Setting brushfires
"It does not take a majority to prevail ... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men." --Samuel Adams
links for 2010-01-07
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Tuned by the Smith & Wesson Performance Center, aimed at the competition market, but certainly applicable for personal defense. Droolworthy.
Yep, too late.
"[A] rigid economy of the public contributions and absolute interdiction of all useless expenses will go far towards keeping the government honest and unoppressive." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to Marquis de Lafayette, 1823
Too late?
"The multiplication of public offices, increase of expense beyond income, growth and entailment of a public debt, are indications soliciting the employment of the pruning knife." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to Spencer Roane, 1821
ATPM 16.01
The January issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure. The staff of ATPM is pleased to note with this issue we are entering our 16th year of publication! Mark kicks off the new year having some fun with a GPS iPhone app, comparing it to its hardware-based brethren and how they work in the United Kingdom. He then notes some consternation with the ability of a XP-based Dell to not multi-task while his equivalently-equipped Mac strolls along chewing bubble gum. Sylvester is kind enough to take us through building our own additions to the Services Menu. What's that? You've never heard of the Services Menu? Crikey. Sylvester's certainly got his work cut out for him then... ATPM friend Delwin Finch loves macro photography, and was kind enough to share some shots of water drops under low light conditions in this month's desktop pictures section. At Wieser Graphics, they're feeling the economic crunch. Todd runs headlong into the digital vs analog wall, but proves adept at translating marketing speak for his boss.His greatest achievement, however, may be...well. You'll see. If you haven't made a New Year's resolution yet, but would like to, Linus is ready with some suggestions. Ed takes a look at a device I'm beginning to pine after: the Harmony 510 Universal Remote. Why, pray tell, might a publication dedicated to things Mac review such an item? Because Ed's using it with an Apple TV, that's why. And a Sony DVD player. And a Dish Network DVR/receiver. And an Onkyo 5.1 AV unit. And...well, you get the picture. Or maybe just Ed does... Matthew drops his nets in the Craigslist ocean using Marketplace. It has a few limitations, sure, and some might find its price (there is a fully-featured trial period) off-putting. However, I recently used Marketplace to help my sister locate a used MacBook, and it was pure pleasure compared to searching Craigslist via its web site. Linus claims he used Ortelius to make a map for his son, who wanted to use his green and tan plastic army soldiers in a game of world domination. But we really know who was playing with the green and tan plastic army soldiers, don't we? Don't we, Linus? Chris gives Uniea's U-Motion, a workout sleeve for the iPhone, a, well, workout. Then he goes after the U-Motion's more formal sibling, the U-Suit Folio Premium. As always, About This Particular Macintosh is available in a variety of formats for your enjoyment: + Offline Webzine + Print-optimized PDF + Screen-optimized PDF Thanks for reading ATPM!
links for 2009-12-31
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For future reference, if, once the missus is on a Mac, we find we need this as a family.
links for 2009-12-29
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This is the awesome.
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The title says it all.
Sinking gradually
"[W]hen the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, -- who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually, by totally disusing and neglecting the militia." --George Mason, speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1788
A dangerous fairy tale
The idea that anti-Americanism exists or increased just because of Bush springs from an immature, self-centered view of the universe and international politics. We saw this in the weeks after 9/11 from the "Why do they hate us" crowd that attempted to blame the victim for the terrorism. It's safer to think that we control everything in the world, and that therefore we have the power to change anything in the world. That's nothing more than a fairy tale, and a dangerous one when taken seriously.
links for 2009-12-23
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Handy list of alternatives to Evite.com. You're still not using Evite, are you?
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Useful information if you don't receive a new HDTV for Christmas, but still want one for the Super Bowl.
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For Newton users past and present, Grant Hutchison has created a desktop wallpaper for our Macs and PCs.
On the narrow path
I remind him to watch the cars, to look the drivers in the eye and make sure they see him. His brothers and I sit in the minivan while he goes to the curb and waits for a chance to walk out to the girl. Finally a car stops to let him pass. The girl’s face is turned down; she sees nothing but the ground. I watch my son’s narrow shoulders as he crosses the drive, and I am praying that no harm will come to him, not now or ever, that someone who is this loving will be spared the pain of the world, which is when I remember that it is Christmas, the time when we celebrate precisely the opposite, the coming of pure love to suffer for all we who sit with faces turned down, not even knowing what to ask for, knowing only in our crusted-over hearts that anything will help.
"Let your gun ... be your constant companion"
"A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be your constant companion of your walks." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, 1785
links for 2009-12-13
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The most honest fortune cookie fortune ever.
The sheer arrogance
Robert Tracinski, RealClearPolitics:
When you understand what this bill does, you can see why the Democrats would be happy to compromise and drop the public option-for now. This bill so comprehensively wrecks private health insurance that pretty soon a "public option" will seem like the only alternative, and they will already have put into place one of the new taxes needed to pay for it. If the left's goal is to impose socialized medicine in America, this bill does it in the most callous and destructive way possible. It smashes private health care-then leaves us stranded in the rubble, at which point we will be expected to come crawling back to the same people who caused the disaster and ask them to save us.
That is the final and perhaps most compelling reason to kill this bill: the sheer arrogance of the whole enterprise. It is the arrogance of stampeding an unwilling public toward a monstrous 2,000-page piece of legislation while admitting that it still has huge problems, but promising that it will all somehow be fixed later on. It's the arrogance of selling us a bill that expands government spending by hundreds of billions of dollars while telling us that it will reduce the deficit. It is the sheer unmitigated gall of appointing a bureaucrat to run a government-controlled insurance market that takes away all of our health choices-and then calling this bureaucrat the Health Choices Commissioner.
That's the kind of government arrogance that has to be smacked down hard, and that alone is reason to demand that your senator reject this vicious bill in its entirety.
links for 2009-12-09
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"Prayer--which is simply talking with God--is considered a critical aspect of faith. One prophet blurted, 'Far be it from me that I should sin against the LORD by failing to pray for you' (1 Sam. 12:23 (TNIV)). Prayer is not some kind of pious decoration; it is the breath of the human soul. Unfortunately, some of us don't breathe as often as we should--and it shows."
A wise and frugal government
"[A] wise and frugal government ... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government." --Thomas Jefferson Oh well...
links for 2009-12-08
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"The Internet may be a worldwide superhighway, but it's all to easy to shut it down. Governments aiming to squelch free speech in don't even have to work hard to do so: It's all too easy to restrict the Internet and keep their people in the dark.
"The practice is all too too easy, and all too common."
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"Freegate is an anti-censorship software for secure and fast Internet access. It was developed and maintained by Dynamic Internet Technology Inc. (DIT), a pioneer in censorship-circumvention operation."