My mac mini shipped for the manufacturing plant on April 4th, 2005. It shipped with Mac OS 10.3, but I wanted widgets, so as soon as I was able to get my hands on a copy of Tiger, I upgraded the OS to 10.4. To date, I have 306 widgets, and am using 14 of them at the moment. And it's these 14 that I want to talk about today... On the top left, is my weather widget. It displays the 6-day highs and lows for Lexington, MA. Currently, it's 61 degrees and cloudy, and it looks like the rest of the weekend will follow suite. Just out of curiosity, I have a sunset and sunrise widget. It uses a circle which looks like a clock with one hand to differentiate between night, day, sunrise, sunset, dawn, and dusk. I had a choice for twilight but decided civil would be better than nautical or astronomical. Was I wrong? Underneath my weather widget is my sports scores. All summer it was MLB, but since there's only one fall classic, and only one October, I opted to swap it out for the NHL one by what appears to be the same author. I'm able to see all the games and start times, last night's scores, and even the standings for any division. It's quite handy! The Bruins are playing The Sabres tonight at 7. On the bottom right, I have the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 silhouette. It's Joel, Tom, and Crow sitting in their usual seats, only this time the movie they are stuck watching is my work. And they still don't have any control over when it starts. To their left is my pseudo inspiration quotation machine. It spews out pithy maxims no one wants to take credit for like "start every day off with a smile and get it over with." Standing on top of that one is a small Ignignokt from AquaTeenHungerForce. He looks perturbed, like someone just woke him up after a bender. I think the most random widget i have, is my Scrabble spell checker. You type in a string of characters, it tells you if it's a word or not. QOPH is a word, and if you play Scrabble, it's a good word to keep in your back pocket. We're not all like Dogbert who burns new tiles midgame of the letter he needs! The smallest of the group reports free hard disk space. Currently, I have 2.81G free. Good thing I don't plan on migrating to Leopard in the near future for I'm 6.19G short of the minimum requirements. Occassionally, I refresh the button on my CNN widget. The RSS feed I have it set to is "Top Stories" and right now the top of the list is an article stating that "Stocks slump, oil soars." Across the top of the screen is my iStat Pro with red lettering. I have it customized to show me memory, network, uptime, CPU, and the 5 most current processes. FYI, my mac mini has been up for 35d 23h and 47 minutes. It also has a swap file currently at 1.5GB. I really need to log out and back in. One of my favorite widgets is the root cause for all my widgets! It's called "More Widgets" and just like the name suggests, it reports all the newest widgets out there! Just today, I downloaded "calculate 1.0.1" and "Orange Liveradio 1.0.0." It's like having a genie and wishing for more wishes. Finally, i have a lightbulb on a string. That's right! it hangs down and can be turned on or off. Simple, silly, and pointless. Seems like the perfect bookend for my weather widget's practicality and usefulness. Don't you think?