Engadget hit on this one, and it's technically possible to do it with a Windows PC, but considering that Mac users are greener than most folks, and lovers of both plants and cool tech DIY, we're posting it anyway. Botanicalls, which is a project to help your plants make phone calls, has posted a how-to guide on getting your plants to twitter when they need water, got water but not enough, or are even being overwatered.

The whole rig requires an Arduino board, and it's not exactly for Mom to do on her own (unless of course your Mom is an electrical engineer, which is entirely possible), because it also will walk you through making your own moisture sensor. Once you've got everything plugged in, the Arduino software will talk to the unit via USB and ethernet, and a terminal script will actually send the Tweets out. Unfortunately, despite a quick search on Twitter, I wasn't able to find any plants actually tweeting, but if you have one, let us know.

Desktoptopia (not to be confused with Desktopia) is a program that automagically delivers the latest and greatest in wallpaper right to your desktop-- just press go, and the app will drop a new desktop on you as often as you want, from any categories that you want, rated however you want. For people who love seeing a brand new desktop, but don't want to take the time hunting around to find one all the time, it's the best. The best, Jerry, the best!

And now it's even better, because they've posted a coupon code on his site that drops the normally $20 shareware application down to just $10. Enter "luckyme" at checkout, and you'll be wallpaper browsing and changing in no time. More desktops, no worries-- sounds great to me.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

I have a confession to make: even though I was there at the iPhone launch, I haven't actually purchased an iPhone. Yes, I'm part of that supposedly small (though I think there are quite a few of us) group of Mac fans who have chosen not to shell out $2k over the next few years to own a little piece of the revolution.

But I still want to be on the cutting edge of the iPhone zeitgeist and that's why I think this little mashup is so cool. Reader ADM tells us that he's squeezed together Google Maps, Twitter, and Ning to bring you a geographic, browsable representation of what people are saying on Twitter about the iPhone. Now you too, even if you don't have an iPhone, can stay up to date about what people are saying and where they're saying it.

What's that? You don't care about the iPhone? And even if you do, you think something like this is completely silly and unnecessary? Touché. But ADM has also included the source code through Ning, so you're welcome to make your own mashup about whatever you want. Meanwhile, I and mine will continue to listen intently through the tubes, and hope for our own little bit of salvation: a price drop.

Over at MacOSX Hints, a poster has figured out how to rotate a single page in Preview without affecting any other pages in a PDF file. The secret lies in the option key. By holding it down before clicking either Rotate Left or Rotate Right, you limit the rotation to the currently displayed page rather than the entire document. This is particularly convenient when you want to rotate a single portrait figure into landscape or vice versa.

For those of you looking for the Rotate Left and Rotate Right icons while displaying your PDFs, be aware that you may have to resize your window to reveal the entire tool palette.

By this time it is a well-worn cliché that there are 10 kinds of personal computer users: those that get this joke, and those that don't Mac users and PC users. For the most part, we, particularly Mac users, want to see this distinction as personality-driven. We chose Macs because we're creative, rebellious, cutting-edge, or, if we believe the ads, just plain cool. To the PC world, we're ridiculous spendthrifts, wasting our money on overpriced hardware that dooms us to a life of marginalization and incompatibility.

Personally, I see it as matter of genetic superiority. In a race for survival of the fittest, Mac users will win every time. We're infinitely adaptable. We're used to a constantly changing OS and set of core applications that we further rearrange with scores of hacks and utilities. The majority of PC users, on the other hand, got lost when Microsoft moved the "Programs" item from the middle of the "Start" menu in Win95/95/2k to the bottom of the "Start" menu in XP, and added a green arrow. The outcry against the ribbon interface in the new Office betas--the most innovative and useful UI modification to come out of Redmond in years--was so strong that the developers were forced to remove it. Meanwhile most Mac users are not only coping with OS X's mutability, but keeping up with PCs on the side; the fraction of Mac users who use only Macs is pretty small.

Chris over at Restiffbard, though, sees things differently. He's decided that it's the OS that makes the user, not the other way around. For him, it all comes down to the functionality of a single interface button: the maximize button. On Windows, you can't easily resize a window larger to a 'best fit' like Mac OS X can. Sure you can drag the bottom corner, but it's much easier to just hit maximize and go full screen. This leads to Windows users becoming task-oriented users by default. For Mac users, on the other hand, it's difficult do get a full-screen window in most applications. The green "+" button resizes the window to the size of the document, not the screen. This means that Mac users almost always have multiple windows and application visible. We can switch easily between them and, probably more importantly, they're always there, reminding us of their existence, nagging us. We naturally become multi-taskers.

I'm not sure how much of this I buy. I mean, really: are you going to tell me that you can take any old group of PC users in front of Macs for a couple of years and they'll just naturally become as cool as me, or Steve in a bowtie? I don't think so.

But it's an interestingly fresh take on a decades-old question.

Update:

if (($tongue{'position'} eq 'cheek') or ($sarcasm > 0)) {
$tongue{'position'} = 'notcheek';
$sarcasm = 0;
print <<END

Guys, check the categories, you'll see "Humor" and "Cult of Mac." No, I don't really think Mac users are genetically superior. And I don't think I'm nearly as cool as that pic of Steve in a bowtie. In fact, I don't think Steve is as cool as that pic of Steve in a bowtie. In fact, I don't think anyone is as cool as that pic of Steve in a bowtie. Ok, maybe Woz, but that's about it.

And just for the record, I don't think those of us who were weaned on Macs are cooler than "Switchers," or anyone else. If I'm cooler than you, it's just because I was born that way. :p~

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