Thursday 1/31/02 §
It is a "crunch" day here at the office (we have a deadline tomorrow), so I doubt I'll post much on the site today. Normal posting will, I hope, resume tomorrow.
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Wednesday 1/30/02 §
Speaking of fun, read Part I of Andy Ihnatko's account of his trip to Macworld Expo San Francisco earlier this month. "3000 words and I haven't even boarded the damned plane yet." It's more about traveling than it is about Macs, and Andy has more funny in his incisors than most people have in their entire mouth. So you should definitely read it. (Found at Brad's Must-See HTTP)
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How fun works. Entertaining yet simultaneously thought-provoking article incorporates ideas from a wide variety of sources to answer questions such as "Will eternal life be boring?" and "Will we ever run out of fun?" (Found at abuddhas memes)
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Vagabonding -- not just a style of travel, but a way of life. (Found at Waeguk)
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Tuesday 1/29/02 §
Shall I buy a new PowerMac G4 dual 1GHz? I have a dual 533MHz already. Hurry up and decide for me, because Apple's financing deal (no interest or payments for 6 months) expires Thursday.
If you're thinking about getting one of these or the new iMac, I suggest not ordering from the Apple Store. Instead, check your favorite mail-order dealer (I like independents Small Dog and PowerMax). Your Mac will almost certainly be drop-shipped by Apple anyway, but you'll avoid paying the sales tax, which, on the dual 1GHz, will save you more than $250. Authorized dealers can hook you up with the special financing too -- at least, those two can, and they can't be the only ones.
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First come up with a clever -- or at least punny -- headline. Then invent a news story over which that headline could appear. Congratulations; you're playing Usupported Headlines. Example story: Example story: Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov arrested for public disturbance after argument over who is the more respected Grandmaster erupts in crowded hotel lobby. Headline: Chess nuts boasting in an open foyer, of course. (Found at Black Belt Jones)
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Monday 1/28/02 §
And now, to round out the recent AppleScript goodness, I should mention that if you've registered with Apple as a developer (and doing so is free), you can download AppleScript 1.8.2b1 for "classic" Mac OS and Mac OS X. If you've been unhappy with the performance of your scripts since you upgraded to Mac OS 9.2.2, this will fix you right up again. Of course, there's the risk that you'll run into some other bugs (this is a beta version after all), so use it at your own risk.
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Angry victims of an eBay con artist get all Scooby Doo on his ass. (Found at CamWorld)
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Look -- out in the snow! Faster than a native Seattleite on the ice! More than anecdotally familiar with low temperatures! Able to help cute Asian women pry open their frozen car doors in a single bound! Is it a penguin? Is it a polar bear? No, it's Midwestern Man!
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James Lileks is back with another hilarious deconstruction of America's historical kitsch. It's an equation as inevitable as E = MC2: Celery + Gravity = Art. Art Frahm, that is. (Found via Dane Carlson)
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Sunday 1/27/02 §
Today's burning question: Which countries are supplying fresh, chilled and frozen horse and ass meat to Italy? Fortunately, Chilled and Frozen Horse and the Fresh have the answer. (Are they a hip-hop group?) If you have questions about ass meat operations in any country, or the world at large, these guys (or their counterparts, Sheep, Goat The Edible Offals of Bovine, Ass Meat Research Group) have got you covered with more than 90 reports, priced to move at $325 each. (Found at Meatfilter, er, Metafilter)
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If you use Internet Explorer for Mac and want to block annoying pop-up ads at specific sites, I posted step-by-step instructions to a Usenet newsgroup recently on how to use Security Zones for this purpose. You can do something similar with Windows IE, I believe, but I don't have the step-by-step for Windows, so you're on your own there.
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This is shaping up to be "digital photography Sunday." Fred Miranda has some Photoshop actions you should probably look at if you do digital photography. The Stair Interpolation action is free, and purports to do high-quality upscaling of images by increasing the size repeatedly instead of all at once; the samples Fred provides seem to bear this out, although the differences are subtle. He also has a noise reduction action, which he has optimized for various digital cameras (including a version for the camera I own); if this really does as nice a job of removing noise while retaining detail as his samples show, it's probably well worth the $12 he's charging for the set. Other interesting filters in Fred's toolkit include edge sharpening, simulation of B&W and Velvia film, and dynamic range increase (which combines underexposed and overexposed versions of a scene to create a file with more total dynamic range). Oh yeah, he also has a gallery of his own photography. (Thanks, Victor)
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I've found that when iPhoto imports pictures from my camera, it doesn't assign them a 4-letter file type that Adobe Photoshop recognizes, so double-clicking a thumbnail in iPhoto switches to (or launches) Photoshop, but doesn't actually open the selected photo. If you are having a similar problem, paste this AppleScript into Script Editor, save it as an application named "iPhoto Helper" ("Stay Open" and "Never Show Startup Screen" should be checked), and select it as your double-click application in iPhoto.
on open (theFiles)
tell application "Finder"
repeat with theFile in theFiles
if name of theFile ends with ".jpg" then
set file type of theFile to "JPEG"
set creator type of theFile to "8BIM"
end if
if name of theFile ends with ".tif" then
set file type of theFile to "TIFF"
set creator type of theFile to "8BIM"
end if
end repeat
open theFiles
end tell
end open
on idle
tell application "Finder" to get name of every process
if the result does not contain "iPhoto" then quit
return 15
end idle
When the script is first used in an iPhoto session, it'll take a second or two to open up and do its rock 'n' roll duty, but it stays running as long as iPhoto is running and is very quick opening up the second and subsequent photos in a session. (Note: This is actually the third version of this script... the revision I posted around noon on Sunday had some flaws.)
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Friday 1/25/02 §
While I was at Textism looking at the "small caps" link in the last post, I found a collection of AppleScripts that Textism's big cheese Dean Allen uses for writing for the site. You might find them useful. I do my own writing in BBEdit and have set up shortcut keys for italic, bold, and other formatting tags, but like Dean, I have a "grab URL from IE" script I use to insert a link to whatever I'm looking at. Here's mine:
tell application "Internet Explorer"
ListWindows
set theWindowInfo to GetWindowInfo (item 1 of the result)
set theURL to item 1 of theWindowInfo
set theName to item 2 of theWindowInfo
end tell
tell application "BBEdit 6.1"
set t to contents of the selection
if t is "" then set t to theName
set selection to "<A HREF=\"" & theURL & "\"> </A>"
select character -5 of the selection
set the selection to t
end tell
Assign that puppy to Ctrl-L (for Link) using BBEdit's Scripts palette and inserting a link to the displayed page in Internet Explorer is as easy as whacking a key.
As I've mentioned in the past, I use a big-ass AppleScript to update this site, inserting new articles (composed in BBEdit) in the local copies of the pages, then telling Interarchy to synchronize the JerryKindall.com FTP disk. Perhaps I'll clean that up a bit and post it for download, if anyone's interested...?
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Provenance: Unknown has an interesting Web style guide for electronic writers. There are plenty of things I'd do differently were I to bother developing a style guide for my own site. For example, the advice that acronyms of five or more letters should be initial-capped (e.g. "Nasdaq") seems goofy to me (I prefer them upper-case but small-capped, but am generally too lazy to do it here), So does "a.m." instead of "AM." Writing for MacJournals cured me of the desire to put a space between a number and its units; thus I prefer "1.2GHz" to "1.2 GHz," although I concede the latter is probably more readable. Using em-dashes at all on the Web is pretty foolish, since the proper way to get them is to use Unicode HTML entities, and there are too many browsers that don't support those correctly (this is why I use double-hyphens). "E-mail" requires the hyphen because "email" looks like it should be pronounced "em-ail" but even better would be just to use "mail."
But part of the fun of finding a style guide is quibbling with it. That's okay. Style guides are for consistency in a single publication, and if you work on a site that's maintained by more than one person, you should have one. Possibly you should have one even if it's just you, depending on how anal-retentive you are by nature. This one really isn't a bad place to start developing your own. (Found at Glish)
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Thursday 1/24/02 §
I was just browsing through my archives and realized that my six-month milestone (not a "six-month anniversary" as some would have it; the "anni" part of "anniversary" means "year" so it is necessarily a marker of a whole number of years) -- er, where was I? Lost myself in a parenthetical. Oh yes, my six-month milestone with this site occurred just before Christmas.
Like many bloggers, I gauge my site's self-worth at least partly by how many people read it. (Who links to me is also a factor.) I've been averaging 175-200 visits, where a "visit" is any number of page views no more than 15 minutes between them, for the last few months. I write about what interests me, and I will continue to do that to a certain extent, but I'm also interested in what interests you. I rarely talk about myself on the site; is that something anyone wants? Do you dig the links I find, or are have you usually seen them somewhere else before I post them? Do you like the occasional longer piece I write, such as the odd movie or book review? I've stuck my toe into the political waters a bit this week; is that something you're interested in reading more of? (I have opinions, but I generally shy away from controversy.) What is the favorite thing I've posted since you've been reading? Are the topics I choose too esoteric? How's the tone -- too impersonal and offputting, or friendly enough to draw you in?
By no means am I asking anyone to answer all the questions I've posed; I'm just asking for some feedback. Anything you'd like to say will be gratefully received, even if it's "you suck."
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Rebecca Blood has a book about Weblogs coming out in June: The Weblog Handbook. She is also incorrectly listed as the author of We've Got Blog (she wrote the introduction and contributed one chapter). Those of us aspiring to the A-List now have another hurdle to clear: what with Powazek's tome and now Blood's, it's becoming clear that the way to prove you're really somebody in the community is to write a book about weblogs.
Some readers may know that I once wrote a book on Web animation. The day after I sent the final draft to the publisher, my editor called to tell me that my book had been cancelled by the corporate minions, who, in a fit of cost-cutting, looked at the number of titles their imprints had in production at the time (300) and said "make it 200." According to my editor, my book was similar to one another imprint actually had at the printer already, or something of the sort. So I ended up with a manuscript that I basically couldn't sell to another publisher, and only part of the advance (the rest was to be paid on publication). Worse, the advance was a pittance; the real value of doing the book was to be that I'd become an "authority" and get more and better Web development gigs, but of course that only would have worked if they'd actually published the thing. I wish Rebecca better luck. (Found at Oliver Willis)
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AppleScript and Timbuktu Pro lead to the recovery of a stolen iMac, as documented by macscripter.net from a Google Groups thread. There are enough AppleScript samples in there to make your eyes glaze over (the goal was to remotely delete the owner's private information such as credit card data), but what finally allowed recovery was setting AOL to try to dial the legitimate owner's home phone number, so that the next time the computer tried to log on they could get a Caller ID trace. It's a small leap from there to this anti-theft idea: if you use dial-up Internet, simply set up your computer's PPP or AOL dialer to dial your home phone number first, every time you log on. If you're using the computer from home, you'll get a busy signal and the dialer will quickly move on to the second number, which should be a real number for your ISP or AOL. If the computer is being used from elsewhere, though, the thief may leave a trace the first time they try to log on. (Thanks to John Clark)
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Researchers in France have conducted an experiment in which gravity is observed to be quantum. This is something predicted by quantum mechanics, but it's incredibly difficult to observe because gravity is such a weak force, and this is the first time anyone has succeeded in doing so. (Found at Follow Me Here)
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Among other things, the Internet is useful for confirming that the CIA is populated by real people with actual senses of humor. I feel much better now. (Found at David Chess)
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Wednesday 1/23/02 §
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak ("Woz") has started a new company called Wheels of Zeus ("wOz") which plans to create new wireless devices to help "everyday people track everyday things." The company has raised $6 million in initial funding. A New York Times article (free registration required) has more. (Thanks to Scott for the initial Reuters story; NYT story found at the Boing)
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Patricia Rasmussen and Ken Libbrecht have some absolutely amazing photographs of individual snow crystals. You won't believe your eyes... (Found at speedysnail)
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Tuesday 1/22/02 §
Just discovered that Australian hard-SF writer Greg Egan has a new novel due out in May. (Hope it's better than his last one.) If you don't want to wait until May, you can order the paperback from Amazon UK and save a few quid; the British edition is due out in February (apparently they're releasing hardcover and paperback at the same time; I have no idea whether that's typical in the UK). They also have a collection of his which has never been published in the US (although some of the stories in it have been). And no, you don't have to live in the UK to order there.
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A thought-provoking piece on ethics and art: Teaching Aesthetics to Artists. (Found at Follow Me Here)
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"Minus the torture, the United States is now doing what most Arab regimes have been doing for decades: arresting their brutal 'Islamist' enemies, holding them incommunicado, chained and hooded, while preparing unfair trials." So writes Robert Fisk in an Independent article. But acccording to Rumsfield, the accusation that we are holding the prisoners "chained and hooded" is simply false: while they were initially restrained and made to wear blacked-out goggles, this was a temporary measure to protect the guards while the prisoners were being moved. The goal, of course, is to prevent another Mazar-e-Sharif, which is where, you might remember, a group of about 300 prisoners staged an armed uprising. Some prisoners have tuberculosis, and to prevent the spread of disease all were made to wear surgical masks. "At least" one prisoner was sedated (meaning only one could be confirmed), I would imagine because he was violent or panicking. The prisoners were later moved to individual cells and are not forced to wear the restraints or goggles there. They are apparently receiving regular showers, medical care, three meals a day, and pen and paper to write home with (damn, there goes Fisk's "incommunicado" too). They have been provided with a copy of the Koran and an extra bath towel to use as a prayer mat and are allowed to pray facing Mecca. There is of course some chance that Rumsfield is lying to the Associated Press, so I was relieved to hear on the radio this morning that the British have interviewed those of the prisoners who are British citizens, of which there are a few, who confirm that they are not being treated cruelly.
Further details (some of which I've already cited above) can be found in the BBC's Life in a Guantanamo cell and Harsh detention for Afghan prisoners. Despite the title of the latter article, I have a hard time imagining that people who most recently lived in caves in Afghanistan would consider six- by eight-foot cells in a mild climate -- 22 to 28 Celsius works out to 72 to 83 Fahrenheit -- to be that harsh. The mosquitos would probably be annoying, but as Marine Brigadier-General Michael Lehnert is quoted as saying in the latter article, "We have no intention of making it comfortable." (Case in point: some of the guards are women. Heh.)
How generous of Fisk to assume the worst of the United States. As a nation, we certainly have our flaws, and we have admittedly committed our share of atrocities, but our military is not stupid. Given that he's demonstrably wrong about "holding [the prisoners] incommunicado, chained and hooded," it seems a wee bit premature of Fisk to declare the forthcoming trials "unfair" before they've even begun, don't you think? (Found at also not found in nature)
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The architect of the Internet Archive discusses how it works in an O'Reilly Network interview. He says that the hardware it runs on was free, by which he means it cost less than $400,000. Must be nice to have the sort of budget where a few hundred grand represents rounding error from zero. (Found at Boing Boing)
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Monday 1/21/02 §
As soon as the Enron scandal broke, you could hear the left sharpening its knives. But now even the pro-business, laissez-faire right is beginning to find the whole business just as repulsive. You know it's bad when National Review calls for the principals of both Enron and Arthur Andersen to be tossed in jail. He's right: the alleged actions of Enron's executives have made it much harder for more ethical corporations to get the capital they need, kicking our struggling economy in the nads once more. As a former member of the Libertarian Party and a lifelong capitalist sympathizer, I hate to see unnecessary restrictions placed on business, but I think Enron has proven that our current public safeguards are simply inadequate. The outrage would be muted if only a few rich investors had been wiped out, but with more and more ordinary people investing in stocks, insider fraud on the scale of Enron has the potential to have immediate, devastating effects throughout the entire economy. I don't know precisely how this risk should be addressed, but only a libertarian ideologue would say that the government shouldn't do something. (Thanks to my good fried Dean, who's still looking for an IT job in Detroit)
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Handspring has just reduced the price of the Visor Pro by $50, two weeks after I bought one at the old price. Of course, I got a free travel charger, which is a $35 value according to them (even though it probably costs about a buck to make), so the delta is really only $15. It's not worth getting bent out of shape over, I guess, but still, I thought I had better timing.
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Find out about indirection and how it can impede your written communication. (Found at xBlog)
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Meme du jour: Have you ever wished that your favorite weblogger was a hot-air balloon? All right, all right -- I've only actually heard of two of these people, but it's still cute. (Courtesy jish, who has been inflated)
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Thought I'd update you on some of my recent discoveries with Mac OS X.
First, I had been having trouble getting X to blank my monitors even though I had had the Energy Saver prerference pane set to blank them after 10 minutes of inactivity. (Since the monitors are EnergyStar compliant, this essentially turned them off.) I found that if I set the whole computer to go to sleep after an hour instead of "never," and the screens to blank after 10 minutes, the blanking would kick in on schedule. Apparently if you have the computer set to "never" sleep, Mac OS X doesn't even look at the other settings. Oddly enough, though, the computer doesn't actually go to sleep after an hour, even though I've set it to do so. That's okay; I do not in fact want the computer to go all the way to sleep. But it seems weird to have traded one bug for another...
My cordless Intellimouse Explorer was signaling that its mouse button had been released, even when it hadn't, sometimes in the middle of menu selection or window dragging or other rodent manipulation that required the mouse button to be held down. I am sure this is an artifact of some power-saving mode on the mouse, and that Microsoft's forthcoming Mac OS X mouse driver will solve the problem. In the meanwhile, I bought a Logitech corded mouse with dual optical sensors, three buttons, and a scroll wheel. I'll send this rodent to my mom for use on her iMac, or else to my sister, when I'm done with it.
Either Internet Config or Internet Explorer seem to be losing cookies, file helper settings, and other configuration information on a regular basis. I can't figure out what's triggering the problem -- it sometimes happens while I'm at work, when I've left the browser running. Anyone else seeing this problem on Mac OS X?
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If you were truly introverted, would you really want to tell everyone that?
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Wallace and Gromit, the animated clay stars of Oscar-winning shorts "The Wrong Trousers" and "A Close Shave," will appear in twelve new 1-minute films to be distributed exclusively on the Internet. The bad news: apparently we'll have to wait until this autumn. The Wallace and Gromit feature film is, incidentally, slated to debut in two years. The last I'd heard, Aardman's second film for Dreamworks was to be a version of "The Tortoise and the Hare," but apparently W&G have been bumped up. And not a moment too soon, as far as I'm concerned. (Found at Follow Me Here)
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Friday 1/18/02 §
What the world needs now is a way to read and write CompactFlash media on 8-bit Apple II computers. (Mega props to the null device)
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Thursday 1/17/02 §
If you go to a Kidd Valley burger joint, order the bacon cheeseburger combo, and pay with a twenty, your change is $13.37. That's so... leet.
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What television does to you. (Found at Rebecca's Pocket)
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Every year, Edge asks a bevy of luminaries a question and compiles the results. This year, the tables were turned on the panel, who were each asked to ask the question most important to them and explain why they they think it's important. The questions range from the deep (Randolph Nesse's "Why is life so full of suffering?") to the trivial (Brian Eno's "Why do we decorate?") to the humorous (Eberhard Zangger's "How do women's minds work?"). But even the seemingly trivial and humorous questions have provocative rationales behind them, and there are hours of interesting reading to be had here. (Found at Boing Boing)
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Wednesday 1/16/02 §
New Mac OS X users will be happy to find MacFixIt's list of essential utilities. (Found at Xspot, a little corner of randomWalks I hadn't noticed until today)
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Working cats. (Stolen from Anita Rowland)
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Apple's Jonathan Ive talks about his new iMac. (Found at Kottke)
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Tuesday 1/15/02 §
Amazingly, people are still writing articles on online dating as if it's a new phenomenon. Tamara Straus's story for Alternet begins by stating the obvious: that online dating is both a "bleak reflection" of our society and a way to "cut through the b.s." Who'd've thunk it? She also underestimates by at least half the amount of time people have been finding love online (she says "six years" -- I met my first girlfriend online in 1990, and I certainly wasn't the first to do so). The article concentrates on Internet services intended specifically for dating, while chat services and community sites (which in my experience are a big part of online romance, and maybe even more useful than dating-oriented sites) are not mentioned at all. My good friend Dean met his wife by posting a classified ad on Usenet, of all places. (I just went and looked: Google Groups does have his ad. Heh. I won't embarrass him by linking to it.) Still, once you get in past the first few paragraphs, this isn't a bad article at all if you're interested in the state of the dating art in 2002. (Found at Follow Me Here)
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Monday 1/14/02 §
Bessemer Venture Partners is painfully honest about the investment opportunities they have missed since 1911. "This long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up." (Found at Making Light)
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Seattle's Experience Music Project lends patrons a gadget called MEG, or Museum Exhibit Guide, which provides additional textual and audio information about the artifacts on exhibit. I visited the EMP for the first time this weekend with a friend from out of town and discovered that MEG is technology in search of a problem.
MEG's first hurdle is that the hardware is completely overengineered. The main MEG unit is a module about nine inches square, and three or four inches thick, that you sling over your shoulder on a strap. To this is connected a hand-held controller with a numeric keypad and navigation buttons on it, along with a touch-sensitive color LCD and an infrared scanner. There is also a set of lightweight headphones that provide audio commentary and musical excerpts. MEG is not so heavy that it's bothersome when you put her on, but when I took her off after half an hour or so, I sighed with relief, as if I'd just taken off a heavy coat that was a little too tight.
All this gear is provided in service of a user interface that is overly complicated for its purpose. They actually have to provide a short orientation session to groups of newly-cyborged MEG-bearers, and there is even a MEG help desk. You know that they wouldn't pay for it if you could get by without it. Getting more information on a given artifact is a two-step process: first you have to use the infrared scanner to tell MEG what exhibit you're looking at, then you have to key in a two-digit artifact number. This is exactly one step too many. Keying in four or five digits per artifact would not be at all onerous, and it would reduce the size and cost of the MEG unit (and simplify operation) by eliminating the scanner. Once you've chosen one exhibit, you'd be able to choose nearby ones from a listing on the screen, so much of the time you wouldn't even need to key all the digits anyway. Given the limited things she can do, there's really no reason MEG should be much larger than an Apple iPod, or even an Archos Jukebox. (I half suspect MEG is so large to prevent her from being stolen.)
MEG does apparently have one really cool feature. You can "bookmark" artifacts you're interested in, then enter your ticket number on EMP's Web site when you return home to get access to those bookmarks. I say "apparently" because this function, possibly the only thing that could coax me to drag MEG all over the museum, was not covered in the orientation! I didn't even find out about it until I got home.
Last but certainly not least is MEG's impact on the social character of the museum. Unless you're visiting alone, part of the fun and enjoyment of the EMP is talking about what you're seeing with your friends -- or even with random strangers you encounter on your tour of the exhibits. This is difficult to do when you're wearing headphones. I am one of the most asocial people I know, not to mention a gadget freak of the first order, and even I found my overall experience diminished, not enhanced, by MEG.
Once my companion and I ditched MEG, we enjoyed the EMP. From the inside, the building's odd Gehry shape makes much more aesthetic sense than it seems to make from the outside. The building was full of fascinating and lively spaces. Some of the exhibits were mediocre verging on the lame (the "Artist's Journey" funk exhibit was very nearly the latter, rescued only by a pretty decent motion-control ride at the end, a la Star Tours), but I really enjoyed Northwest Passage, Guitar Gallery, and Milestones. I must sheepishly admit to being modestly geeked to see one of Geoff Tate's leather jackets on display in Northwest Passage (Queensryche was one of my favorite bands in high school and college, and I think Operation: Mindcrime still holds up well today).
The EMP has taken on a serious challenge in trying to exhibit in concrete, temporally fixed form an inherently abstract and fleeting art, so it's no surprise some of the exhibits were more successful for me than others. They probably do as good a job of it as anyone could expect, and I found my visit memorable. It's not somewhere I'll feel the urge to go again anytime soon, but I'm glad I finally got to go.
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Friday 1/11/02 §
iPod software 1.0.4 appears to fix the relative volume tag glitch I was bitching about the other day. Update: No, it doesn't.
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Thursday 1/10/02 §
Koss's KSC-50 sound really good for their price ($15-$20). The bass is amazing for such a compact set of earphones. They work great with my iPod and are far superior to the earbuds that came with it.
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Dr. Walter Willett recently participated in a live chat for ABCNEWS about the problems with the USDA's "nutrition pyramid" and the excess of certain carbohydrates in our diets. Actually, this might still be open for questions, since the form's still there. Interesting questions and answers, in any case.
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Wednesday 1/9/02 §
Meadow of the Damned! (Found at Elegant Hack)
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Because Mac OS X has received so much flack for its user interface, I thought it would be only fair to point out some of the ways in which Mac OS X improves on the traditional Mac UI.
First, when viewing the contents of folders in the Finder's list view, the Command key is now used for toggling the selection of single icons -- just as Apple has always recommended for lists since the Human Interface Guidelines, but has not bothered to implement in the Finder until now. Shift is used to select ranges of items in the list, again as Apple has always recommended but has never done in the Finder. And blissfully, holding down the Shift key while pressing the arrow keys actually works to select multiple items in a Finder list view!
They definitely got some things right here. Mac OS X is polished in some ways that the legacy Mac OS never was, yet remains bafflingly unpolished in other ways. I'll be glad when pop-up windows and spring-loaded folders come back. The latter is, I hear, slated for 10.2.
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Oooh. Must have. (Found at memepool)
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Here's to Doubting Thomases. (Covered in cheesedip)
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Tuesday 1/8/02 §
The Economist has useful backgrounders on a variety of topics and individuals around the world. While the links in the capsules go to premium content (i.e., stuff you have to pay for), there's enough meat there to start exploring on your own via Google searches. And, hey, some of that stuff might be worth paying for; it's only $10 for a whole month, and that doesn't seem like too much to get up to speed on a bunch of current topics. (Found at The Daily Dose)
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James Lileks (p)reviews the year 2002 in his end-of-year column. Hilarity ensues. (Found at InstaPundit)
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Monday 1/7/02 §
I must say, iPhoto is way, way cool. It's what I've been wanting for use with my digital camera for longer than I can remember, even though I didn't know exactly what I wanted. This whole "digital hub" thing is an actual honest-to-god strategy, and it just might work.
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I suppose, avowed Mac-head that I am, I will be remiss if I don't say something about the new iMacs. Well, they're definitely new, and they are most certainly iMacs. I have a dual-processor G4/533 with two monitors, but I'm freelancing hardly at all these days, and I'm thinking that when I move closer to town I'll probably get a one-bedroom apartment rather than a two-bedroom and dispense with the home office entirely. At which point, this new iMac looks like just the sort of machine I'd like to have.
Wouldn't the new iMac look just lovely in '50s kitchen appliance colors, like avocado, yellow, and robin's-egg blue?
What's particularly interesting is that the price of the entry-level iBook is now $100 lower than the iMac, although they top out at the same price. I think this might be unprecedented in Apple's history; usually mobility carries a price. Of course, if you consider the speed you sacrifice with the iBook, you are paying a price. It's just not in dollars anymore.
The iBook with the 14" screen is welcome as well, fitting neatly between the 12" iBook and the TiBook.
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I was looking for some information on a Steve Reich piece when I ran across this 1998 interview with the composer. I found his comments about amplification having made him less interested in the orchestra to be thought-provoking in several senses, and there are other good nuggets in there for anyone interested in music, even if you're not familiar with Reich's work. (But in that case, may I suggest this -- I have the whole of "Electric Counterpoint" on my iPod.)
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The UK's Guardian (via Common Dreams, a progressive news site) has an excellent article on why traditional left-wing change tactics are becoming less and less effective and what must be done. I'm a moderate conservative/libertarian myself, but as far as I'm concerned George Monbiot has nailed the underlying reason for the uneasy feeling I've had about progressive movements all my life. I'm fifteen years into my adult life, and in that time there has not been a single cause which affected enough people to unite them in opposition to the status quo and actually accomplish anything. The world which so many progressives seem to be living in, in which this is an effective lever for social change, is a world that simply does not exist anymore. (Found at Follow Me Here)
Update: Stephen Hart looks at this issue in a little more detail in this excerpt from his book Cultural Dilemmas of Progressive Politics: Styles of Engagement among Grassroots Activists. (Found at wood s lot)
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Sign that the Internet bubble may be re-inflating: Verisign buys the .tv top-level domain for $45 million, thus putting it under the same "friendly" management enjoyed by large numbers of .com, .org, and .net domains. (Found at dangerousmeta)
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Meme watch: last night's episode of Futurama had an All Your Base reference. At this point I believe we will be hearing snippets from that damn game for the next decade.
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Sunday 1/6/02 §
Saw Vanilla Sky last night. Warning: spoilers ahoy. The problem with this film is that it's a science fiction flick, but it doesn't really clue you in on that fact until the last half hour or so. Sci-fi films have a certain kind of grammar that allows audiences to calibrate their expectations of what is possible in the film's world, and this is entirely missing from Vanilla Sky. There are a few hints that the movie takes place in the future (for example, a free-standing hologram at a party, impossible with current technology) and there are anachronisms that clue you in that things are not as they seem (Cruise and Cruz walking down a street with improbably old and well-preserved cars parked along the side), but for the most part, the film has an immediate, real-world feel that anchors it firmly in the present day. Ham-handed references to a cryogenics firm crop up sufficiently frequently that you know the firm will tie into the story at some point, but you still don't expect half the things that happened in the film to be rendered utterly meaningless by the film's (overly-expositional, deus ex machina) conclusion because they occurred in a cryogenic dream. That's a cheat, and it makes the film feel hollow. It's a technically well-made film and the performances are uniformly strong and agreeable, but the ending ruins the whole film simply because it's not set up well enough to be believable. Director Cameron Crowe should stick to the kind of character-oriented films he does well.
I must confess I'll never forget Tom Cruise standing in a deserted office lobby screaming for tech support -- but I'm not proud of that.
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I've moved yesterday's rant about Mac OS X and Dvorak to a page of its own for posterity.
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Friday 1/4/02 §
Image to the right found at Design Defense Ministry.
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It was a dark and stormy month: Narrative of the events behind the scenes of National Novel Writing Month, which was November. (Found at BrainLog)
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Vegan techno musician Moby is bitten by an alley cat, neglects to have the wound taken care of, and has to go to the emergency room. Now he says he's still a vegan but will definitely eat the cat if he sees it again, or at least give it a very stern talking-to. (Found at MetaFilter)
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The good news: my iPod came today. The bad news: I don't have a Mac with FireWire here at the office that I can plug it into, just a tangerine iBook. I wish they had made it dual USB/FireWire. Yeah, it'd take forever with USB, but at least I wouldn't have to wait until I get home to see how it sounds. I can't believe they didn't at least include an MP3 of "Apple II Forever" or some other classic Apple DTS hit.
In other news, apparently my left earhole is bigger than my right, because the earbuds that come with the iPod can be inserted comfortably into my left ear but are too tight a fit to go into my right. I won't be dancing around like the guy in the iPod commercial; that's not very sexy when your right earbud keeps falling out. Not that a 300+ pound guy dancing around is very sexy to begin with.
Update: Both earbuds are staying in after I put the foam thingies on them. The foam thingies are harder to put on than they should be, though.
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Thursday 1/3/02 §
If, like me, you are just now moving to Mac OS X, you should be sure to get the following:
- FruitMenu, the new old-style Apple menu ($7)
- WindowShade X, windowshading for Mac OS X windows ($7)
- ASM, "classic" process menu and window layering (free)
- TinkerTool, controls hidden system settings (free)
- Watson, the logical companion for Sherlock ($29 and worth it)
- Drop Drawers, a drawer-based launcher and clip manager ($20)
- ShellShell, scriptable GUI front end to Unix (free)
- Zingg, opens any file in a compatible application (free)
What else do you recommend?
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The Numion Speed Test is an interesting browser performance test that attempts to simulate "real world" Internet conditions by loading images from a variety of commercial sites. (Found at Absolute Piffle)
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Apologies for the outage, folks. It's amazing what a missing quotation mark or two can do to a site.
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Wednesday 1/2/02 §
Joe Clark has a great piece on the difficulties inherent in designing an icon that means "accessible to the handicapped" -- and how Apple solved it. (Found at Xplane's Xblog
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College kids put their favorite MP3s in their computers' home directory, not realizing that these files are also automatically published on the Web. Here's how to find them. (Found at davezilla who found it at machaus)
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Want a better TV picture but don't want to spend a bunch of bucks for a high-definition (HDTV) setup? What you want is a non-interlaced (progressive-scan) but standard-definition TV. Most have de-interlacers for watching normal interlaced TV signals, but they really come into their own when hooked up to a source (such as a DVD player) which can output a progressive-scan signal. Although the resolution of a progressive-scan TV is identical to that of an interlaced picture, interlacing itself is the source of many picture-quality problems, including motion artifacts and dot-crawl, so getting rid of interlacing cleans up the picture more than you'd expect. For this reason, many videophiles refer to progressive standard-resolution pictures as "enhanced definition." Read more about it at Projector Central. (Found at CamWorld)
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Bored with the standard Hollywood fare? Looking to expand your knowledge of foreign and/or independent films? Strictly Film School is a fine place to start. Explore by director, genre, threme, or imagery. The level of pretense is acceptably low, although you will find the phrase "intensely personal" occasionally. I haven't checked out the entire site yet, but what I've looked at is solid enough to be worthy of recommending to others. (Found at Frytopia)
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I'm back! Actually, I arrived home last Thursday evening, but I decided before I left to use these past few days to recharge my batteries. When you fly across the country to spend five days in the middle of nowhere, you sometimes need a second vacation to recover from the first. My second vacation consisted mainly of sitting around watching movies and playing with Mac OS X, which I installed over the weekend -- and if anyone can tell me how to get X's Energy Saver function to power down the monitors like I've told it to, I would be much obliged. I did also find time to tidy up the homestead a bit; there's nothing like a visit to an obsessively tidy parental domicile to make your own personal clutter loom oppressively. I planned to go see The Lord of the Rings on two different days, but the beautiful thing about making plans to go do something is that I am totally free to disregard my plans and do something else instead, which is what I ended up doing. Happy 2002 to all of you; I'll be posting links periodically throughout the day.
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