Only two new entries were made to the Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List this week.

MacBiff (IMAP polling utility) was added to the Notification section and Gmailto No. 2 (makes the Gmail web interface your default mail client) was added to the helpful apps / Miscellaneous section.

In other news, someone kindly added Hawk Wings to the external links section of Wikipedia’s Mail.app entry (). Thanks!plugins, wikipedia, notification, mail.app, gmail, macbiff, IMAP

In the last 36 hours, two developers have emailed to tell me about their triumphs with “endianness” problems.

Because I am supposed to present a knowledgeable fa?ɬßade, I emailed back saying, “Great”, “Excellent! :)” and so forth.

Then I ran to Wikipedia to find out what it means. Here are the fruits of my labours:

Endianness generally refers to sequencing methods used in a one-dimensional system (such as writing or computer memory). The two main types of endianness are known as big-endian and little-endian.

Systems which exhibit aspects of both conventions are often described as middle-endian. When specifically talking about bytes in computing, endianness is also referred to as byte order or byte sex.

What could be plainer than that?!

I think it has something to do with AppleScript on Intel Macs.

(Or possibly Jonathan Swift).

UPDATE: But I’m wrong. FastScripts developer Daniel Jalkut reveals all.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has taken the unusual step of making a personal appeal in the site’s latest fund-raising round.

If you don’t know what Wikipedia is, you can found out here.

It had some bad news coverage last year. While its foibles are real, they are few. And its virtues far outweigh them.

Now it needs donations. Why would you give? Jimmy Wales explains:

I can?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t speak for everyone, but I can speak for myself. I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m doing this for the child in Africa who is going to use free textbooks and reference works produced by our community and find a solution to the crushing poverty that surrounds him. But for this child, a web site on the Internet is not enough; we need to find ways to get our work to people in a form they can actually use.

And I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m doing this for my own daughter, who I hope will grow up in a world where culture is free, not proprietary, where control of knowledge is in the hands of people everywhere, with basic works they can adopt, modify, and share freely without asking permission from anyone.

The proprietary control of knowledge is not a sexy topic. But it is a real danger.

Give to Wikipedia. I did. I want my kids to grow up in a world like that too.

It’s even tax-deductible if paid out of federally-taxable income in the United States.

Speaking of using OS X’s Services menu in Apple Mail to work smarter, two new things deserve a mention.

HotService has been updated. This bundle moves the Services out of the File menu onto the Statusbar for easier access. The new version replaces the “Services” text with a bullet to conserve Statusbar real estate and initialises the Service Menu more quickly on start-up.

InstantLinks is another Services bundle that offers quick and easy shortcuts to various useful “look-ups” on selected text:

Select an address that someone has emailed you, and Google Maps via InstantLinks gives you a handy map. Or highlight a word in a Mail.app message and InstantLinks can take you straight to its Wikipedia entry.

Command-= takes you to the dictionary definition or thesaurus on Answers.com. And so on.

Of course, while these tools help you work better in Apple Mail, by their very nature they are there to help you in any other Cocoa-based app you use.

Both bundles are freeware.