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Slydial is a “voice messaging service that connects you directly to someone’s mobile voicemail,” no matter their mobile carrier, or yours.
I can totally see myself using this service a lot, and while it is “free,” I think I actually might opt for the $0.15/message plan to get around the short, pre-message audio ad. (Nevermind that I probably shouldn’t announce this publicly).
Use Dropbox to sync MarsEdit across multiple machines
As great as MarsEdit is (and it is great), it doesn’t yet let me sync drafts across multiple machines. With respect to WordPress (and some other CMSs), MarsEdit does allow you to save your posts as drafts on your web server; however, I have a general aversion to this because it requires that I remember to update the timestamp of the post (to the current date/time) when I actually publish it, and also causes the post IDs to stray from date-order (I know, I’m anal).
A couple of months ago a friend mentioned Dropbox (currently in private beta) in passing, and immediately I wondered if I could use such a service to do what I needed with respect to MarsEdit (and OmniFocus; see below). Turns out I could.
MarsEdit
To get Dropbox to play nice with MarsEdit you have to use symbolic links (because, as far as I know, MarsEdit doesn’t let you specify where you want to store your drafts and other data), and Dropbox will sync only what you drop into the Dropbox folder. The trick to using symbolic links in this scenario is two-fold: 1) you must make sure your usernames on each machine are the same; and 2) you must time correctly the creation of the symlinks on each machine.
Usernames
Regarding the first point, it must be understood that when you use the “ln” command to create a link, it resolves the tilde so that the path to the linked-to file contains your username (i.e., ~/Dropbox → /path/to/username/Dropbox). In light of this, the usernames on every “syncing” machine must match up, else the last machine to talk to the Dropbox folder will overwrite the symlink to point to the username on its machine; this obviously will break the symlink on the other machine because it will then point to a path that does not exist on that machine.
Dueling symlinks
Even if each instance of MarsEdit is being run under the same username, you still may run into some problems (but these can be remedied; keep reading). When I first set out to get sync working, I saw some funky behavior. For example, I’d create the symlink on machine one, run a couple of tests on machine one to make sure it was working, and then run some tests on machine two (which immediately showed the symlink in its Dropbox folder, as it should).
At some point during this process, the symlink on machine one would break, and the LocalDrafts folder (the MarsEdit folder I was trying to sync) would be copied into the Dropbox folder and the symlink removed entirely. You can appreciate the problem: both machines were now synced, but MarsEdit could no longer see the synced folder because it existed outside of the hard-coded directory used by the application.
To get around this, I thought to create the symlinks on both machines semi-simultaneously, in the hope that some contention rule would let them stand on their own (i.e., machine one wouldn’t ‘cause’ the symlink to be created on machine two, and therefore wouldn’t set into motion the problem just described).
Well, my hunch was correct — creating the symlinks at the same time does the trick. Over the last couple of months I’ve had zero problems with the setup; the symlinks on both machines have persisted without issue.
Finally, the actual solution
Remember that Dropbox syncs only what’s in its folder, and so the symbolic link must be placed there. To do this, simply navigate, on every machine you want synced, to ~/Dropbox/, and execute the following command (simultaneously on all machines):
ln -s ~/Library/Application Support/MarsEdit/LocalDrafts marsdrafts
That’s it. Realize that “marsdrafts” is the new directory entry that will be created; you can name this whatever you want. Keep in mind that if you have MarsEdit open on two machines simultaneously, and make changes to a draft on machine one, those changes may not show up on machine two until you restart MarsEdit on machine two (which will cause the application to re-read the LocalDrafts folder).
OmniFocus
OmniFocus lets you specify where you want to store your database file, and so it’s trivial to get it working with Dropbox (i.e., simply tell OmniFocus to store the database file in the Dropbox folder).
However, there is one caveat. You’re going to want to quit OmniFocus on machine one before firing it up on machine two, else you’ll likely run into the file being locked by one instance of the application, which can result in some weird (and maybe fatal?) contention issues.
I note that this method, and the issues that come with it, have been obviated by the sync-capable OmniFocus v1.1 (currently in pre-release). While on the topic, and despite my grumblings about the price, OmniFocus for the iPhone is very nice.
Other applications
These methods obviously may work with any other application you’d like to sync across multiple machines. However, you should remain cognizant that certain applications may have read/write mechanisms that preclude these particular approaches; as ever, backup your data before experimenting.
YouTomb is a “research project by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation.”
Byline is a Google Reader client for the iPhone. The app looks nice enough, but unfortunately it offers zero granularity with respect to choosing what you want to read (i.e., your only option is “new”). No thanks.
Relatedly, Google Reader’s “web app” for the iPhone is fantastic; I’m half-convinced that most of the people still clinging to NetNewsWire haven’t given Google Reader a fair shake, and at this point, likely never will. The brilliance of the web app notwithstanding, why hasn’t Google come out with native iPhone apps for Google Reader and Gmail?
While on the topic of feed readers, Shaun, why am I not beta-testing this? ;)
Wall·E
It’s no secret that I have a somewhat anti-utopian (as opposed to dystopian) view of the future (and present!) of mankind (“Oh, hello there AI. Please don’t kill me!”), and on the whole, generally prefer my movies sad, and my music sadder. To that end, the first half of Wall·E really delivered.
How could you not be moved by the drab, post-human, almost post-robot Earth? Talk about being simultaneously harrowing and beautiful: the melancholic color palette, the dutiful robot carrying on with its “directives” even though there is no one left on Earth to appease, the non-dialogue, the re-packaging of consumer detritus — man’s legacy — into skyscrapers, the “non-junk” saved and savored by Wall·E, and his painful-to-watch attempt at piecing together the human condition and connecting with the past that built him.
You kind of forget that Wall·E is a robot, much less a cartoon robot. Brilliant.
Ah, a perfect beginning to what could have a been a near-perfect movie, but which eventually transmogrified into something else entirely, something packaged and predictable, something happy.
I get it — everything has to work out in the end. For the kids. But, it all felt a bit manufactured and forced to me, and ultimately the ending completely belied the beginning. Or, by the grace of some cosmic, ironic redemption, the whole thing came full circle. Who knows.
Pixar’s ability to consistently deliver movies — over and over and over again — that appeal to every age, is something that puts it in an untouchable class of its own; at the same time though, that versatility continually demands it sacrifice honesty for marketability, and (especially in Wall·E) vision for profit.
There is no doubt that the pre-watch hype surrounding this movie (“OMG! Greatest movie ever!!!”) had a role in it not living up to my admittedly impossible expectations, but such influences notwithstanding, I still came away from it slightly underwhelmed. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the majority of it, but something definitely was missing.
It’s a smart, emotional movie, and I will no doubt watch it again many times over; I just wish the second half was a bit more like the first, the messages not so strained, and the ending slightly less optimistic.
If I’m being completely honest, I found the similarities to Johnny 5 a teensy bit grating. After all, I’m a robot-loving child of the ’80s (and, if memory serves, had the movie on both VHS and Beta) — how am I supposed to feel? ;)
[E]ven though WALL·E is just a futuristic trash compactor (the robot equivalent of a hungry goat), he’s still able to fall madly in love with Eve, a drone that looks like an iPod. Because his intelligent designers gave him the ability to express his emotions — he’s got those adorable binocular eyes — they also unwittingly gave him the ability to experience his emotions. That very Darwinian idea is at the heart of WALL·E.
Watching the “fish” flop around on the table is kind of creepy (but it’s a cool creepy).
MS Exchange email drafts on the iPhone
The iPhone’s built-in support for MS Exchange is great, and has worked for me without issue since setting it up yesterday. That said, there is one niggling nut I’d like to crack, if possible.
Let me start by saying that I’m pretty sure the problem isn’t on Apple’s end; I think it’s just how Exchange handles the situation, though I have no real experience with Exchange and can’t say for sure (please correct me if you know).
The issue is that when I save drafts of emails on a computer other than the iPhone, those drafts, while “available” on the iPhone, act like emails I’ve received (though they are devoid of sender information); given that copy/paste is still a pipe dream on the iPhone, the drafts are effectively useless (i.e., I can’t send them!).
There is a similar issue going the other way as well; that is, when I create a new email on the iPhone, and save it as a draft, that draft never appears on any of my other Exchange-aware machines. On the iPhone, a new “drafts” folder appears in the folder list (for those counting, there are now two folders named “drafts”), but I don’t think that folder talks to Exchange (i.e., it’s the local-only drafts mechanism built into the iPhone Mail app).
So, the question is this: how can I get the iPhone Mail app to treat Exchange-created drafts as drafts?
Prototype of Nike shoes from Back to the Future II (available on eBay).
Note that this is an actual working model of the Nike “Mag” kicks from the movie, not the just-released Marty McFly Hyperdunks. If you’re having trouble remembering what these shoes were all about (and you’re not, because you wanted them at some point), check out this quick video.
Google has open sourced Google Browser Sync.
Awesome! This is potentially great news, especially in light of the semi-disappointment that is Weave v0.2.
Thumber is a Mac OS X app that creates Cinema Redux photos.
A few months back I actually bought Brendan Dawes’ Cinema Redux print of 2001: A Space Odyssey; it’s currently hanging in my office. I love it.
The previews we’ve seen over the past few months leave no room for doubt that the iPhone is an extremely capable gaming device and that we will see some very solid titles available on launch day. Given this, we thought it a particularly good time to have a look at just what makes the iPhone thusly capable.
Weave v0.2 and tab synchronization
A couple of weeks ago I published a piece regarding the death of Google Browser Sync, and its heir presumptive, Weave, which at the time, did not yet support the feature I care most about, namely session restoration across multiple machines. Not long after pushing that piece into the ether, a few people emailed me to let me know that a tab-syncing version of Weave would be released on June 20th; though the release date slipped a bit, v0.2 was made available a few days ago, tab synchronization intact. Well, kind of.
Since the release, I’ve been testing the tab-syncing functionality, and unfortunately, I have to say it hasn’t worked too well. There have been times when it has presented to me tabs from machine one that weren’t currently open on machine two, but this behavior — the intended behavior — is sporadic at best.
The following is my attempt to sum up what I’ve experienced over the last couple of days (please forgive me the bullets), after which I’ll describe what I think is wrong with the implementation (even assuming it worked perfectly).
I haven’t yet had occasion to pore over Weave’s activity log (I will this weekend), but I suspect it might shed some light on at least some of the issues I’ve encountered.
Implementation (and how it should be changed)
It’s called tab synchronization, which, in my mind, means it should be as automated as possible. As it stands, users have to consciously look for, of all things, a yellow triangle with an exclamation point in the middle. Yeah, a hazard symbol. Huh?
Assuming you notice this little “warning” in your status bar, you then have to click on it, which will [hopefully] present to you the tabs on your other machine(s) which aren’t currently open on the machine from which you’re clicking. Finally, you have to read through a list of page titles and check a box next to those pages you want to open. What is worse, there is no way to select all of them at once, and presumably that’s exactly what you want to do (I mean, you’re syncing, right?).
In my opinion, tab synchronization should work like so:
That’s it. I should never have to think about synchronization. When I open/close a tab on machine one, machine two should open/close that tab in the next sync cycle. I don’t need to interact with those processes other than to set them in motion by using the browser.
To the Weave team
Thank you. Please don’t confuse my comments with inappreciation or some sense of entitlement. Quite the opposite — I know how hard this stuff is, and recognize the nascency of the project. At the end of the day, I just want to see this thing reach its potential, which, I realize, goes far, far beyond tab synchronization.
[L]et’s assume that this mythology is true and, within about 25 years, computers will exceed human intelligence and rapidly bootstrap themselves to godlike status. At that point, they will aid us (or run roughshod over us) to transform the Earth into a paradise.
Here’s the problem: 25 years is too late. The newest business-as-usual climate scenarios look increasingly dire. If we haven’t solved our problems within the next decade, even these theoretical godlike AIs aren’t going to be able to help us. Thermodynamics is thermodynamics, and no amount of godlike thinking can reverse the irreversible.
The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany’s University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet’s stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century.
Running out of oil, yes. We’ve all been concerned about that for many years and everyone anticipates a time when the world’s underground petroleum reserves will have been pumped dry. But oil is just an organic substance that was created by natural biological processes; we know that we have a lot of it, but we’re using it up very rapidly, no more is being created, and someday it’ll be gone. The disappearance of elements, though—that’s a different matter.
[...]
But we can’t exactly set up a reservation somewhere where the supply of gallium and hafnium can quietly replenish itself. And once the scientists have started talking about our chances of running out of copper, we know that the future is rapidly moving in on us and big changes lie ahead.
The previous post explained how computers boot up right up to the point where the boot loader, after stuffing the kernel image into memory, is about to jump into the kernel entry point. This last post about booting takes a look at the guts of the kernel to see how an operating system starts life.
Booting is an involved, hacky, multi-stage affair — fun stuff. Here’s an outline of the process.
Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites.
[…]
In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines.
Dear online stores, while this little development may make your Flash-only sites more visible to search engines, it’s not going to help you push product. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to a Flash-only site, clicked around a bit, found something interesting that I wanted to share, and been unable to share it because there was no URI to that particular “page.”
If a referral from me to your product requires steps similar to those found below, then consider it a lost sale because I’m not making the referral:
UPS and the art of sorting nearly a million packages a day.
During the course of moving off the 90 aircraft they’ve come in on and are immediately heading back out on, each of those 800,000 to 900,000 packages [winding their way through Worldport, UPS' air-distribution facility,] are touched by human hands just twice, once at each end. [The facility] can handle as many as 416,000 packages an hour.
[...]
[Worldport] has 30,500 conveyor belts that comprise 170 total miles of belts. There are 326 different positions for unloading packages and 1,480 for loading. And there are 8,372 tilt trays sorters, each of which delivers a package into the hands of the person who will ultimately place it into the bin that will then be put onto an airplane.
Infatuated with statistics and seduced by the power of extrapolation, singularitarians abduct the moral imagination into a speculative no-man’s-land. To be sure, they are hardly the first to spread fanciful technological prophecies, but among enthusiasts and doomsayers alike their proposition enjoys an inexplicable popularity. Perhaps the real question is how they have gotten away with it.
Let’s face it. The singularity is a religious rather than a scientific vision. The science-fiction writer Ken MacLeod has dubbed it “the rapture for nerds,” an allusion to the end-time, when Jesus whisks the faithful to heaven and leaves us sinners behind.
Select multiple lines of text in Firefox 3.
Awesome. This will be great for my “bits,” and for work stuff too, though it should delimit the selections somehow (currently there’s not even a space between them).
Google Browser Sync → Weave?
Update: It looks like a tab-syncing version of Weave will be released on June 20th!
A few days ago it was “announced” that Google was discontinuing support for Google Browser Sync, which is, without a doubt, the most useful Firefox extension I use. In a response to a user’s inquiry regarding GBS support in Firefox 3, Google said the following:
It was a tough call, but we decided to phase out support for Browser Sync. Since the team has moved on to other projects that are keeping them busy, we don’t have time to update the extension to work with Firefox 3 or to continue to maintain it.
Grr. I understand that they have much bigger fish to fry, and that GBS makes absolutely no money for them (as far as I can tell), but so many of us have to come to rely on it, and in a very big way. I’m not saying they should maintain it forever, or even that it should remain free, but it would be nice if it could be kept alive just a little longer; maybe at least until someone else offered something similar?
Well, it looks like the void may be filled sooner than we thought. Keep reading.
I hate inefficient, repetitive manual labor
I’ll be honest, I don’t care about 80% of what GBS does, and in fact, most of what it does can be done by other extensions or combinations of extensions. I mainly care about session restoration across multiple machines, something that no other extension, browser, or service currently supports.
I realize that my use case may be a little different than most — I generally cycle between two machines each day and my browser rarely has less than 50 open tabs — but I must admit that I was still very surprised to see so few mentions of the session-restoration aspect of GBS on sites discussing the death of the extension.
In any event, before GBS, I was made to do the following every singe day, twice:
It’s 2008. That’s crazy. The Copy All URLs extension made the task bearable, but it was still something that made me angry every time I had to do it. And I had to do it twice a day.
GBS changed all that and allowed me to completely ignore what tabs/windows were open/closed on which machine — if I wanted to make sure that all the open tabs from machine one were available to me on machine two, I simply had to restart the browser on machine two. Period. End of story.
Sure, there were times when it broke, and badly, but it was nothing a little history-surfing and determination couldn’t fix. For the most part, GBS worked brilliantly and saved me a lot of time, effort, and worry.
Enter Weave (hopefully)
Sadly, and I think surprisingly, there are currently no other options for multi-machine session restoration. Though relatively new, not even Weave, Mozilla’s homegrown web services integrator, supports such a feature, though it seems it will be a part of the next release. From a recent post at the Weave discussion board:
Tab sync is not in the latest release, but it should be in the next one. The way it works is that it periodically saves a list of your open tabs to the Weave server, and it periodically checks the server to see if any tabs have been added by your other computers.
So when you open a tab on a computer with Weave, then go to another computer that also has Weave, Weave will notify you that tabs from the first computer are available and let you pick which ones you want to open.
Nice! If that second part is true, then Weave may actually turn out to be better than GBS, because you won’t have to restart the browser to sync tabs/windows.
Given the current, overlapping features between GBS and Weave,1 and the cozy Google-Mozilla relationship, one can’t help but think that GBS is being phased out in light of Weave.
I wonder if the tab-syncing version will be released together with Firefox 3 on Tuesday. Hrm.
Yes, I realize fully that the big picture for Weave is much more grandiose than was ever intended for GBS, but its current, very limited feature set finds a lot of parallels in the Google extension. ↑
Lenski started off with a single microbe. It divided a few times into identical clones, from which Lenski started 12 colonies. He kept each of these 12 lines in its own flask. Each day he and his colleagues provided the bacteria with a little glucose, which was gobbled up by the afternoon. The next morning, the scientists took a small sample from each flask and put it in a new one with fresh glucose. And on and on and on, for 20 years and running.
[...]
Over the generations, in fits and starts, the bacteria did indeed evolve into faster breeders. The bacteria in the flasks today breed 75% faster on average than their original ancestor. Lenski and his colleagues have pinpointed some of the genes that have evolved along the way; in some cases, for example, the same gene has changed in almost every line, but it has mutated in a different spot in each case. Lenski and his colleagues have also shown how natural selection has demanded trade-offs from the bacteria; while they grow faster on a meager diet of glucose, they’ve gotten worse at feeding on some other kinds of sugars.
[...]
Lenski’s research has shown that in many ways, evolution is repeatable. The 12 lines tend to evolve in the same direction.
Scientists confirm that parts of earliest genetic material may have come from the stars.
The materials they have found include the molecules uracil and xanthine, which are precursors to the molecules that make up DNA and RNA, and are known as nucleobases.
[...]
The analysis shows that the nucleobases contain a heavy form of carbon which could only have been formed in space. Materials formed on Earth consist of a lighter variety of carbon.
“The only novelty in my work is the attempt to explain how species become modified,” Darwin later wrote.
[...]
[W]e often act today as if Darwin invented the idea of evolution itself, including the theory that human beings developed from an ape ancestor.
In fact, scientists had been talking about our primate origins at least since 1699, after the London physician Edward Tyson dissected a chimpanzee and documented a disturbing likeness to human anatomy. And the idea of evolution had been around for generations.
Synapses found to be more complex up the evolutionary scale.
In worms and flies, the synapses mediate simple forms of learning, but in higher animals they are built from a much richer array of protein components and conduct complex learning and pattern recognition.
[…]
If the synapses are thought of as the chips in a computer, then brainpower is shaped by the sophistication of each chip, as well as by their numbers. From the evolutionary perspective, the big brains of vertebrates not only have more synapses and neurons, but each of these synapses is more powerful.
DailyLit is a nifty service that will deliver entire books to you over email in small, manageable bits. The idea is to read a tiny bit of the book every day until it’s finished.
Worst. Idea. Ever. Get a grip people.
What are the essential properties of consciousness, those without which there is no experience whatsoever?
We think the answer to that question has to do with the amount of integrated information that an organism, or a machine, can generate.
[...]
To be conscious, then, you need to be a single integrated entity with a large repertoire of states. Let’s take this one step further: your level of consciousness has to do with how much integrated information you can generate. That’s why you have a higher level of consciousness than a tree frog or a supercomputer.
The Machine That Changed the World.
Andy Baio has put a lot of time and energy into making available online the “longest, most comprehensive documentary about the history of computing ever produced,” replete with excellent annotations throughout.
I’ve just finished this five-part, five-hour series from 1992, and am here to tell you that it’s fantastic, a real treat. If you’ve any interest in computers, you almost have to watch this documentary — trust me, you’ll enjoy it.
Thanks Andy!
Just how will Apple meet expectations? Using the patent application as a guide, Apple appears to be making room on the iPhone for flash memory, which means an end to Apple’s standoff with Adobe that’s kept iPhones from easily viewing a plethora of Internet videos.
This has to be a joke, right?
Just send a direct message (not a @reply) [to “trackthis”] with the FedEx/UPS/USPS/DHL tracking code [], followed by a nickname for the package.
Joe Keohane profiles CKE, the company behind Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., and dissects its utterly unapologetic approach to producing and marketing gut-busting, “meat as a condiment”-type fare.
Religion is a product of evolution, software suggests.
To determine if it was possible for religion to emerge as an adaptation, Dow wrote a simple computer program that focuses on the evolutionary benefits people receive from their interactions with one another.
[...]
By distilling religious belief into a genetic predisposition to pass along unverifiable information, the program predicts that religion will flourish. However, religion only takes hold if non-believers help believers out – perhaps because they are impressed by their devotion.
Monkey thinks robot into action.
In a dramatic display of the potential of prosthetic arms, a monkey [] was able to use his brain to directly control a robotic arm and feed himself a marshmallow.
[...]
To achieve the feat, two monkeys had a grid of microelectrodes implanted into the motor cortex, [the] part of the brain that controls motor planning and execution. The animals had previously been trained to move an anthropomorphic robotic arm [] using a joystick. To learn to control the prosthesis with their minds, the monkeys had their arms temporarily restrained as they watched a computer move the arm through the required motions []. ‘They imagine themselves doing the task, like athletes do for sports,’ says Schwartz. ‘The neurons are active as they observe the movement, and then we can capture the [neural signals] and use them for our own control.’
‘Wolverine’ frogs pop retractable claws from their toes.
The frogs defend themselves with sharp bone claws on their hind feet but to do so, the animals have to drive the claws through their own skin. It’s an extreme defence that is completely unique in the animal world.
Twitter Tools, modified to ignore @tweets
For the past month or so I’ve been using Alex King’s fantastic Twitter Tools WordPress plugin to display on this site the latest tweet from my Twitter stream (see sidebar). However, I have one semi-trivial issue with his very robust plugin, namely that it doesn’t allow you to keep @tweets — tweets directed to a particular user — from being displayed. I changed that.
To ensure that my changes wouldn’t break any of the “main” features of the plugin, the only function I modified in twitter-tools.php was aktt_latest_tweet() (i.e., the function that displays the latest tweet). If you use any of the other features and want this @tweet-exclusion to be plugin-wide, it shouldn’t be too hard to incorporate my changes into the other functions you’re using.
The modifications
I increased the query limit from 1 to 5, so that the last five tweets are retrieved instead of just the latest. These five tweets are then cycled through until a non-@tweet is found, at which point the loop breaks and the non-@tweet is output to your site. If your last five tweets are @tweets, then the function will simply output “No tweets available at the moment,” which is what it would otherwise display if there was some error in initially retrieving the tweets. If you’re constantly @replying to other users, you may want to bump the query limit to some larger number.
I should note that this is a modified version of Twitter Tools v1.1b1 (the latest version of the plugin is v1.2b1). If you’re currently using v1.2b1, but invoking only the aktt_latest_tweet() function, then you can safely overwrite your twitter-tools.php file with this modified version. If you’ve made any modifications to either v1.1b1 or v1.2b1, or if you use any of the other available plugin features, then you’ll want to overwrite only the aktt_latest_tweet() function.
Download the modified twitter-tools.php file (remember to change the extension from .phps to .php after downloading).
Future plans
I think at some point I may completely gut the Twitter Tools plugin, and release a much simpler version that does nothing more than display the latest tweet, minus @tweets.
Trashing (from) the command line.
A neat Mac OS X command-line tool from Dave Dribin that allows you to move files to the trash, instead of irretrievably deleting them with “rm.”
If you live and die by the command line (like me), it might make sense to alias “rm -rf” to this program (e.g., for a bash shell: alias ‘rm -rf’=”trash”), though I’m not yet sure how it handles subdirectories, etc.
Dead-simple way to check and see if one Twitter user follows another.
I love sites like this that build their functionality into the URI itself.
Is the world’s food system collapsing?
Our current food predicament resembles a Malthusian scenario—misery and famine—but one largely created by overproduction rather than underproduction. Our ability to produce vastly too many calories for our basic needs has skewed the concept of demand, and generated a wildly dysfunctional market.
Amazon Kindle
Yes, I realize that this piece is a bit “late,” but I wasn’t able to get my hands on a Kindle until just a couple of months ago.1
The five-second, 192-char review (inspired by Twitter)
I love the Kindle, and totally see myself using and enjoying it (and its progeny) for many years to come. I’m reading more because of it, and seriously doubt I’ll ever read a paper book again.
Why I bought one
My explanation (justification?) is likely going to sound either abstruse or semi-reasonable, depending on both how well you know me and where on the luddite↔technophile continuum you fall, but hear me out.
I’ve always been a rather voracious reader (I’m that guy who has to read the side of the cereal box, etc.), but since becoming so completely caught-up in this web thing many, many years ago, almost all of my reading has moved to the computer. So, while I no doubt read much more than the average person each day, the bulk source of the words has shifted from books to Internet-based “news,” and all that that has come to mean.
At the end of the day, I really wanted to get back to reading books.
You could obviously argue that I could read books without the Kindle, and you’d be right. Partially. Sure, I can go out and pick up a book (and I’ve certainly done that over the last decade, though probably only a handful of times a year), but these books are missing what I’ve come to really appreciate and enjoy about reading online — the ability to [re]search and easily switch between sources. The Kindle fills these gaps.
For example, you can immediately lookup the definition of a word by using the device’s built-in dictionary (simply move the cursor to the line where the word is and choose “lookup in dictionary” from the menu). Relatedly, and given that the Kindle comes with a lifetime EV-DO Internet connection, you can use Wikipedia to easily lookup anything on which you’d like more information. It all works quite brilliantly and is obviously something that simply can’t be done with a paper book.
As another example, consider the auto-bookmarking feature, which automatically remembers where you left off in each of your books (and yes, you can manually place as many bookmarks as you’d like). Such a nicety also finds a parallel in the computer world: my browser automatically remembers not only tabs and other session information, but also the position at which I stopped reading the pages within the tabs.
Another feature I really like is the ability to see, at a glance, how far along you are in a book simply by looking at the dotted line at the bottom of the screen (the dots are “bolded” as you go), which can be considered equivalent to the scrollbar on a web page. Moreover, when viewing your list of books, these dotted lines are made relative to all the books on your Kindle; it’s kind of neat to see not only how far along you are in each of your books, but also how long each book is relative to the others on the device.
One of the best features of the Kindle is its storage capacity. Out of the box it can hold roughly 200 books, and that space can be expanded many times over using its available SD memory slot. It’s so nice to have multiple books at your fingertips (as you have multiple tabs at your fingertips inside a browser); you can flip back and forth between completely different subject matter, all from a single, light device that automatically remembers where you left off the last time.
Finally, the Kindle lets you highlight certain passages and take notes along the way; and like a web page (or the Internet generally), these highlights, annotations, and even the books themselves are searchable.
All of this may seem perfectly obvious, not perfectly analogous to the web world, and completely inconsequential to you, but for me, in the aggregate, it’s exactly what I currently want in a book.
The end result of all of these things is that I find myself not only wanting to read more, but actually reading more. A lot more.
Design
Let’s be honest, the Kindle looks like a crossword-puzzle device a grandfather might receive from his grandson at Christmas (and so it is with some trepidation that I use it in public), but the fact is, the design is actually very thought out, and well at that.
At first blush, the design seems irretrievably flawed. Indeed, when I first saw the pictures I couldn’t believe Amazon went with what looked to be the worst type of design: ugly + impractical. In fact, I didn’t feel too much better upon taking the device out of its packaging, but after some serious use I’ve come to really appreciate the way it works. Sure, even after nearly two months of use, I still find myself hitting the next/previous page buttons when I don’t mean to, but I’m willing to look past that given that they work so well when you actually do want to move between pages, and which ease-of-use isn’t predicated on the device’s position.
I usually find myself holding the Kindle with one hand (i.e., near the bottom of the device with my thumb on top and fingers below), and switching back and forth between my right and left hands. The back cover is a rubber-like pad that actually feels pretty good and definitely makes the Kindle a bit easier to grasp.
As previously mentioned, it’s hard to use the Kindle for anything other than reading without accidentally hitting the large next/previous buttons that make up most of its sides. That said, the layout of the buttons really does work well when you’re reading; because they take up most of the sides, they are generally very accessible no matter how you hold the device, or even if you lay it down on a table, bed, lap, etc.
Many have criticized not only the large buttons, but also the combination of the “select wheel” and “scrollbar,” used to highlight menu options and other controls. I quite like the select wheel and think it’s a great compromise given the limitations inherent in e-ink. The wheel has a nice rubbery feel to it, and gives tactile feedback when you press down on it (not unlike the scrollwheel on a mouse). The one thing I’m not a huge fan of is the “cursor,” which runs along a track parallel to the screen, and which corresponds to what on the screen you wish to select. It’s a bit shiny (think reflective), and for reasons I can’t quite figure out. I should note that the cursor also acts as a progress indicator in some instances, but I’ve yet to find that functionality useful.
One of the nicest things about the Kindle, and something that is inherent in such a device, is that, unlike a regular book, its orientation and weight aren’t constantly shifting. With a paper book, you are made to move [it] around as you shift from the left to the right page, flip pages, etc. With the Kindle however, all of that shifting disappears and you can hold your chosen position indefinitely.
Such a “feature” generally allows you to expend less energy when reading. For example, I like reading in bed while lying on my side. With a paper book you have to constantly hold the book to keep it open and to move it slightly depending on whether you’re reading the right or left page; with the Kindle, you can just let it rest on the bed and then tap the next-page button as needed. I realize that this may sound like a trivial thing to devote a paragraph to, but it really is amazing how such a device can change the way you read, or make the way you’re used to reading that much better.
The e-ink display
If you haven’t seen e-ink before, you owe it to yourself to check it out. It really does read like paper. Of course, this technology has been available to the public for quite some time (most notably via Sony’s e-book Reader), but never has it been presented in such a perfect package (the Kindle’s looks notwithstanding). Not only does the screen read like paper, but the viewing angle also mimics paper (i.e., it’s limited more by your eyes than the technology), and it’s very non-reflective, which means you can read it just the same in the bright sun as you can next to a lamp in a dark room (I’ve yet to find lighting conditions under which I couldn’t read it, save no light at all). It’s great.
Another nice side-effect of the e-ink technology is how little power it draws. Indeed, because there is no backlight, the only time the Kindle really touches the battery is when the screen is refreshed (e.g., when you go to the next page). Subsequently, the device can go for a very long time without a recharge, which, as you might guess, is incredibly freeing.
The Kindle offers six different font sizes, which is useful in ways you might not imagine. For example, lately I’ve been taking the Kindle to the gym if I know I’m going to be riding the bike, and if my arm gets tired from holding the device in a particular position for a prolonged period of time, I can simply increase the font size and set it on the control panel of the bike. Similarly, when reading at night, if my eyes start to feel really tired, I might turn the font size up a few notches to reduce the strain.
The refresh rate of the screen seems to bother some people, but my guess is that these complainers have either never used an e-ink device (and are commenting just to comment) or have only used one for a very short period of time. I’ll readily admit that the first few times it was a little weird to have to “wait” for the screen to refresh, but given that it takes less than a second — roughly the same amount of time it takes to flip a page in a book — it’s a total non-issue.
The included case is crap
The Kindle comes with a usable, but cheap case that uses one of those annoying elastic bands to hold it together (think Moleskine). Moreover, the device is secured to the bookcover-type case by just two flimsy braces located near the middle of the case. It’s crappy.
Within two minutes of using the supplied case I started looking online for third-party options, but there were very few available. In fact, I could find only one company making Kindle cases, and I picked up their Slip Case. It’s nice. It’s certainly not going to win any design awards, but it gets the job done. It’s very thin (fits well in the small pocket of my computer bag), is hard on one side (to protect the screen), and holds snugly the device. I definitely recommend it.
Buying books is addictive
I was amazed at how many books I bought within the first two weeks of owning the Kindle.2 It’s so incredibly easy to buy books, either directly from the device itself, or through Amazon.com; either way, it’s essentially a one-click process, and the book arrives on the Kindle within a minute of the purchase.
Using a similar process, you’re allowed to download, for free, the first chapter of any book available in the Kindle store. A great move, which costs all involved parties essentially nothing, and in the best case may lead to a purchase.
Did I mention that there are currently ~120,000 books available, and most for $9.99 or less? I don’t think you’ll ever want for content.
The send-to feature
The ability to send to the Kindle, by email, long-form articles and other content (for 10 cents an email)3 is invaluable. If I come across a long article that I think I’ll probably never actually finish reading on the computer, I simply email it to my Kindle address and seconds later it’s on the device. OK, so the formatting is hit-or-miss, but what do you expect? Amazon obviously can’t be expected to be able to parse perfectly everything you throw at it, and I’m sure this is something they’re constantly improving.
Things I haven’t tried yet
I’m so preoccupied with reading that I haven’t spent any time at all connecting it to my computer (I’ve done everything over-the-air), adding music (much less listening to music through either the built-in speaker or headphone jack), adding memory by way of an SD card, or downloading and listening to audiobooks. I have spent a little time playing around with the “experimental” web browser, and while it’s usable, I don’t see myself ever actually using it, save for Wikipedia lookups (web pages just aren’t meant to be consumed on a device like this, with non-scrolling e-ink).
What I’d like to see in future versions
I’d like them to offer different colors, or at least one other color (i.e., anything other than bright white).
It would be really nice to have my highlights (i.e., book passages that I’ve “circled”) available to me through my Amazon account. Amazon currently keeps track of the books you’ve bought (and will allow you to re-download them at any time if, for example, you’ve removed them from your Kindle to make room for other content), but doesn’t offer a way for me to use the highlights I’ve made, without plugging the device into my computer (though I think they’re saved together with the book, and come along with it should you re-download it).
I use the keyboard so infrequently that it might be nice to have it slide in/out or otherwise hide itself, so as to bring down the overall length of the device. Then again, I’m not quite sure how I would hold it if that extra space wasn’t there.
The behavior of footnotes can be inconsistent, even within a single book. I think this needs to be a bit more standardized across all books. When it works, it works great, but when it doesn’t, you can be made to figure out where you left off (which may be next to impossible in some cases).
Should you buy a Kindle?
Yes, assuming you like to read books (or simply want to read more of them), I can’t recommend this device highly enough. Amazon has made the entire process — from searching for and buying books, to reading and annotating them — effortless and fun. They really do have something special in the Kindle.
Six months ago, Amazon sold out of Kindles within 5.5 hours of making them available, and only recently has supply caught up with demand; yeah, that’s right, it was basically “out of stock” for six months (you could order it, but it was still taking, in some instances, a month+ to actually ship out). So, what’s the fallback option? Right, eBay. The problem though is that for a very long time they were going for ~$1000 on eBay (2.5 times their retail cost of $400), and only a couple of months ago did the prices start to fall below $500 (which is when I finally grabbed one). ↑
Rodney Brooks’ Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us, Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, David Levy’s Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships, Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, David McCullough’s John Adams, and Tony Horwitz’s A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World ↑
It costs you 10 cents each time you send content to your Kindle email address, but to save some time and a little money, you can actually zip up a few different files and send the archive to your Kindle address; the file will be unzipped and the individual documents will be sent to the device, all for just 10 cents. ↑
Belkin CushTop
Earlier this month I wrote about my quest for a new laptop stand, and commented on the stand I had recently purchased, the Allsop Cool Channel Platform. I also referenced the iLap, which I had been using for years, despite some fairly serious flaws.
While the Allsop was OK, I very quickly resigned myself to continuing the hunt for a better solution. Just a few days after publishing that piece, I came across the Belkin CushTop, and while I had seen it many times before, it always struck me as a bit too bulky and cumbersome, but this time I decided to give it a shot, and I’m really glad I did.
There’s no getting around the fact that it’s a little large, but I’m here to tell you that it works very well besides. In fact, I liked it so much, that after just one night’s use I picked up another so that I could have one at my girlfriend’s place when I was over there.
I was worried that the fabric covering the CushTop would not be sticky enough to keep the MacBook Air from sliding around on its four rubber feet, but the Air actually sticks to it really well, which allows you to work in a lot of different positions; in other words, you don’t have to sit perfectly still with the stand flat against your thighs, but rather have some real freedom to move around a bit.
Part of its large volume has to be attributed to its slightly unusual height, but that it’s so tall is actually good for a couple of reasons. The first is that the heat from the bottom of the laptop is that much further away from your body; this, coupled with the inch-plus hole in the middle of the CushTop, means that you feel no heat from the notebook. Very nice.
The other advantage of the increased height is that the screen is moved closer to your plane of sight (i.e., you don’t have to bend your neck as much), and with protracted use this can make a huge difference. As a corollary, the keyboard is also raised a significant amount (when compared to other stands, which usually raise the back of the laptop much more than the front); while some people might not like the extra height, I actually prefer it — I can generally type faster and for longer periods of time when the keyboard is raised a few inches above my lap.
After using the CushTop for a few days, I’m no longer actively searching for a new laptop stand (that’s right, all of you can breathe a heavy sigh of relief, and sleep well knowing the hunt is over — my gift to you).
Help, I need a new laptop stand
For the past four years I’ve been using an iLap to keep my laptop away from, you know, my lap, but a few weeks ago I decided to pick up an Allsop Cool Channel Platform. I had been looking for a new stand for a while, and just happened to notice the Allsop model while waiting in line to return the BlueAnt Z9.
While there was nothing particularly wrong with the iLap, I was getting a bit bored with it (yeah, I know, I know, it’s a laptop stand), and I’ve found the front pad, which connects to the stand by velcro, pretty annoying all along (something I kind of touched on in my original iLap piece). The whole setup never felt very solid, yet for whatever reason I stuck with it for years.
As far as the Allsop platform goes, it’s generally alright, but definitely suffers from some problems, especially if you are using a MacBook Air.
My favorite feature of the stand, and indeed the main reason I bought it, is the “lip” in the front, intended to keep your notebook from slipping off the platform.1 This feature allows you much more freedom to place the laptop in various positions on your lap, stomach, etc., and knowing that it can’t slip off the front is pretty liberating. The problem though is that the platform just isn’t rigid enough; it bends very easily. In fact, with just the lightweight Air resting on it, and it on a slightly less than perfectly flat surface (e.g., your lap a lot of the time), it will bend. This desire to bend, coupled with the Air’s super-low profile, means that the front of the Air often finds itself on top of the lip, instead of behind it, which obviously completely defeats its purpose.
I’ve also had a problem with heat dissipation, even though Allsop says the platform “uses a non-slip woven surface with engineered channels for passive air circulation to help keep your notebook computer cool.” With the Air, the heat vents are located on the bottom of the notebook, near the back where it starts to curve. Because the platform is slightly cushioned, and because the Air’s feet are very short, the entire bottom of the Air tends to touch the surface of the platform, which inhibits the heat’s dispersion. My Air tends to run 10-15 degrees hotter when on the platform (as opposed to a table). So, while it does keep the heat away from your lap, it actually causes the Air to become hotter than it otherwise would.
Long story short, I need a new laptop stand. Any recommendations?
The iLap effectively has a lip (i.e., the front pad extends above the top of the metal), but given the annoying velcro fastener and that the front pad is easily disturbed even when it is on a perfectly flat surface, the lip just isn’t very sound. ↑
