This photo.net query is either pretty hilarious, a sad commentary on the age, or both. (link via markd on twitter) Of course, there are obvious parallels to this question in the audio-nerd world, where novice recordists often ask “which plugin/software will make my recordings sound like artist/producer X” — ignoring performance, technique, instrument, room, microphones, mic placement, and preamplification. For some reason, though, reading this recalled this classic Onion article for me.
Assume for the sake of argument that you regard email both as a necessity and as a regular source of distraction and interruption. You might set your mail client to check infrequently so that you can batch-process messages, but perhaps — due to force of habit or weakness of will — you find yourself clicking “Get Mail” more often than is healthy. How can we solve the distractions of compulsive clicking?
Consider patient-controlled analgesics (PCA), which hospitals use to allow patients to self-administer doses of intravenous painkillers by pressing a button. Of course, it would be dangerous to allow patients to take arbitrary doses of opioids, so the PCA system only dispenses drugs once in any given interval — fifteen minutes, for example. That is, at most one button press every fifteen minutes will actually have an effect — the rest will serve as placebos.
In patient-controlled email, the “Get Mail” or “Refresh” button will check with the server at most once every n minutes, no matter how often it is pressed. To make the user feel better, the standard “checking mail” messages and spinners could pop up and pop away as they typically do. This behavior will dramatically reduce the potential interruption caused by compulsive checking for new messages. (I suspect that some clients and servers actually implement this, although I have no proof.)
The concept is simple: you may believe that you know how often you need to check email, but the client knows better. Perhaps the act of refreshing your inbox is merely punctuation in the middle of some other, more involved tasks — a simple hiccup in your workflow that allows you to go on and do something else unfettered by the thought that there might be some message demanding your attention. With patient-controlled email, you wouldn’t have to fear the arrival of an actual message, causing a comma to turn into a sidebar. It would be simple to support this feature and its configuration as well:
The “check at most” option could default to “as requested” — meaning that the “Get Mail” button might deliver an overdose. In any case, patient-controlled email is compatible with automatic checking and — for some patterns of email use — enhances manual checking.
If you’re using the Safari 3 beta, there’s a cool feature that I don’t believe was available in previous versions: you can examine the properties and styling of DOM elements in a floating inspector panel:
I’m not trashing my copy of CSSEdit, but this is an extremely nice feature!
This consequence of the Engadget Apple rumor fiasco merely indicates to me that too many people are directly managing stock portfolios who have absolutely no business doing so. I mean, what kind of fool would you have to be to engage in a financial transaction based on rumor and conjecture on a website? A random website rumor about Apple is about as reliable as an index card on a urinal reading SONY WILL HAVE TO RECALL ALL CONSUMER PRODUCTS INCLUDING ORIGINAL WALKMAN. I AM TRUSTWORTHY..
I completely agree with the folks at bancomicsans.com, who claim to provide “the source for anti-comic sans propaganda.” Comic Sans is facile, ugly, and immediately casts a pallor over any work typeset with it: “this is the product of an unserious human.” Few fonts make me so angry.
Rolf sends a link to this gizmodo article about some company that calls itself “Amiga” and is introducing new computers next week. Sadly, instead of fondly remembering the machine that made computing fun (and, notably, introduced me to emacs in the mid-1980s), I was instead reminded of when I bought the “Amiga SDK” in 2000, which was a hosted, VM-based development environment that ran on Linux. (It also had some bizarre copy protection scheme that didn’t work on machines with more than one ethernet interface.) I don’t know if this soon-to-be-not-vaporware “Amiga” hardware uses the same SDK or not.
After browsing amiga.com, though, I was reminded of the original bearer of the Amiga name. In the heady days of the mid-to-late 1980s, I used many applications that were way ahead of their time: a real shell on a personal computer, the trackers, Deluxe Music, Deluxe Video, and a wide range of other tools that didn’t have competitors in the rest of the computer world for years.
Fittingly, the current Amiga is also a source for software that has no peers elsewhere, like 2006 Arena Football League Word Search. (I’d be willing to bet that isn’t licensed and would be running the risk of an instant cease-and-desist if it weren’t so far under the radar.)
I just installed the OS X 10.4.9 update yesterday. Since then, ssh has failed to forward my Kerberos and AFS tickets to the office. Saying this is a big pain is perhaps the understatement of the decade. (It’s thrilling to log in to my office computer and not have access rights to any of my files — it makes me feel like a secret ninja hacker, just like Matthew Broderick in Wargames!) As far as I can tell, this is the default behavior in the version of ssh included with 10.4.9 (bad idea, Apple). Fortunately, this simple solution worked for me:
I’ve been following Actiontastic for a while, installing time-limited betas and hoping that the final version would be released soon so that I could buy it and stop worrying about having a decent GTD system on my computer. Well, I can stop waiting, I guess:
Actiontastic will be free and open source. The free (as in “free beer”) part starts tonight. The code (as in “freely available source code”) will follow when the overhead of a new team won’t crush the project under its own weight. Those with experience getting to 1.0 will understand what I mean.
Crosby is also going to release the source code to actionatr, his upcoming productivity tool web service that syncs with Actiontastic. Nice.
Here are some typefaces you will like from the consistently impressive P22 foundry: the Pop Art set, Kells Round, and Franklin’s Caslon. (The Kells link is to veer.com because P22 does not make it easy to link to an individual face in a set.) I particularly like P22’s apparent m.o.: finding good lettering from art and digitizing it.
(I started window-shopping for type after reading this article about Gill Sans. You may find it interesting as well.)
I managed to end the nightmare of crappy rasterized fonts in PDFs after reading this thread. Here’s the short version:
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} \usepackage{lmodern}
Apparently, the lmodern package replaces CM-Super, which replaced something else, …, which transitively replaced something that was supposed to solve the crappy raster font problem years ago. I don’t know why I didn’t know about it until now.
If you’re a nerd, either you already read John Gruber’s daringfireball.net or you ought to. Gruber’s writing about popular technology is always intelligent, insightful, and lucid. A regular feature on the site is the “Jackass of the Week,” in which he dissects the ridiculous claims of some foolish technology pundit.
This week, the award went to Gundeep Hora of cooltechzone.com for claiming that Apple is likely to stop making OS X. Gundeep Hora is not as notorious as many of the previous JOTW recipients1, but I’m glad that Gruber pointed out Hora’s site, as it is pure comedy gold — it’s the webpage equivalent of that wild-eyed guy on the bus who’s always on a tirade about how Antarcticans caused the national debt.
“CoolTechZone” is a collection of ad-impression-friendly short articles consisting almost exclusively of risible, factually-challenged navel gazing.2 Consider his recent article “Why Microsoft Should Acquire Linux”. The title alone indicates what sort of argument we should expect from this fellow (although he claims in the article that he merely means that Microsoft should acquire all commercial Linux distributors). Hora’s tense, rhetoric, and ability to discriminate between the hypothetical and actual are deeply confused throughout; furthermore, he presents claims like the following without evidence:
Assuming Microsoft makes such a move, it will obviously concern the Linux community, and rightfully so. What would prevent Microsoft from killing Linux just so Windows could continue to be the dominant OS maker? Nothing, to be honest. I suppose the various Linux distributions that Microsoft may acquire would have to work on that with the software giant.
Well, to be honest, one supposes that they would. But Hora’s closing thought is brilliance in 10-point Arial:
With the amount of resources Microsoft has, and its potential threat to Linux, it only makes sense for the two competitors to merge and keep everyone satisfied.
QED, I suppose.
1 As of today, Google identifies only 438 pages linking to cooltechzone.com; a cursory scan indicates that the vast majority of these are located on cooltechzone.com. 2 Here’s an article template for Hora’s site: I’m making a mildly controversial or foolhardy assertion about something that is unlikely to happen. This might not actually be possible for reason X that I will now ignore. I think that person or persons Y would be happy/unhappy in this event, and person or persons Z would be unhappy/happy. Calm down, person Y/Z! Time to wrap things up. The end.
I’m currently listening to Express from the album “The Roots Of Dubstep” by Bbbb
Sorry if this is obvious: I had wanted to try this for a while, but wasn’t sure it would work. It does, so I’m writing about it.
I was running out of disk space on my notebook, with often-hilarious consequences. (It should not be surprising how poorly most modern operating systems deal with having absolutely no free space and needing to page.) The most obvious advice OmniDiskSweeper gave me was hard to take: well over a third of my disk was devoted to music and photos. I chose to ignore this advice and the law of diminishing returns for as long as possible, deleting other random files, archiving infrequently-used documents, and so on, but I grew tired of having to decide what to trash before running some experiments.
I rejected as “too nerdy,” “too inconvenient,” or “too expensive” the options of storing my music on a networked file system (WebDAV, AFS, or Samba were all contenders); setting up a DAAP server and “sharing” from home (probably over an ssh tunnel); using Amazon’s S3 service as paid-for network storage; or buying a new internal notebook drive. Instead, I took the plunge and moved my iTunes Library to an external drive. I don’t haul the drive around, I just keep a selection of music on my iPod. It works pretty well and was reasonably easy; I am documenting the steps I took because there are a few things that may save you some time if you want to do the same.
First, I plugged in my iPod and set it to “manually manage songs and playlists.” This is important, since I want to be able to plug my iPod in to charge it even when the external drive is not available, and I don’t want some overzealous syncing to erase my music. I ejected the iPod.
Then, I needed to copy the music to the external drive. This was easy: I just changed the library location in the iTunes preferences to point to a folder on the external drive and selected “consolidate library.” (“Consolidating” your library moves all music files to the library folder specified in your preferences.) Now I had two copies of my iTunes library: one on my notebook drive, and one on the external drive.
Because I have some paid-for downloads (and a bunch of ripped personal CDs that would be a massive pain to re-rip), I made another backup to a different disk before I wiped out the copy on my notebook.
It works pretty well, actually. If you haven’t tried this yourself, you may be pleased to learn that it’s possible to use the iPod as a music source from within iTunes — so if you’re at a desk most of the day, you can leave the iPod docked and just listen to its music on iTunes. There are only a couple of drawbacks:
Having to manually manage playlists is sort of a pain. (related: Having to remember to eject the iPod is sort of a pain.)
My iPod is not nearly large enough to hold all of my music. (It doesn’t do photos, so I don’t have to worry about those.) This is not a huge problem, but it does mean that I’ll need to devise some strategy so that I don’t listen to the same 13gb of music exclusively for the rest of my life.
As far as I can tell, it’s not possible to burn CDs directly from the iPod in iTunes. This means that I will be less likely to burn throwaway CDs to play in the car. This is probably not a big deal.
To actually sync my iPod, I need to daisy-chain it off of the external drive.
All told, I think these are reasonable tradeoffs.
I’m currently listening to Backward from the album “Memories Of The Future” by Kode 9 and The Spaceape
Some change at my web host has caused all of my redirection links (i.e. those http://willbenton.com/go/to ones) to cease working. I’m going to try and fix it soon. You may have noticed that I changed the theme a bit — now, you can see recent comments on the right. So if you ever experience a shortage of tirades from baton-twirlers with poor reading comprehension or bartering offers from Japanese-whisky enthusiasts with poorer reading comprehension, you’re in luck. (Note that I am referring to proponents of Japanese whisky, not to Japanese proponents of whisky; also note that, as of today, this site is the #3 Google hit for “Nikka whisky.”)
The “latest photos” are temporarily gone while I rework my photolog to use Gallery. The old photolog will remain accessible at photo-classic.willbenton.com. Of course, since the majority of my recent exposures are strictly of WT, you can see the latest kid pictures on my flickr photostream.
Cool Mac OS X discovery of the day: the pbcopy and pbpaste shell commands, which provide shell-script access to the system-wide pasteboard (aka “clipboard”).
Tom at Music Thing links to this absurdly awesome Kraftwerk video from 1975. (1975!) I like Kraftwerk a great deal; however, I am reminded that electronic music is not only an expensive hobby but an extremely dorky one. (Wait for the “lapel” discussion from the narrator.)
Wow. That’s really all I can say.
Related: buy “Possessed,” in which the Balanescu Quartet performs string-quartet arrangements of Kraftwerk songs. It’s not quite the Kronos Quartet doing “Purple Haze” — it’s better.
I’m currently listening to Trans Europe Express from the album “Minimum-Maximum” by Kraftwerk
This post from The Daily WTF definitely reminds me of some abject coding horror I witnessed when doing some maintenance programming on a consulting gig once. The “C/C++ tips” alone is worth the price of admission, but the fact that the programmer used strcpy instead of strncpy is icing on a terrible, terrible cake.
