links for 2007-05-17
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I suppose I'm a neo-Luddite, because I find very few web apps worth using full time, mostly because they require you to be connected to the Internet, which isn't always a possibility.
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Khoi Vinh's proof of concept for a focused writing tool.
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QI Software's Mac application based on Blockwriter, Khoi Vinh's proof of concept.
links for 2007-05-16
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If you play around with a lot of beta software, this may be an easier way for you to contact developers with crash logs, etc.
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"Pibb combines the best features of instant messenger, chat, email, and bulletin boards." No software to install, works in your web browser. OpenID is required for registration.
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Robert Scoble has a 50-plus-minute interview with Adobe's John Nack on the company's latest edition of its flagship application.
Dear American Soldier in Iraq
Dear American Soldier in Iraq:
There are a few things you should know about how tens of millions of us back home feel about you and the fight you are waging. These things need to be said...
What has happened is that many Americans, for all sorts of reasons--some out of simple fatigue, some because they do not believe that war solves anything, some out of deep loathing for the present administration--do not believe that what you are doing is worth doing. You know that what you are doing is worth continuing...
You know that you are fighting the most vicious and primitive ideology in the world today. It is the belief that one's God wants his followers to maim, torture and murder in order to spread a system of laws that sends societies back to a moral and intellectual state that is pre-civilization. You know that the war you wage against these people and their totalitarian ideology is also necessary because a society unwilling to fight for its values does not have values worth sustaining...
We see you as the best and brightest of our society. Even The New York Times, one of the mainstream media publications that do not understand the epic battle you are waging, acknowledged in an article by one of its embedded correspondents that few Americans of your age can come close to you in maturity, wisdom or leadership abilities. It is unfortunate that the battle for moral clarity and moral courage in America is as divisive as the battle for freedom is in Iraq. But that is the nature of the world we live in. And it has ever been so...
You probably knew all this. But you need to hear it anyway.
That, and thank you. Thank you very much.
On innovation
"I wish developing great products was as easy as writing a check. If so, then Microsoft would have great products." --Steve Jobs, Apple, Inc. shareholders meeting, 2007
I've been all a-Twitter lately
Yeah, I know I've been pretty quiet on ye olde blog the past week. But I haven't been exactly quiet in general. It's just that I've been yakking it up, 140 characters at a time, over on Twitter. So in case you ever notice a lack of posting here, you may want to take a peek over there. Just for, you know, future reference. Sign up on Twitter yourself, and feel free to add me as a friend.
Happy to have been wrong
I am pleased to report that my fears yesterday were reassuringly calmed today, as both the battery grip and flash were delivered. Both have been attached to the camera and tested successfully. Hurray!
For the waffle-loving geek who has everything
Ladies and gentlemen, do you ever find yourself worrying over what to buy the geek in your life for their birthday, or your anniversary, or Christmas? Wonder no more. Just pick up the waffle iron that makes keyboard waffles. Oh, yes, you read that right. Keyboard waffles. [Via Lee via IM.]
I wonder if I should take bets
So the new flash and battery grip I ordered are both sitting in Mesquite tonight. For those of you unaware of Dallas metroplex geography, the center of Mesquite is roughly 35 miles from the center of the little burb I call home. I could drive over there in about 45 minutes. Now, the last time I was expecting something of this magnitude--the camera for which these two items have been purchased--the item in question also spent a night in Mesquite. Then proceeded 121 miles south to Waco before then returning 121 miles to be delivered to me. This couldn't possibly happen again, could it? Well, according to the Amazon status tracker, estimated delivery date is the 8th. Yes. The 8th.
ATPM 13.05
The May issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure. April showers certainly brought May flowers for Apple, notably the kind that grow from the branches of the money tree. Rob provides a rundown of Apple's latest financials in this month's Welcome. Wes has the blogosphere round-up on the latest digital rights hubbub, set off by the open letter by Steve Jobs to end DRM on music. When you're already using the coolest computing system in the world, where do you go next? If you're Mark, you start letting a robot clean your carpets. Lee takes us through Photoshop's bag of tricks concerning color, hues, saturation, gradients, and all sorts of other goodies you can tweak your photos with. In closing out her series on web accessibility, Miraz looks at the capabilities of Firefox and Opera. Matthew does some hacking on what is still my favorite Mac to have owned, the Cube, shoving a XFX GeForce 6200 graphics card into our beloved lucite box. Lee shares some great photos he snagged at the 2007 AirFest, held last month at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. And it may look like this month's Cortland is having a severe case of schizophrenia, but trust us, it hits on several plot points of importance. Miraz thinks Digital Photography Expert Techniques is pretty good, but badly missnamed, as it is about workflow after the fact of shooting photos, rather than during, the latter of which being what I would have thought from the title. Lee has a double-dose of reviews this month--I guess May turned out to be Lee Bennett theme month--looking at a pair of iPod accessories: the Dock Extender, which I am gear-lusting for; and the PocketDock Line Out USB. Chris raves about the Elevator, Griffin's replacement for the iCurve, which I used to use extensively. David uses Pando, which I've been following closely, but have not yet had a need to use. Ed closes this month's issue out with a look at Yep, billed as "iPhoto for PDFs". Personally, I store a lot of my PDFs in EagleFiler, but Yep certainly does look interesting. As always, you can read this month's ATPM online, as an offline webzine, a screen-optimized PDF, or a print-optimized PDF. We offer a variety of flavors for your consumption. Enjoy!
Suburban hippie
A few moments ago, I was watching Seinfeld, folding some clothes, and I looked down at my attire for the day: hemp-dyed Kauai t-shirt, khaki cargo shorts, Invisible Children reed bracelet, and new Keen sandals, and the title for this post was what sprang to my mind. Somebody help me.
The more things change...
"Quemadmoeum gladuis neminem occidit, occidentis telum est." --Lucius Annaeus Seneca, circa 45 AD Translation: "A sword is never a killer, it is a tool in the killer's hands." Just thought this might be somewhat relevant to political and cultural debates we're having two thousand years later.
Headline you never thought you'd see
"Arctic Monkeys see slower sales for new album" I guess they gave up trying to come up with Shakespeare.
Oh, but to love...
I'm not sure if there's anything to the fact that as George Thorogood's "Who Do You Love?" was playing, I came across Steve's great poem, "my convenient social gospel", but regardless, it's a good poem. Thanks, Steve!
links for 2007-04-24
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Home of the ExpoDisc white balance solution.
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Good overview article from the SF Chronicle on Twitter, though I like to call the individual Twitter messages "tweets", not "twitters".
links for 2007-04-23
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Corner.js 1.0 allows you to add corners to webpage images. It uses unobtrusive javascript to keep your code clean. It works in all the major browsers - Mozilla Firefox 1.5+, Opera 9+ and Safari. On older browsers and Internet Explorer, it'll degrade and your viewers won't know the difference.
Twitter time
I found Annalee Newitz's article on Twitter fascinating, including this breakdown of time: + Twitter time: every minute + Blog time: every few hours + Newspaper time: every day There's also a mention of "book time" in the one-line bio at the end of the piece, which I suppose one could translate in to meaning "every few days", given how long the average person devotes to getting through a tome. I also thought about how one might define the 24-hour news cycle. Would "CNN time" be defined as "every second"?