« September 2003 | Main | November 2003 »
October 31, 2003
Nice hidden Panther feature
According to this you can share image capture devices like scanners and cameras with image capture in Panther. I just tried it myself, and although my iSight doesn't show up as a capture device (which would make it a pretty cool webcam), my mounted compact flash card from my digital camera does. I poked a hole in my firewall and just showed a few friends some photos I just took, but haven't downloaded yet to my mac.
Very cool hidden feature.
Posted by 12:34 PM | TrackBack
October 30, 2003
Everyone's got priorities
On this Slashdot post about the Microsoft temp that was fired, I noticed what could be the best off-the-wall slashdot comment ever:
...I can walk into a McDonalds (not that I would - I've been boycotting them since they started making pizzas) with a group of friends, order a meal, and start snapping pictures of our little party.
Some people boycott McDonalds for their treatment of workers, mishandling of food, or what they've done to the livestock industry.
Then there are others that just hate pizza so much they'll never set foot in a restaurant ever again.
Posted by 01:13 AM | TrackBack
October 29, 2003
Onto the to-do list
Postfix Enabler is a quick GUI for turning your mac's local SMTP server on and sending mail from it.
Posted by 12:13 PM | TrackBack
October 28, 2003
Minor site updates
I tossed the mobile phone photos along the right sidebar of this site and instead am feeding the most recent post to my ten years project, with an excerpt (all my photo taking energy is being used up there, so nothing extra left over for random mophos). I also added a feed from the Creative Commons blog.
As always, this site is an experiment in personal publishing and I may be adding more stuff and taking other stuff away soon, we'll see.
Posted by 11:34 AM | TrackBack
Panther
It seems like every time Apple releases a minor update, the mac lovers from all over exaggerate their upgrades into gifts from god that made their computers faster, their bodies sexier, and their lives richer.
Not being a huge Apple fanboy myself, I just want the thing to work, to come close to the speed of my PC, and to be more stable. It looks like Panther is the first release that lived up to the hype, for me at least. My powerbook seems downright peppy and I haven't seen a swirling beachball since I upgraded. Mail and iChat finally seem stable and Mail isn't going unresponsive when I have more than one window open. I finally see what everyone was raving about with Expose, having a quick keyboard shortcut to get to other windows on a crowded monitor is a lifesaver.
I haven't dived in much deeper than that, but so far I'm very happy with the $130 package.
Posted by 09:20 AM | TrackBack
October 25, 2003
Storytime with Sedaris
I owe a million thanks to John for getting me tickets to David Sedaris. I've read a book of his a few years ago and read one or two of his articles in Esquire, but earlier this year I got a copy of his book on CD that he read and it was about a million times better than the printed word (which granted, is already pretty funny, but his delivery and timing is everything). It was the first time I've heard him live and I was crying with laughter at several points in the evening. There was a story about a morgue (to be a chapter in his next book), a story about halloween (to be in next week's Esquire), and a story about Santa. He's on a 30 city tour, and I hear he's going to be down in Stanford next week, so catch him if you can.
Posted by 10:34 AM | TrackBack
October 23, 2003
The Daily Show
Two odd things about The Daily Show:
- On last night's show, Jon Stewart made an off-the-cuff joke about the first story of the night "which you can read about on my blog." before launching into the full story. The blog joke didn't get too many laughs though (I was thinking to myself do people even know what he's making fun of?).
- perhaps related, but author and blogger Neal Pollack is going to be on tonight's show
Posted by 12:19 PM | TrackBack
Down and Out in Dartmouth
This overview of Darthmouth College's wireless setup and how people use it sound like something out of a Cory Doctorow future.
Posted by 10:50 AM | TrackBack
Amazon whole book searches
Thanks to Amazon's new search-inside-books feature, you can quickly see all the books that mention "blog" in them. Scroll past the blog books and start digging deeper. There are self-help books, marketing books, programming books, and grammar books mentioning the concept in all sorts of ways. Fascinating stuff.
Posted by 10:08 AM | TrackBack
October 22, 2003
ALA is up
The new A List Apart is back online. I've missed it since it's been dormant, using it fairly often during the last redesign project (mostly for the CSS lists article).
The new issue features Doug's article on CSS tabs, and it's absolutely terrific. Doug's got an amazing way of coming up with solutions to problems no one else can crack, and his solutions are really clever. I'd say he's one of the few people doing web design that can truly think outside of the box, but that phrase is so cliched as to be meaningless so I won't say it. Anyway, Doug never ceases to amaze me with the things he can come up with.
That all said, there were a few visual aspects of the new ALA site I feel could be improved. The front page feels a bit chaotic to me, with all that blazing red everywhere. Above the fold, I'd guess there are 25 links in four different sizes and different type treatments, but when I first looked at the site all I saw was red links everywhere and it was hard to know where to focus. The layout kind of reminds me of the excellent Nedward blog, which does a great job of visually separating content into "the important stuff on the left and the other stuff on the right" through the use of color in backgrounds and graphics. The other problem I have is the separation between articles on the front page and the archives. Scrolling through this list of CSS stories, it's hard to tell where one ends and another begins. I would guess whitespace would go a long way here. Adding 30-50px above each title would pad the page out and require more scrolling, but each article would be easily found and retreived from the growing lists. An alternative would be subtle separators of some sort, either CSS-enhanced horizontal rules or graphics. And lastly, the article widths feel about half as wide as they used to be. I don't know if they are really narrower or it's a bigger font, but the line-length feels abrupt compared to normal comfortable reading on other sites. I don't want to sound ungrateful, it's an amazing developer and designer resource, but the collaborative nature of the articles naturally brings out the design and developer critic in me.
Congrats on all the work Zeldman, et al. had to do to bring it back from the dead!
Posted by 02:04 AM | TrackBack
Free Culture!
I helped put together the new Creative Commons CD featuring all sorts of great licensed music, and it's all available for download.
Now that the pool of CC-licensed music has grown, we had a great deal of choices and as a result there are all sorts of songs in the mix. I've been listening to these songs for months and it's hard to pick favorites, they've all got some strengths. Don't miss the bonus remixes too, the creativity there was amazing.
Posted by 01:39 AM | TrackBack
October 21, 2003
The cost of consumer privacy
I recently signed up for phone service, this time with Verizon/GTE, and like my PacBell line in the bay area, they wanted to charge me for not listing my phone number in all their directories. I could argue that consumer privacy isn't a special privilege and that the whole idea is preposterous that I need to pay them not to sell my name, number, and address to anyone that wants it, but PacBell/SBC charged a negligible 26 cents a month. I wonder if such a low charge even recoups the accounting costs, but it seemed like such a ridiculous amount I paid it without protest. Verizon, however, charges five times as much at $1.25 a month. Fifteen bucks a year to maintain my own privacy is no longer a negligible amount.
Years ago, phone companies developed business models where they would sell space in white and yellow pages, and eventually the complete listings to telemarketers and other companies. If I don't want to take part, I have to pay to make up the difference they could be making by selling my info. I can't think of any other business where this is acceptable, but it seems pretty messed up.
Posted by 12:05 PM | TrackBack
Crap. Goodbye Elliot.
Elliot Smith killed himself today. I downloaded a few songs of his back in the Napster heyday and ended up buying a few CDs. I had the opportunity to see him live a few times in SF, but never went.
Crap, I really liked his stuff.
It's a little weird, in a life-imitates-art sort of way, to realize his song was used in a suicide scene (in The Royal Tennenbaums), and now he's gone and done that himself.
Posted by 11:28 AM | TrackBack
October 19, 2003
The Blög Böökcäse
This is dangerous (to my bank account): IKEA has finally embraced the web. You can order some stuff online and they have their entire catalog online, either as a painful flash interface, or you can just download the whole thing as a PDF.
After spending weeks browsing through expensive modern furnishing and top o' the line interior design catalogs, I'm impressed at how cheap IKEA remains and how closely they pay tribute/copy classic designs (pdf of a room that looks vaguely Eames-ish or Danish 1950s). I guess it'll always be considered semi-disposable swedish furniture, but many of their pieces are looking lovlier than ever.
That reminds me: I used to joke about "The IKEA rule." If you were moving from one region of the country that had a local IKEA to another that also had a nearby store, you had to destory or give away all your IKEA products, then repurchase at the new location, 'cause all that fiberboard ain't making the trip intact. There was also a point in my life when I longed for IKEA products that used startch-based materials instead of wood. That way, when you wanted to move and get rid of your stuff, you'd simply submerge them in water until they dissolved. No muss, no fuss.
Posted by 12:39 PM | TrackBack
October 17, 2003
Nerdvana
Thanks to Michael Heilemann's detailed tutorial and some spring cleaning of my desktop files (half an hour ago, there were about 300 files on my desktop, now all organized into directories), my workstation PC looks like this (with windows up, everything minimized -- both ~200kb jpegs), and I'm extremely pleased with the look and improved workflow. I share my desk with a powerbook I customized to behave more like windows, and now I can get both desktops to behave almost exactly the same.
Posted by 02:12 AM | TrackBack
October 16, 2003
Me gusto del mundo
Every 18 months or so I remember a site called Adventures in Advertising by Tom DelMundo. And like a Skinner Box rat, I check every archive to catch up where I last left off. Here's one of the many good ones.
Posted by 11:09 AM | TrackBack
October 15, 2003
Go!
Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs
update: Noooooooo!
second update: fer chrissakes!
Posted by 07:15 AM | TrackBack
October 14, 2003
It's like the Jetsons. Finally.
The company LG appliances has a couple things that should have been invented and perfected long ago: the combo washer/dryer and the microwave/toaster. Progress!
Posted by 12:22 PM | TrackBack
Carrying on the family tradition of ruining games in a single move
Hey, I didn't know Bill Buckner moved to Chicago and had a son!
Posted by 09:22 AM | TrackBack
October 13, 2003
Thoughtcrime!
I've been a happy customer of the iTunes Music Store, but in order to let my TiVo stream music through my home theater system, and in order to hear music on my MP3-playing car stereo system, I have to first burn everything I buy to a blank CD, then import them as MP3 files. It's a pain and makes a lot of 10 cent coasters I have no other use for.
It seems like there should be a way, or a hack, out there to burn the AAC songs to a virtual CD blank on the filesystem, then rip the tracks off that. Still tedious, at least it would remove the need to waste physical media converting to a more widely supported music format.
If anyone knows of a way, email me and I'll keep it to myself. It's probably a borderline DMCA violation for me to even think these thoughts, but I bought the music legally and I want to use it in my entertainment devices, not in P2P clients.
update: looks like there is more than one way to skin a cat.
Posted by 01:50 AM | TrackBack
October 10, 2003
3,649 to go...
I removed the "daily" photo thing that was on this site, because I was being pretty lazy and only updating once a month as of late. But instead of simply stopping that feature, I chose to do something a bit more ambitious.
I like taking photos on a regular basis. I get a chance to practice and improve my technique and I also get the chance to capture memories in a format I can easily archive.
As I've gotten older, I've noticed that time seems to move faster. The rate of change of those around me makes my head spin. Children seem to double in size between the times I see them.
Today I turn 31 years old, and to help me document the next ten years I've started a new site for daily photographs, at: http://tenyearsofmylife.com/.
From 31 to 41 I'm sure there will be a lot of interesting things coming up along the way. I'm going to shoot for one shot per day, but I'm not sure how many will be taken on the same day. I may eek out a dozen photos shot on one day over time, or simply try and pick the best shots from the previous few weeks of photos to showcase. I'll see how it goes.
Posted by 12:05 PM | TrackBack
Back when MTV still played music
I'm buying all three of these DVDs the day they come out. The Gondry clip is unbelievable.
Posted by 11:56 AM | TrackBack
The Cinderella series
Everyone's pulling for Sox vs. Cubs in the World Series, right? I don't even follow baseball that much and I can't wait to watch it if they both win their league series. The only thing that could make it a better match-up would be if somehow the Indians could also be battling for the pennant in some freakish round-robin thing.
Posted by 11:49 AM | TrackBack
On being bought
After seeing this post (to answer that post directly, I would have been happy with $20 a month, since that's what I hoped for) and this other one about Google ads being the equivalent of a chilling effect bought and paid for, I think both authors are missing a vital point in what I wrote last week.
The bottom line for all this discussion is simple: google ads aren't designed for typical blogs.
Maybe I made the mistake of calling my article "blogging for dollars" since it's not exactly blogging in the classic sense. I don't post about the cheese sandwich I ate earlier, I don't post about politics, and the site isn't a mirror reflection of me. I'm not the least bit worried about Google's terms of service because I'm not blogging my thoughts on advertising systems at the site. It's totally focused on gadget freakdom and not at all a personal site.
People worried about carrying Google ads on their personal site and wondering if they would be silenced over it should worry more about how pointless of an endeavor the ads will be. Unless you're focusing on a specific thing, they're not going to pan out at all. If your blog is about anything and everything, you shouldn't run the ads and you won't have to worry about any terms of service agreements.
The ads only work on focused sites like my pvr blog, news about WiFi, news about gadgets, news about motorcycles, and the latest mac software news. Overall, those sites barely resemble a standard weblog, and don't have much in common aside from the formatting.
So on the subject of advertising money killing the independent free-form nature of blogging, I say it's much ado about nothing.
Posted by 10:07 AM | TrackBack
October 08, 2003
Weird find
I have no idea why these work, but they do:
http://www.amazon.com/weblog
http://www.amazon.com/bob
Posted by 02:23 AM | TrackBack
October 07, 2003
Shannon on the new porn/guitar ads
She's a porn star, for crying out loud - she's good with fingers AND can take direction. And seriously - get that girl a pick. Porn stars are also good with props. She can handle a pick.
Posted by 12:20 PM | TrackBack
October 06, 2003
World Cup
Though the US lost, tonight's World Cup game was a great one to watch (photos from my seat: 1, 2, 3). The packed house was on the edge of its seat the entire time, watching as the US team put together play after play attacking the German goal, but coming up short in the end. I knew the game would be a tough one to win for the US after watching Germany rule its previous matches. They controlled the mid-field, won most balls in the air, and had an amazing goalie.
The Canada-Sweden game that followed was also a nail-biter, but Sweden controlled the second half and put a couple in late to get a well-deserved win. I'm looking forward to both the final match (Germany will likely kill Sweden), and the 3rd place game between the US and Canada (I'm hoping for a US win, I think we can pull it out).
It's a bummer the US team lost, but it was a great night of soccer. I'm bummed to hear the WUSA doesn't look like it will be playing in 2004, I would have loved to drive up to Seattle to see Mia Hamm and Abby Wambach play.
Posted by 12:02 PM | TrackBack
Brad Sucks (not in the least)
A couple months ago I picked up the Brad Sucks CD based on Scott's recommendation, before I heard a single note.
It sat around for a few weeks until one day I decided to rip the disc into iTunes and toss it into the random work mix. It spun for a week and it wasn't until I looked for the songs today that I realized what I've been enjoying all week. I have a few John Vanderslice and Folk Implosion albums in my library and I assumed the songs I heard and liked were one of those bands, but it was all Brad. "Making Me Nervous" is my current favorite song on earth. It sounds like the best of Folk Implosion and the rest of the Brad Sucks disc is really good too.
It's well worth the five bucks, and once again I'm amazed at the full sound a record-at-home musician can create. The days of multi-million dollar recording studios and thousands of dollars per hour rental fees are dead. Now it's just a cheap PC, a little equipment, a little software, and some expertise to make music.
Posted by 09:21 AM | TrackBack
October 05, 2003
Life ain't nuthin' but blogs and money
So I finally wrote up my experiences with Google's Adsense system and my PVRblog. I'm hoping it helps people looking to commercialize weblogs do a better job (also, the first thing I should do is hire an editor, it's a long one).
Posted by 12:01 PM | TrackBack
October 04, 2003
Finally uploaded
I've been fairly quiet here for the past couple months due to a million projects at work, one of which I finally got to finish tonight. We revamped the Creative Commons website, and although it largely looks the same, there are some new sections, a reorganization, and complete recoding from the ground up, using the latest CSS tricks.
The logo is now using this image replacement trick to hide the logo from text browsers. I removed the javascript rollovers and script used in the navigation on every page, and instead replaced it with the CSS rollover technique, which borrowed heavily from the techniques used on the Lee Jeans site. It's a really cool trick, each nav bar item is actually a larger image that shows both states, with CSS to move and hide the parts that don't need to show. As these technologies and tricks are constantly evolving, Simplebits has a great tutorial on doing a three-stage rollover all with CSS (I'll have to copy that and reduce the number of images and lines of CSS further). Before I was doing navigation and subnavigation using nested div elements, but now everything is a nicely organized, unordered list styled with CSS.
The end result are pages that look exactly the same as before, but the code is about 20% tighter (the site was already valid XHTML/CSS before), pages will be easily indexed by search engines, and the content will be more accessible to all. Take a look at the about page, then turn off styles in your browser and view source to see what all the work was for. Now, if I could only get IE 5 on the mac to allow for float:right to work when applied to a form element, I could get rid of the last table in the header, but even with that, the site is valid XHTML, it's simpler to update, and carries both rich semantics and increased accessibility.
But don't just take my HTML programmer word for it, there really is a business case to be made for coding websites like this.
Posted by 12:58 PM | TrackBack
Upcoming.org Events
As I mentioned before, I would eventually automate my upcoming events listing using mt-rssfeed. Thanks to this tutorial, about five minutes after I started tinkering I was done adding it to the sidebar of this site. I love it when stuff just works like that.
Posted by 01:44 AM | TrackBack
October 03, 2003
Gettin' the Led out
I crapped on School of Rock when I saw the first trailer for it, but lately I've heard one postive review after another. Apparently it could have been the crappy film everyone's seen a thousand times before, but Linklater pulled it out and let Jack Black run with it.
I just got back from seeing it, and although there were one or two cheesy parts that felt like every 80s movie ending I'd ever seen, the rest of the film was pure Tenacious D rocking with Jack Black (sadly, Kyle Gass was nowhere to be found). Basically it was like all of JB's parts from High Fidelity mixed in with a bunch of kids and a cheesy plot, but somehow it all worked and was quite entertaining.
Posted by 11:36 AM | TrackBack
practical jokes powered by wishlist hacking
I was happy to read that Meg got her gift today, and with some forward planning, Mark even got photos of the actual event (I told him I would give him my first born if he'd take photos on the sly). I think the photos capture it well:
- Oh boy, free amazon stuff!
- From Matt! With a funny note attached, I wonder what it is...
- What the hell is this piece of crap? Is this some sort of joke?
Looks like it went off perfectly.
So here's the backstory on the joke. When Meg lived in SF, I heard first-hand all about the wonders of Seabiscuit for years. Eventually when I finally saw a Seabiscuit special, I was totally let down by the hype. I was convinced he was the greatest horse that ever lived, a Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan of racing, but it turns out he won a couple big events but otherwise just made for a good underdog story at a key point in this nation's history. We used to argue about the details of the story, but suffice it to say she loved the Seabiscuit and hated the Admiral.
Anyway, when I saw Meg dissin' the War Admiral the other day, I decided to see if an old Amazon bug was still around, the one that lets you send stuff not on a wishlist to people's wishlist address. Amazon closed up all the holes except one, and I 2nd-day-aired the toy along with a note that said "HA HA! War Admiral RULES!" I really wanted to see the punchline to the joke, when she would get the box from amazon, would think it is Seabiscuit, then realize it's her nemesis. Judging from the photos, I call this joke a rousing success.
Now, a tutorial on how to do it:
How to send something not on someone's wishlist to that someone
I really hope Amazon doesn't close this hole because I actually use it for good, not evil, and not usually for jokes. I often buy someone something extra to go along with their wishlist item, so if they wanted a simpsons figure, I often use this hack to buy them another one that goes with it.
So go to someone's wishlist page, then add something from their list to your cart by hitting the buy button. Then when you are directed to the quasi-checkout/upselling page, you must scroll down all the way to the bottom to the button that says "Continue Shopping" in their list. Now, you have their address stored, and can go hog-wild ordering stuff. Just click anything in the top nav or run a search to get them something else. Add that something else to your cart then proceed to checkout.
On the address page, pick their wishlist address. Next write a gift note on the thing you really want to give them, if you want. Click continue. On the Shipping Options page, there's a list of the goods, with a button that says "change quantities or delete". Click that, and then click the delete button for the thing originally on their wishlist. You should be able to complete checkout, and they'll get something not on their list.
Again, use this for good, not evil. It's a fun little hack and I sincerely hope Amazon lets it stick around, I know friends have enjoyed getting extra gifts they didn't ask for, and Meg even said it was a funny joke.
Posted by 05:44 AM | TrackBack
My precious numb ass
Some exclusive superfan screenings of the LoTR trilogy are being planned. Check out the Dec. 16 screening of both extended films plus the new film as a chaser. What's that, like 12 hours of film in a single sitting?
I can only imagine that with my adult diapers on, I could tell other patrons trying to leave my row for the bathroom: "you shall not pass!"
(thanks lance for the heads-up)