December 21, 2007

Hot or not?

Been a while since I geeked out about apps and such. Let me rectify that.

Except for the web apps and where denoted* these are all OSX apps. Complaints may be directed to my brand new domain www.whiffofcondescension.com, which may or may not be working because, well, its better than you ... and you can smell it.

FacebookSync - Simple little thing that takes your OSX Address Book and yanks down info and photos for matches from your Facebook friends. Really handy.
MarsEdit - Best offline blog editor I've found. Blows Ecto away.
Displaperture - Miss the rounded screen corners in Leopard? This is for you. For the pill-capsule-shaped-screen obsessed among you, you can distort the edges much more than Tiger even allowed.
Songbird 0.4* - Mozilla-based music manager. Getting better all the time. Browsing music blogs with this is a dream.
Beatport Sync* - Free app for DJing and beatmatching. Super-simple. Traktor Lite, essentially.
MailPluginManager - Part of the Leopardized widescreen mail hack for Mail.app (which is indispensable), this add-on lets you manage plugins much more comprehensively.
GetTube - Simple app for pulling down YouTube videos locally.

Apps I want to like but have not given them their due. Any experience with these?

MemoryMiner* - Multiple media integrator for narrative-based presentations.
Bento - iWork-like database from Apple's subsidiary, Filemaker.
Candybar - Icon/Dock über-manager from the makers of Coda and Transmit, which I love.

Web apps/sites:

Gmail IMAP - Just weeks after I moved all my POP mail to a jury-rigged IMAP redirect via Gmail, they released their native version. But the truth is, It is seamless and nearly-perfect. Well done, Google.
imeem - Very comprehensive, user-submitted streaming music site. Each track has an independent page. Really handy for letting others listen to tracks as reference.
5inch.com - Awesome alternative CD/DVD cases and labelling.
Fawnt - Free fonts that don't look like an accountant chose them to accompany his clip artwork.
Vector Magic - Turn bitmaps into vector files.

And now to bitch a little. All about iTunes, probably the single most used piece of software I have on my machine.

Why is there no way to move or copy part of your library? This seems like an obvious feature for selective backup or at least something that a clever AppleScript could solve.

I'd love to be able to flag or mark sections inside a track for later reference. This would be extremely handy for tracks over an hour long. (I don't mean chapters like you can break an audiobook into, but actual markers that could be rearranged.)

Related to that, now that the Finder has become iTunes-like how about moving some changes the other way and letting me color-label tracks/albums like you can for files in Finder?

Why is there no way to select multiple playlists at a time? Infuriating.

I love you, iTunes, but why do you treat me so?

Posted at 6:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 25, 2007

You may bleep when ready

LEGO is making products so amazing they have to censor how much their customers rave about them.

From a site-based e-mail to my wife that began “Holy shit!” and ended with some half-hearted rationale that we needed to buy this for our son for Christmas. (At least I'm self-consciously transparent, you know?)

Tags: censor, lego, e-mail, starwars

Posted at 5:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 13, 2007

“A cross between horseshoes and sodomy”

Summer in Chicago is technically over, but winter seems not to have gotten the memo and the The Greatest Ninety Days in any city seems to be rolling on.

As such, the sidewalks are alive with a simple game. It is called baggo, or bags, or bag toss, or as it is most unfortunately known around these parts: cornhole. (The bags are filled with corn kernels, you see.) Any game that enables you to play it while holding a beer in one hand and making endless sodomy jokes is bound to be good fun, no?

All it takes are two boards with holes, placed about 25 feet apart (the standard width of lots in the city -- handy), and a couple of bags. Oh, and beer. See I believe this game was made specifically so that you could engage in a competition without putting your beer down. Which makes it perfect for tailgating and frat boys. But damn is it fun. The rules are simple: three points in the hole, one for on the board, you can knock others off, first one to 21. (There is a cancel-out variant of the rules where you have to do better than your opponent per turn to score at all, but that's just, you know, complicated.)

But the real reason I like it is that it is an engine of social interaction for passersby. You're blocking the sidewalk and the game makes a natural conversation point. I have met more neighbors in the past months playing baggo than I have in the past five years. Recently one evening when I was playing with my father-in-law (there's a streetlamp right in front of our house) two drunkards spilled from the corner bar and slapped $5 on the far board. They managed to say something near “sink it in one throw.” I did. Not sure how I did, but I did.

Of course if you play on a weekend night you're going to encounter idiots. One of the tactics in baggo involves deliberately trying to get your opponent's bag off the board with no hope of scoring yourself. This involves an overhand throw, pitching-style. Of course, if you miss, the bag sails down the sidewalk.

This is precisely what happened a few weeks ago when, as our annual neighborhood party let out for the night, a few inebriated revelers strolled by. Can you piece together what happened next? The fellows thought we were trying to hit them. Took the bag and walked. Luckily I had a gigantic brit friend in town and he was right behind me as I negotiated the return of my precious corn-bag. Friend stared and grunted menacingly behind me, like a thug from a Guy Ritchie film. Bag returned, all OK. The magic of cornhole.

As with anything simple, it can be made less so with gadgets. Wife has not allowed me to purchase the LED tubing to light the hole at night, but damn it is tempting. And where is pimpmycornhole.com? That is money on the table, people!

You ask, all good fun, but is there a governing body of this nascent sport? But of course there is.

Post title from Stephen Colbert. Here's the (w)hole truthiness.

Tags: baggo, cornhole, game, sidewalk

Posted at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

August 10, 2007

Next to godliness

Managing hard drive space (yes, settle in folks, this post is pure fun) is a constant problem in my home. Recent smiting from Olympus notwithstanding, keeping up with the onslaught of music, video, photos and work files is a challenge.

Recently I've come across a few apps worth mentioning for keeping tabs on just what is bloating my Macs.

I have a Smart Folder set up that only lists files over 100MB. This is useful for pruning big-ass files, the easy marks. But, other than mail archives and video rips this is a small folder indeed.

Enter Grand Perspective.

This (free) app seems like eye candy, but it is a lot more than that. It gives you a visual tapestry of your file system (though it sorta looks like a map of drive clusters, which it is not). Mousing over the map shows you collections of files, grouped by color and outlined together. This is super-useful as it highlights groupings that may be huge even if the individual sizes of the files may be small. For instance, Grand Perspective helped me move nearly 10GB of support files for LiveType onto an external drive. I would never have known all that crap was in there.

A nice complement to Grand Perspective is WhatSize, a more traditional listing of every file on your machine by size. Also free. WhatSize retains folder organization so you can see at a glance what should get the heave-ho.

Lastly, Hazel (US$21.95), an app that I have had in trial mode on my machine for a while but which, like Quicksilver, I needed a kick in the pants to get really using. Hazel is a bit like Smart Folders except that you can set up rules for nearly any kind of file. It can do just about anything to a file, especially in conjunction with Automator actions. For example, Hazel constantly monitors my drive for duplicate files, segregrates PC-only attachments I receive (for purgation in the holy fires of iWork) and automatically prompts me to remove support files when I nuke an app.

While I'm at it I might as well list a few apps that I am very fond of lately. All Mac, unless otherwise noted.

DropCopy - Opens a little wormhole on your desktop for dragging files to other machines. Unlike a folder alias it can have multiple destinations.

iPhone Remote - Access your Mac from your iPhone. You can use it as an iTunes Remote, PervCam remote viewer for the iSight, file browser, or to stream files to.

Coda - Superb single-window web coding app. Dreamweaver cowers in the corner.

Mouseposé - Nifty app that turns your pointer into a spotlight for highlighting things during presentations. Also has a keystroke mode where your typing is highlighted in big letters onscreen.

Flickr Export for iPhoto - If you manage photos in iPhoto and post some to Flickr this is indispensable. You can do everything to the photo pre-upload but geolocate it. Really solid. There's also an Aperture version.

NetNewsWire - The latest version of this newsreader adds a few great touches like iTunes-style “cover art” for the site your feed is being pulled from and great handling of embedded media and microformats. Also synchs with online version, PC app NewsGator, and an iPhone web app!

Earth Addresser - Yanks all the addresses from OSX Address Book and plots them as a layer on Google Earth. Interesting at-a-glance view of the folks you know.

HandBrake - The latest version of this DVD rip ... er, backup program has defaults for AppleTV and the iPod/iPhone. Handy. There is a PC version but it rather blows.

iStat Pro - Puts the dashboard in Dashboard. Highly configurable system status widget.

Dashalytics - If you use Google Analytics to track website traffic, this is a great window into the data. Also a Dashboard widget.

Weather Underground Dashboard Widget - Like the site it is a visual fiasco, but it displays great info. Way better than the default weather widget.

And lastly, apps that I desperately want to like, but just don't yet. (There's hope. I went through this with Quicksilver and Hazel.)

Tinderbox - Eastgate's hypertextual note-taking system-cum-personal CMS. Their Storyspace changed my life. I guess I'm expecting this to do so as well. Perhaps I should set my expectations lower for a piece of software.

Joost - Remind me why I want to watch full-screen TV on my laptop?

iPhoto '08 - Permit me to step out of the RDF for a moment, but isn't an Event just a smart folder by date?

Slife - A very cool idea for tracking and visualizing app usage over time, but it is a serious resource hog and supports apps inconsistently.

Now, go be productive.

Tags: apps, filemanagement

Posted at 4:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 26, 2007

Canon fodder

Convergence is not a flavor of tech hype I'm particularly susceptible to. Best device for the task, and all that. But both my trusty mini-DV cam and still camera went south at about the same time and so I naturally wondered if I could get away with a single camera. About a year before I was able to play around with a friend's remarkable straight-to-memory videocam (which because of its small size enabled things like this). It was far too expensive to justify, however.

Enter the the Canon TX-1, by most accounts the first reasonably-priced ($500) high-definition tapeless camcorder that takes equally good stills. I've had it for a little over a week now and I'm totally impressed. There's a comprehensive review over at DCRP, but here are a few quick thoughts.

Video image quality is stunning. It captures at 720p in 16:9. The downside is filesize, since the format is not MPEG but rather MJPEG (wrapped in an AVI container). MJPEG is literally a stream of single JPEG-compressed images. 15 minutes of video captured this way is a whopping 4GB. Even with the new 8GB SDHC cards on the market the TX-1 will stop recording at 4GB. (You can start a new clip immediately though.) The upside of MJPEG is that, since there is no inter-frame compression, you can actually pluck a still from the middle of the video and get a 7.1 megapixel shot. In fact you can take a still photo while shooting video. Nice touch -- except that the camera records a frozen shot and shutter noise into the video itself. What's up with that? Of course, you don't have to capture in high-def. Video shot at VGA resolution looks quite good. You can capture a few hours at this rate, depending on tweaking.

The form factor is vertical, which takes some getting used to. Like you're shooting a gun. People have complained about being unable to shoot with one hand. It can be done, it just takes time to learn. The really hard part is not the form but the size. The thing is just tiny, hardly bigger than a pack of cards. I constantly feel like I am going to drop the thing.

iPhoto works fine in snagging photos and videos from the camera ... to a point. Any video larger than about 3/4 GB chokes. You must use the included Canon ImageBrowser software to remove files this size and larger, which is a bummer because the software itself is crappy. Hopefully iLife '07 will address this issue.

So to recap. $500, tapeless, high-def video, 7.1 megapixel stills, tiny, great 10x optical zoom. Highly recommended.

Tags: canon, gadget, photo, HD, video

Posted at 1:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

April 12, 2007

Gadgetive

I've made some purchases recently. Let me tell you about them.

Got an AppleTV. All I ever wanted was an Airport Express (you know, the digital audio network bridge) with an HDMI out (for video). But Apple engineered it differently. In fact, the AppleTV is much more like a networked iPod video than a video-equipped Airport Express. It has a drive that you can synch media to or you can stream media from elsewhere. Strangely, if you want to put media on the AppleTV you must synch. Unlike iTunes and the iPod you can't just drag media to the AppleTV to upload. This seems odd to me since it means anything you put on the AppleTV must also live in your iTunes library. That's a lot of duplication for very large files. (Though it does show me the value of iTunes 7's support for multiple libraries. Video can “live” in the iTunes library but reside on a different volume than all the music.)

Others have covered the AppleTV in much greater detail. I will add only these blurbs.

• No gigabit ethernet, which seems odd given gigabit on every other Mac and their focus on next-gen wireless.
• Wonderful, wonderful UI. Front Row meets Coverflow.
• It looks fine, not great, but fine on a standard def 4:3 TV. There was misinformation regarding whether this was possible at all.
• The music and photo handling -- not reasons I purchased an AppleTV at all -- is surprisingly good. Begs for party usage.

I really bought the thing so I could rip the DVD player out of the kids' area. They've ruined dozens of discs from overhandling and are on their way to trashing a third DVD player. Now there's no physical media to manhandle. And the AppleTV runs so damn hot the kids avoid it like a stovetop.

Finally broke down and bought a Novatel Merlin UX870 high-speed 3G wireless card. Cingular supports it -- and supposedly will sell it -- but I could not wait any longer. I have longed for wide-area wireless for years, but it was not until post-GPRS/EDGE speeds were fairly ubiquitous on Cingular that it became practical for me. The Novatel is a fantastic device. It is tiny (fitting in the ExpressCard slot) and I've gotten 3G speeds (UMTS/HSDPA) 90% of the time I have used it in Austin and New York. Last I tested it I was getting 800Kbps download. Not sure about the upstream, but I have been moving lots of big files around with no problems. I'm still resistant to Blackberry-style lashing to a wireless device, but this is going to make my life a lot easier. I'm tired of hunting out Starbucks and begging friends to use their T-Mobile accounts.

Over the holidays I went on a digital video tape transferring spree. All that usage finally jammed the tape door shut and pretty much has required taking the thing apart. So, in additional to not knowing if I put it back together correctly I'm just sick of physical media. (See above, kid-smarm on DVD's.) I was totally smitten with my friend's hard-disk video recorder, but it was way too pricey. Coincidentally my Canon G1 still camera has come to its end-of-life. So, two needs, not much money, and still gadget-happy. Enter the Canon Powershot TX1. It does not ship until June, but here's why I was so impressed.

• High-def (720p), flash media-based video recording
• 7.1 megapixel still camera
• 10X optical zoom

Looking forward to that one.

And now I must return a call from my loan officer. Excuse me.

Tags: apple, camera, gadget, novatel, wireless

Posted at 9:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 11, 2007

Died and gone to heaven at SXSW

Been wanting to do that since last year.

See also the view from above.

More of heaven.

Tags: lego, sxsw

Posted at 8:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 5, 2007

Shadows of ice

All that is solid melts into air.

Tags: ice, melt, shadow

Posted at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 10, 2006

Fave

You probably didn't notice that I removed my blogroll recently. That's not becuase I'm no longer reading other sites, but rather because I follow so many sites and my interest shifts so often that it seemed silly to call out a subset for special note.

But there's one site that rises above the rest. Maciej Cegłowski's Idle Words is this site. Ceglowski is a polymath polyglot and one hell of a writer. He seems partially powered by wanderlust, a tendency that gives his posts a rewarding freshness. Here are some excerpts.

On Chinese Mooncakes:

Mooncakes, of course, are the exact cultural analogue of the American Christmas fruitcake, that venerable Christmas pastry of astonishing density that brings people together by uniting the giver and receiver in a shared reluctance to eat it. The Chinese have not yet advanced as far as those intrepid Americans who store a received fruitcake for a year before re-gifting it to another victim, but there are promising signs that the failure to let mooncakes overwinter may just be a function of limited apartment storage space, solvable by applying economies of scale.

On flying from North America to Asia:

If you are a package of avionics software, the North Pole is a stressful place. Depending on how close by you pass, longitude and bearing can change extremely quickly (or converge into an unlucky singularity) and most autopilots throw up their hands and enforce a special wings-level lockout flight mode within a few miles of the pole, to keep from spiraling around it like a housefly circling a light bulb.

On NASA's aimlessness:

NASA dismisses such helpful suggetions as unworthy of its mission of 'exploration', likening critics of manned space flight to those Europeans in the 1500's who would have cancelled the great voyages of discovery rather than face the loss of one more ship. Of course, the great explorers of the 1500's did not sail endlessly back and forth a hundred miles off the coast of Portugal, nor did they construct a massive artificial island they could repair to if their boat sprang a leak. And we must remember that space is called space for a reason - there is nothing in it, at least not where the Shuttle goes, save for a few fast-moving pieces of junk from the last few times we went up there, forty years ago. The interesting bits in space are all much further away, and we have not paid them a visit since 1972.

On running the NY Marathon:

Mile 19 We're at 115th street, and the crowd has thinned considerably. My legs are much more tired than I expected, and getting stiff - I stop at a water stand, and walk a block before running again. The next five miles will be walk-and-run, trying not to let my legs seize up like they crave to do. A man with a big synthesizer is playing some easy listening jazz number. I resist the urge to trample him (must conserve energy). Who the f*** plays elevator music to motivate tired runners?

Do yourself a favor and visit the site. Ceglowski is proof that blogging doesn't have to be quick and daily to be satisfying.

Posted at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 24, 2006

Superfriendly

Pardon the Al Bundy moment here, but I gotta say that reliving childhood via your own kids can be damn fun. Possibly my strongest memory of pre-8 year old life is watching the Superfriends cartoon (followed by Scooby Doo) with my dad in the basement on Saturday mornings. I loved the Superfriends intensely, so it was with some trepidation that I bought the recently released first season of The Challenge of the Superfriends for my five-year-old son. Trepidation because, of course, nothing ages well from the 1970's. Or very little besides Pink Floyd. I didn't want to load the DVD initially, afraid that'd I'd fracture a time-honed nostalgia that remembered the Superfriends as gallant, smart, and timeless.

Certainly the Superfriends is simplistic. The Legion of Doom's goal is simply to spread evil and conquer the universe. Dialogue is overt and crude. And the whole thing is borderline racist with token ethnic superheroes that are clearly secondary to the main stock. And yet, I wasn't disappointed. The storylines are suprisingly unique and clever. Yes, each episode starts with a new plot by Lex and friends (none Super) to overthrow the Hall of Justice with the Superfriends having always to react (how about some proactive justice, people?), but there was a lot of thought put into each episode's twist. Time travel, summoning of the undead, alternate universes -- the type of thing that was way beyond me as a kind but now strikes me as fairly interesting for a saturday morning 'toon. And if the the recent upsurge in nightmares of my son is an indicator also fairly "adult" in content.

The real evidence of the value of The Challenge of the Superfriends comes from comparing the seasons that preceded it. Challenge was the first where they got rid of the awful, basically useless teen sidekicks and pets. You recall Wendy, Marvin (I'm sorry, Marvin the Superhero?), and their dog Wonderdog and of course the Wonder Twins and their annoying monkey Gleek, yes? Well, sorry about that. What a dark period that was.

Viva Green Lantern.

Posted at 9:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

August 13, 2006

Ore consequences

My parents recently built a second home in Galena, IL. Galena is in the far northwest corner of the state, nestled between Iowa and Wisconsin. It was a major river town in the 19th century, home to Ulysses Grant and a slew of other Union generals. But the river silted up, Chicago grew up, and Galena slumbered away. Now it is basically a quaint time capsule catering to Chicago weekend escapees, the kitschy knick-knack obsessed, and Civil War buffs.

Galena is the word for lead sulfide, veins of which criss-cross the area. As luck would have it, my parents' land has an abandoned lead mine on it. This isn't suburbia; the lots have (fantastically) reverted to native Illinois prairie. But it was once farmland and apparently the owners way back found a small lode and went for it. The builders of my parents' home wanted to fill the mine entrance in with excavated soil and landscape it. My father, to his infinite credit, said screw that I want a lead mine on my property. And this brings us to today when I had to enter and see what there was to see.

I'll preface this by saying that my adventure was not formally approved by the family. My boys of course were right there with me but mama's look of disapproval, had it been cast groundward, could have dug its own mine.

I struggle to list a hazard that this mine doesn't contain so in the interest of having something to blog about I'll here detail those that it does. The mine is completely structurally unsound, having been abandoned more than a century ago. The whole reason for digging it in the first place is because it contains lead, the very substance that causes parents to obsess about our kids eating paint. It is wildly overgrown and so home to all manner of critters, vermin, and poison flora. There are tons of snakes in these parts and my dad mentioned that he saw something "dog-sized" leaving the shaft yesterday morning. Hmmm, lovely.

So I went in. The kids, standing at the rim of the depression that led to the shaft, were nearly apoplectic with excitement. And while we're using apoplexy as a metaphor I'll mention that it also described my wife at this moment, but for very different reasons.

The shaft entrance had long ago been filled in. Metal containers of all varieties, a tire, and barbed wire clogged the hole. I struggled to loose them but the entrance was a garbage pit. Every time I unearthed a rusty shard I expected some venomous slitherer to inform me of its displeasure. A wooden beam -- really a crudely shaped log -- lay uphill from me in the overgrowth and seemed to mark the entrance to the shaft. My father, lost to me but for yelling, agreed that the best plan was to wait for fall when the foliage died off and then resume digging. Actually he wants to rent a ground radar to see what we're up against. He thinks he's identified a second entrance (exit?) nearby.

In the end this is just good fun. How many kids grow up with an abandoned lead mine as a playlot? Too few, I say.

Posted at 2:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 2, 2006

Demolishin'

Almost exactly two years ago I had a true bonding experience with my son watching a garbage truck in front of our house dump its whole load on the street to try to figure out what piece of trash inside it was on fire. Garbage men, policemen, firefighters, and a bulldozer: does it get any better than that?

Well, apparently it does. I have just learned that the small town in northwestern Illinois where my parents have a home is host to -- wait for it -- a demolition derby using farm combines. Let me apply some formatting to that: a demolition derby using farm combines. And not just any combines but decrepit, rusty-blade-whirling junkers ready to be auctioned off as scrap. Forget summer in the city. I want to see this rural answer to robot wars. Can you imagine the carnage? How onlookers don't get pierced with shrapnel I have no idea. I am willing to risk it.

Posted at 1:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 23, 2006

Zodiac desktops

I've been looking for a good desktop background. But not just anything. Over the years I've formed fairly strict requirements.

1. Usable. Not sure who first said "wallpaper makes bad stationery," but it was my guiding principle. Backgrounds need to be easy to work against, contrasting highly with the folders and files that live on it. Photos of children, hot rods, and (sigh) rocket ships generally don't offer this.
2. Widescreen. 1680 × 1050.
3. Constrained variation. I wanted the ability to change the background periodically but with some consistency from image to image.
4. Cool-looking. Understated references to various aspects of my geekiness score highly.

Well, I found the source material in this amazing collection of images from A Celestial Atlas by Alexander Jamieson published in 1822. The last point was satisified first. These pages are beautiful, simultaneously astronomical and mythological, information design and storybook. But the best part is that they are a calendar sequence tracing the motion of the starry sky over the course of a year -- perfect for changing desktops. In order to satisfy requirements one and two I had to do some modification. Inverting the colors immediately produced a pleasant white on blue that blueprintized the prints satisfactorily. Then I reduced opacity to 15% to make contrast with desktop elements generous.

It's probably no coincidence that I am captivated by these images given my immersion in Tufte's Beautiful Evidence right now. He makes a great case for the multi-layered beauty of astromonical graphics.

You can download the modified images here. (All 1680 × 1050.)

♈ Aries
♉ Taurus
♊ Gemini
♋ Cancer
♌ Leo
♍ Virgo
♎ - ♏ Libra - Scorpio
♐ Sagittarius
♑ - ♒ Capricorn- Aquarius
♓ Pisces

Also, all in a single zip (8 MB).

There's always room for improvement of course. I have five displays on my desktop. Ideally they'd all share similar backgrounds that stretch horizontally from one to the next. You could do this with the astronomy prints (stitching the ecliptic into a continuous Mercator armillary across the displays), though only one machine would ever be correct to the current month.

Also, does anyone know if there is a way to have iCal.app schedule desktop image changes?

Posted at 7:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 9, 2006

Back in the saddle

And I'm already sore. Thanks to everyone who wrote with congrats on the newest little bundle. Charlotte and Mama are doing wonderfully. Her brothers regard her with love, curiosity, but mostly indifference. I mean, she's not exactly stealing their toys yet -- or even awake much -- so she's been deemed low-threat.

The other new delivery is one that plugs in. I've been playing around with a 17" MacBook Pro for a few weeks now. It is a superb machine. Running a G5 at home and having moved most of my critical applications (mail, calendar, to do lists, etc) to online/synch services allowed for a pretty smooth transition. Still, working for IBM on a Mac can be a challenge. Though there are some great resources internally for doing so (and a healthy IBM Linux community that will help you run Anything But MS) some things still require Windows. Which is why running XP in Parallels virtual machine is such a blessing.

Some thoughts.

• There is no solution for in-flight (or in-car) powering of the MacBook Pro. This isn't a problem unique to Apple but rather to newer laptops that run at 85W. Airplane power connectors shut off when anything tries to draw more than 75W. Inverters seem not to work. Since airlines are likely not to retrofit their fleets, what's needed is a way to reduce the wattage pull via software on the machine. This is a serious problem for international travel.
• As yet there are virtually no cards available for the Express/34 slot. Obviously PC cards don't work (which limits the usefulness of running XP a bit), but the real problem is the lack of cellular wireless cards, 2.5G or 3G. Also a big issue for a frequent traveller.
• Right-click. I use it, I need it, I quite love it. Yes, you can plop two fingers on the trackpad and click for a right-click, but that's cumbersome. All Apple would have to do is elegantly split the long mouse button. But I doubt that'll happen.
• The trackpad is nice, sure. But I miss the keyboard trackpoint. It is easier to use on cramped airplanes and it allows you never to remove your fingers from typing orientation. Sigh.
• No dedicated reverse (which is to say forward) delete button. You can do this with Fn-Delete, but I never realized how much I delete going forward until now.
• There's no IBM VPN client for Intel-based Macs, yet. The company that makes the IBM VPN for PPC Macs is working on it, but right now this means I have to proxy all IBM-bound networking through Parallels and the XP VPN client. A cool solution, but let's face it: a pain in the ass.

Most of these are travel-related gripes, which begs the question. With three kids at home now, maybe I shouldn't be travelling so damn much?

Posted at 7:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

May 25, 2006

Decade

You may be wondering if the baby has come yet or not. The answer is no and the reason is obvious. Vito the Fetus (the in uteronym) is waiting to come later today. In fact, it is waiting just long enough for us to shove the kids off to their grandparents for the long weekend and to settle down to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary in some semblance of peace. Yes, today marks one decade since my girlfriend Robyn had the striking lapse in reason of saying "I do" when posed the fateful question. So now, as we wait for the birth of our child and the next "happiest day of our lives" I'm reminded of that first happiest day ten years ago. I thought I knew then how lucky I was, but of course that's silly. Only looking back on what a special woman, amazing wife, and devoted mother Robyn has become can I even begin to compute the staggering odds against me finding someone so perfect.

For the rehearsal dinner ten years and one day ago I created a video of photos, music, and hilariously terrible on-screen graphics using two VHS decks and a 75MHz Gateway PC. We watched it again today. For one, it was way too long. I don't know what the hell the audience was thinking while I stood up there and narrated, but each of the photos was on-screen for like 10 seconds. Interminable. Get this clown off the stage. But the really funny thing is that in the course of dubbing the tapes I screwed up somehow and spliced in a Home Shopping Network channel audio feed. This wasn't heard at the dinner because my audio tape was separate from the video (high tech synching involved me signalling to my brother to press play on the deck across the room -- I'm so ashamed), but watching it again with the HSN audio was truly surreal. Basically HSN 1996 sounds different in no way from HSN 2006. Still hawking the same crap with the same plastic enthusiasm. The dubbed video was a crazy blend (dare I say mashup) of nostalgia and hucksterism.

That last line may have seemed like an ironic comment on marriage, but no. Now if you will excuse me, we have to prepare for Vito who would like nothing more than to share a birthday with our anniversary.

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April 29, 2006

What a smile 'round my face

Yikes, it has been a silent week 'round these parts. My travels in China have been crushing: a full work day on Beijing time plus 75% of a work day on US time. While this makes for a lot of time in front of the computer it does not produce much of a clear head for blogging. And this is why I am writing now from my flight 35,000 feet above the Pacific. This is my first flight with WiFi broadband and I just need to geek out a bit and say this changes everything. Time was, international flights were like day-long technology isolation chambers, but now that I have a connection (and a pretty fast one at that -- 802.11g) it gets all screwy. I'm adapting my already nutty sleep schedule to Chicago time so that I can Skype with my wife. And the beauty of that, of course, is that we just leave it on the entire flight. She hears me; I hear all the goings-on at home. -- for 10 hours. Just like ignoring each other at our own computers when we are under the same roof. Seriously though. This changes so much. I've watched streaming video, listened to iTunes radio, videoconferenced with a pal, Skyped my wife, and obviously e-mailed and surfed. Am I overdoing it this time? Absolutely. Will this go down as the best thing to happen to me before my baby arrives in a few weeks. Absolutely.

International travel alone is rough, but for some reason Four Tet's "Smile Round the Face" cheers me up every time I watch it. It took me a few viewings to realize what seems so obvious: being a daddy is it's own reward. Thanks, Kieran, for the cheer.

More China double happiness soon ...

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April 1, 2006

(Life)

I've recently become part of the Second Life universe. Second Life is a true alternate reality where 3D avatars of real people do nearly all the things you'd expect in a real world community. It isn't a game per se, unless you consider life itself a kind of game. Live, communicate, buy, sell, interact, build, be. You can pretty much do whatever you want. As with any reality, the happenings are being blogged. There's even an online architecture review of buildings inside Second Life and a police blotter detailing in-world malfeasance.

Look for me as Immerito Foley. My bald spot flickers as I move around. Presumably this is due to some problem with the graphic texture but I rather like it. Might try that in the real world.

More on Second Life soon, I'd wager.

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January 20, 2006

Three weeks until Torino

Really I was looking for an excuse to post this photo from a transalpine flight of a few years back, but the Olympics are three weeks away. I can't wait to see how many countrymen take home the Olympic donut.

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December 11, 2005

Howdy, neighbor

Nearly every day for the last three years I've said hello or briefly chatted with our next door neighbor, Steve, "Home Improvement"-style through the wooden fence. He's always around so I presumed he either didn't work or that he worked from home.

Today, thanks to a holiday gift of a bag full of cookies I now know what "Uncle" Steve does. Who would have ever guessed?

Golly, they're flavorful!

Posted at 8:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 22, 2005

Dear Santa

I know this is a lot to ask, but we're a bit strapped for cash what with two kids and a nice mortgage rate that is about to become unfixed. Are you aware of the new A/V receiver from Denon, the AVR-4306? Obviously it is high on many people's lists, but if you've forgotten, this is the one that finally is doing something with the Ethernet port on the back. Sure you can listen to Internet radio -- big deal -- but you can also finally treat your receiver as a network-controllable device, just like everything else on your home network. Need to re-route the DVD output, adjust speaker volumes, change the input to the trusty cassette deck? Just bring up the device's web page and do it from any computer in the house or -- if you're really a control freak -- from work or on the road.

So you probably remember it now and you'll also recall that this puppy has two built in iPod ports, one in back for a permanent hookup and one in front for spur-of-the-moment guest DJ'ing like, say, at a party. (I know, I know, I wouldn't think this would be useful either, but some friends of mine have an iPod dock built into the wall of their kitchen and let me tell you it makes for an outstanding get-together to be able to have guests pop their 'Pod's into it. Trust me.) Once docked the iPod is controllable just like everything else from the unit's web page. Oh, and another thing, there's a USB port on the front for hooking up removable media. The AVR-4306 mounts the drive and reads the media for immediate playback. Oh, oh, and do you see those four HDMI ports there? Do you? Three in, one out. That's the coup de grâce, the pièce de résistance, That Which I Must Have. (Is that greedy? Sorry. I've been good. Really.) This spectacle of modern audiovisual magic actually upconverts any video signal -- composite, s-video, component, hell if you sketch it a picture it'll probably try to convert that too -- straight to digital HDMI for a single output to your TV.

Bliss, no? At forty-some pounds it'll be a bit heavy to lug here, I admit. So maybe, if you agree that I deserve it (and, frankly, I'm unable to conceive of a scenario where you would not) then may I suggest using Fedex Overnight shipment? Preferably to arrive before our annual Christmas Party? Sure, you're invited. Thanks!

Oh, my kids have a list for you too. But I've misplaced it at the moment.

Posted at 7:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 1, 2005

Post-Halloween morsels

Miniaturized for easy distribution.

I should have known when Craig ate his words about this guy, but only now do I understand the genius that is Four Tet. Folktronica is a silly term I will type only this once, though what it is trying to describe is accurate enough. I'd like to see Kieran Hebden and Amon Tobin go head-to-head in a sudoku tournament.

Further afield is Tadd Mullinix, an Ann Arborite with two beautiful, intricately glitchy albums to date. Good stuff, if you like abstract electronica.

Why I never thought of using power tools to carve pumpkins before this season is a mystery to me. For example, in addition to creating new patterns and being a lot easier than hacking with a paring knife, the power drill whirls pumpkin crud all over the kitchen when it pierces the pumpkin shell. How fun is that?

There is a doctoral disseration waiting to be written in probability theory about the certitude that the moment you begin futzing in a gym locker the person occupying the locker immediately to your left or right will return from the gym to do the same, causing crampedness and often nude crampedness. Which is uncomfortable. This happens in gyms where you bring your own lock and also in those that distribute keys (where, presumably, some sort of front desk intelligence could space out locker assignments over time).

This month's Wired contains a short piece on the way technology itself is the ghostly medium in most recent horror films. Clearly the Wired staff reads Ascent Stage.

Posted at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

October 19, 2005

One show, daily

I attended a taping of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart today in NYC. Great fun. Actually way more fun than I thought it would be. I guess I just figured it would be a little sterile in a studio setting, but it was actually funnier. For instance, I always assumed that the correpondent reports that are filed from "Baghdad" and "Washington D.C." -- obviously in front of a green screen -- were at least done backstage or something. In fact, the correspondents are mere feet from Stewart on stage and watching his off-camera reaction to their reports is hilarious. Sometimes it felt like he didn't know what they were going to say, though of course it is scripted and flowing past on the telepromters. The staff cracks up constantly too -- and why not? Just great to see how much everyone enjoys the show. There's a bit of a pre-show standup routine by a staffer that was really quite funny and then Stewart comes out to answer some audience questions. One guy asked Stewart how he felt about the fans who purchased the old show set on eBay and are touring around the country. He said he had not heard about it -- which I find very hard to believe. (Thanks for the tickets, Matty!)

Posted at 9:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 27, 2005

Always check the hitch

At the MCA.

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May 2, 2005

Friends who sell things online

Laura Gilligan meticulously creates customized wine charms and other baubles by hand at Cloud Village. Check out the wedding gift detail.

Melissa Pins turns her keen eye for fashion to custom-made dyeable footwear for women at Blue Tux Shoes. Oooh la la!

Matt Wenc creates paintings that warp spacetime ever-so-subtly at mattwenc.com.

The following message was not underwritten by any of the aforementioned merchants. (But I bet they'd like me more if you bought something.)

Posted at 10:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 23, 2005

Favorite things, part the third

Aerolatte - This little gizmo is neither a sexual aid nor a hair removal device, though it looks like both. Warm some milk in the microwave then whip it with the Aerolatte and pour into coffee. Instant latte, no Starbucks or foaming machine. I don't drink latte, but I find myself grabbing it just to stir in sugar. Automate everything!

Stair Basket - With house lots only 25 feet wide a lot of Chicago living happens on multiple levels. Add to that the amount of crap that accumulates and is dispersed around the place with two kids and you quickly find yourself piling stuff up on the stairs to remind you to take it up or down. Add in general clutziness and perhaps drunkenness and you have a real hazard. That's where the stair basket comes in. Now you only have one large thing to break your ankle on as opposed to lots of little things.

Greasemonkey - I join many people in thinking this is the greatest Firefox extension ever. Basically it allows people to write small Javascripts that do some amazing things. My favorites include always providing a download link for embedded movies, stripping the margin crud from Boing Boing, and adding Netflix links to IMDB. But far and away my favorite Greasemonkey script is the Chicago Transit Authority hack of Google Maps. Now in addition to the street and satellite view you can switch to a CTA view that shows you where your address is on the subway grid. Wonderful.

Smarterchild - At work our internal chat client has about a half-dozen bots that can do your bidding for you (fetching addresses, monitoring feeds, etc.) so I was pleased to see this ability on the open interweb. I find myself using Smarterchild most often simply to pop up a reminder at a given time. Smarterchild is my friend.

Plaxo - I was initially very skeptical of this service. Storing all your contacts externally is just asking for trouble, in my opinion. But I am a convert now. Plaxo has a great interface, an online version (so you're not stuck using Outlook), a phone synch option, and -- this is important -- it does not require your contacts to register with Plaxo to use it. I have reconnected with three or four people that I had lost touch with simply because of the one-to-many update requests you can manage with Plaxo. That alone is worth the cost. Which is $0.

See also: Faves I and Faves II

Posted at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 16, 2005

Wet cement botany

It took me few blocks to realize that Vancouver's sidewalks come preloaded with leaf impressions. The relief is a bit high (extra heavy foliage?), but the effect is kinda nice. Fossils of tree-lined avenues that don't actually exist.

Posted at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 24, 2005

The need for feed

Recently I switched from the trusty Sage plugin for Mozilla to the standalone FeedDemon RSS/Atom reader for PC. Sage did the job, but the number of feeds I was tracking was getting too large and I was never completely comfortable (nor have I ever been) with that sidebar window on Moz. So I am here to state my incredulity that I ever lived without FeedDemon. Goodness gracious, that's a well-done app! Very clean with lots of advanced features like podcast organization and keyboard shortcuts. Highly recommended.

Seems like there isn't any information source that I care about that doesn't have an RSS feed these days. Would be interesting to clock time spent in the reader versus in the browser, no?

Posted at 6:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 16, 2005

Is there anything cover art can't do?

Continuing the recent themes of cover art and interesting uses of web services and open API's (in the marginalia sidebar), here's AmazType, a creative little app that creates a word-mosaic of your search term from the covers of books and music at Amazon that are related to the term. So, "Shakespeare" would return that word created from the covers of all the books containing his works.

I consider this a perfect use of technology.

Posted at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 3, 2005

Arcade symphony

Call it recombinant audio archaeology. Andy Hofle has recorded the noises of classic arcade games of the 1980's from the available ROM emulations and then mixed and layered them into a stunning simulacrum of the experience of being in an arcade. He's got background noise, coin changers, and even people talking. A current-day casino might come close, but you'd hear so much more in a casino: slots cha-chinging, recorded voices entreating you to play, and more realistic noises. An arcade in 1983, on the other hand, was all about synthetic bleeps, bloops, and blow-ups. And this is why I love it. The background radiation of my youth.

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February 8, 2005

Favorite things, part the second

Here's round two of Stuff I Like. (Part one is here.) Who cares? Hmm, I don't know, but it is nice to make lists of this. Like a reverse wishlist. Not so much something I want as something I want others to know they should want.

Harmony Remote - Gobbled up by Logitech (but apparently none the worse for wear) the Harmony Remote is by far the most usable, most intuitive universal remote out there today. The most important features of this remote are what it does not do.

It does not consider its screen the primary way of dynamically reconfiguring a new interface for each remote it emulates. Instead it uses hard buttons for as many buttons as possible that overlap the most number of devices. You'd be suprised how few functions are device-specific.

It does not require you to "teach" it the IR codes of your other remotes. Instead, you connect the remote via USB and log in to your account at Logitech. You choose your devices there. I've got a bunch of obscure and ancient components in my setup and it had every one of them and far obscurer too.

It is not device-centric, but rather activity-centric, asking what do you want to do rather than which device do you want to access to attempt to do what you want to do? When you login to your account you define activities -- watch TiVo, play music, whatever -- and almost never need to refer to individual devices again. Activities of course are a nicer name for macros which are just sets of remote commands. But thinking in activities rather than which device must be set to which input blah blah is so much more intuitive. I am about the zillionth person to laud this feature, but hey here I am. (Don Norman loves it, for example.)

Win2VNC - The very definition of a useful hack, this program rides on top of VNC to allow you to use a single mouse and keyboard across multiple computers on a desk. (It'd work longer range, but why?) I use this app every day when I plop down in front of my laptop and need to do things on the three other machines on my desk. Getting rid of all those keyboards and mice really frees up a lot of space.

Mozilla Firefox - So I like Firefox, big deal. Using Firefox on PC is a no-brainer. IE is such a steaming turd there's really no choice. But when I finally switched to Moz on Mac I knew something really important had happened. I mean, Safari is an exemplary browser, truly awesome. For a while there were things I could do in Safari via AppleScript that I could not do in Mozilla, like aggregate all open windows into a single window with multiple tabs. But with Mozilla's flexible extension architecture it wasn't long until even that feature was made cross-platform. There's no Safari for Windows or Linux and I like my browsing experiences to be consistent. Bless you, Firefox.

7UP Plus Mixed Berry - As the only person in the world who actually likes this new drink I feel that I must declare my allegiance here, in public. There, I said it. No need for counterpoint links. Just Google it. No one else likes this beverage.

Anapod Explorer - Probably the most useful piece of iPod software for the PC. The best features include being able to stream music over the web directly from the iPod and being able to manage/access your music via an SQL database of your music library. Oh, also, you can download music from your iPod, something iTunes don't do.

Sunrise Earth on Discovery HD - You had to know that ambient imagery would be the next logical step after high-def television became somewhat mainstream. Sure, there are media players that'll load art packs, but Sunrise Earth is one of the first completely non-narrative programs that is just beautiful to look at -- and that's it. The subject of the show is a single sunrise, taken from multiple angles in full surround sound. I love it.

The window side seat on the upper deck of a 747 - No photos for this, so visualize if you will. The curvature of the hull of the 747 is somewhat extreme on the upper deck of the 747 so seats can't fit right against the window. This is a good thing. Whether the bubble is configured for coach of business class, the gap created by the curve means you get a little footlocker next to your seat that is good for storage, putting your feet up and reclining almost completely, and resting your laptop while you dine. Try it. It feels like a credenza or something

That's all for now. Tell me, what I am missing here?

Posted at 9:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 23, 2005

Moleskine mod

Moleskine notebooks are somewhat faddish right now, but damn they are useful. And there are plenty of sites out there that detail ways to make them more so. Moleskine hacks, so to speak. Here's my own: a holding mechanism for the Fisher Space Pen.

I wanted a way to join the notebook and the pen so I would not have to dig for either when I need them in a pinch. The problem was that the Fisher has no clip and is very slick. So I bent a paperclip to snugly grab the pen where it's sheath ends and affixed a rubber band to hold the other end. It ain't pretty, but it works.

UPDATE: My little MacGyverism hacked me back. Turns out the paperclip snip created a flesh-digging edge. Must work on 2.0.

Posted at 11:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

January 14, 2005

A good week for this geek

Apple's Macworld announcements left me awe-struck and out about $300. Those kids on One Infinite Loop are on fire!

Comcast upgraded my cable box to a dual-tuner HD PVR for free (meanwhile Tivo's product "launch" continues to infuriate).

Cassini's hitchhiker finally showed that it could do cool things too. Hello, Earth II! (Note to ESA: a photo of Saturn setting in the night sky of Titan would have been a real treat. Next time?)

Posted at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 12, 2004

Jewelboxed

There's little I love more than when someone takes a simple idea and makes it extraordinary through attention to detail and good usability. That's precisely what Coudal Partners, a design firm in Chicago that made a bit of a name for themselves with Photoshop Tennis, has done with their side business called Jewelboxing. They were unhappy with the packaging available for CD's and DVD's so they did something about it. I used their system to package the annual year-end mix I give out to my friends. Kudos to Coudal. Highly recommended.

Posted at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 2, 2004

Favorite things, first in a series

Seems like I have come across quite a few useful, fun, or otherwise notable things lately. Thought I'd share.

Dynamap - Currently only for Manhattan, the Dynamap is a map made of polarized lenses stacked on each other so that when you alter the angle of viewing you see different layers of information: street grid, subway system, neighborhoods. Innovative and totally useful.

Konfabulator - Clearly someone at Apple thinks this is the future of modularized, task-specific applets since they are building Konfabulator-like functionality into the next version of their OS. But Konfabulator one-upped Cupertino by becoming cross-platform. To get a quick sense of what Konfabulator does visit the widget gallery.

del.icio.us - Social bookmarks. Like Friendster, except with your links. See how many or how few people link like you do.

flickr - Superb online photo gallery. Impressive editing and organization tools. Great attitude.

Web Developer - Extension for Firefox that adds a slew of geeky web dev tools, but the best by far is a block level element outlining function. Indispensible for ferretting out nested <div> tags and such. (Example.)

Delicious Monster Library - An iLife-like app (Mac-only) that organizes your books, software, videos, and games. Cool part: it can use a webcam to simulate a UPC code scanner, directly grabbing the volume info from Amazon.

Moleskine notebook - Paper PDA. Proto-blog tool. (Even hackable.) Snapping the elastic band over the cover is strangely satisfying.

Smarty Pants - Movable Type blog plug-in that enables curly quotes, em-dashes, and real ellipses. "I'm ... not -- kidding." Rejoice!

ISS-Soyuz bags - Satchels and backpacks made from used Soyuz re-entry parachutes. "Why, yes, this bag has been to space and back."

Posted at 8:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

November 29, 2004

Jeff Berg

I've always been mesmerized by the work of designer Jeff Berg. His primary medium is Flash, but he's savant-like in a variety of areas. Weather, subway signage, geometry -- it's all fodder for visualization and interaction. Plus, he's pretty good at his day job.

Posted at 2:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

November 27, 2004

99 Luft

OK, not only does Lufthansa have one of the only in-air Internet connections available (allowing fun stuff like this), but I just learned that they have a flight from Chicago to Dusseldorf on a flipping 737 that is 100% business class seats. Just 28 or so. I didn't even know a 737 had that kind of range. Like a Southwest flight deciding to re-route to Europe. Except without the free-for-all for seats. Crazy. And Dusseldorf. Huh? Kraftwerk, I may make the trip after all.

Posted at 9:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

November 21, 2004

Big!

Confession. I love watching Big!, the series on Discovery HD Theater where a team of welders, metal fabricators, and gadgeteers come together to build oversized versions of appliances and other everyday items. There's interpersonal drama, mostly staged or instigated -- but even conflict is humorous because you quickly remember that the bickering is over a gigantic toaster or some such. Not to trivialize things, but, c'mon, you're not repairing aircraft here, folks. Maybe I like it so much because I'm really not handy and so seeing things built supersize makes it easier to comprehend their inner workings. Or maybe it is because blowtorches look great in high definition.

Speaking of, I don't watch much television but what I do watch these days seems mostly to be in HD. I wonder if I could pull off watching only high-definition programming in 2005. Could be my first resolution.

Posted at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)