who has the expertise to issue instructions that are very clear and precise and speak the same internal language that the computer does.

But that's not who desktop OSes are written for. In a desktop OS, there is no conceivable reason why you would want to have two files in the same folder that are, for all intents and purposes, named the same thing. "Picture1.jpg" is the same thing as "picture1.jpg". No, really -- it is. It's the metaphor by which you organize the people in your address book. Would you consider "john thomas" to be a different person from "John Thomas"? Would you be unconfused by a set of introductions at a party with both these fellows in attendance?

How come if you're tabbing through fields on a form in Firefox, it skips right past the pulldowns. I don't want to use the mouse.

You need the "Full keyboard access" section at the bottom of the "Keyboard Shortcuts" system preference.

I have to say, if Tim hadn't told me about it, I never would have thought of dragging the menu bar to the other screen.

Oh, Cool; thanks for the tip. Now I might actually use my not-quite-traytable (15-inch) with my 24-inch monitor a bit more often.

It sounds a lot more complicated and expensive than setting up Ubuntu on a generic Intel laptop (with subpixel font rendering and gtkpod to sync my iPod). Are there special Mac-only apps that you need to use? The Mac's great for the wanna-be SF designer crowd, but you seem to be fighting hard to turn it into a generic *nix machine anyway, so why make life harder? I'd say the same (in reverse) to someone who was trying to turn a *nix machine into a Mac.

I had no idea that the Mac used a case-insensitive file system. It's not a huge deal, as David Magda mentions, *unless* you happen to need to copy files back and forth to a case-sensitive file system, as would happen, say, if you were using your computer as a development machine for a web app then copying to a LAMP web server -- then it's a recipe for misery.

I'm also not so much time ago ordered iMac and customize it - here is description of my customization of emacs and other things - http://alexott.blogspot.com/search/label/mac I had selected fink for installing 3rd party software and not compile it from sources. fink has more packages comparing with macports, and apt-get inside ;-)

Definitely look at MacPorts; I've almost completely stopped bothering with building things from source myself since starting to use it. They even have Emacs 22.

I presume you found the setting to turn on anti-aliasing in Terminal? ("Terminal" menu, Window Settings, Display dropdown, Anti-aliasing checkbox.)

phrase role="bubble", I like that!

You can get a case-sensitive filesystem, but you have to reinstall the OS. You choose "HFS+, case sensitive" when formatting the disk.

Have no idea why you didn't have netstat out of the box though...

I always wonder at this kind of reconstruction: did you take notes during the process, or relied only on memory afterwards?

The bubbles are great.

And I am inclined to agree with the first paragraph in David Megginson's comment: what were your functional requirements again?

You can also create a disk image using Disk Utility, which you can format using a case-sensitive filesystem. Your choice of HFS+ or BSD's UFS.

And do try out MacPorts, if only to prevent things like the HEAD disaster (it does everything under its own /opt/local prefix).

"Install PyXML....I wonder if I should be worried that it isn't being maintained anymore?"

.oO(scratch that, this takes no thought ;-) )

Just stop worrying and use Amara. Not only is it maintained, but the maintainer is concerned about not crippling XML, a rare commodity in the Python (or Perl or Ruby) community ;-) .

BTW: http://copia.ogbuji.net/blog/2006-12-30/First_day_

Try Play it does FLAC, has a last.fm component, etc... is OS and doesn't get in the way. Install TinkerTool to stop autostart of crap like iTunes or Dashboard.

“Why isn't that anti-aliased?”

It's an option: Show Info (⌘I) → Display → Anti-aliasing.

“How do I configure things so that apps inherit the right environment by default?”

Use Property List Editor (part of “Xcode Tools”) to write your desired environment variables in ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist. Takes effect on login.

(Why can't I use <blockquote>?)

"Xiph.org, the non-profit organization that oversees both formats, released a new QuickTime plug-in that restores FLAC and ogg vorbis compatibility. Simply download the plug-in from Xiph, run the installer and you should be able to play both file types natively in iTunes." -- Putting Vorbis and FLAC back in iTunes

The "click to focus" requires 2 clicks because you are doing 2 things, and sometimes you only want to do the first thing. Sometimes on Windows XP I'll click on the edge of a window that is 98% hidden, and send the hidden app an unintended command. For example, a browser window might follow a banner ad. Some complex apps have almost no window space that won't respond to the mouse-down event, and you need to see the entire window before knowing where it is "safe" to click.