Category Archives: Technology

Mountain Lion

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So I looked at the list of 200 new features in Mountain Lion and … meh.

If there’s a company in the world that they didn’t pick in preference to Google, though, I couldn’t figure out what it is. I mean, really: a feature to let you access Vimeo?

I wonder how much of that linkage is built on APIs where you can connect to other alternative services? I understand that Apple feels threatened by Google (why, I can’t imagine, except their legendary paranoia) and wants to partner with everyone else. (Vimeo!?) But I want to put together a best-of-breed workflow. I don’t want a Safari reading list, I want Instapaper. I don’t want Safari bookmarks, I want Pinboard. But I’ll get what Apple thinks I should have, which means the services that are dumbed down enough for computer novices to use on their phones.

Except when those services are business partners of Apples. Like Facebook. I don’t want or need hooks to Facebook, but I’ll be surprised if any way to turn them completely off, either. I wonder how much of my activity leaks over to Facebook, and how does much does Apple get for selling to to them? (And since when does Apple overhang the market like this? Fall availability? Why wasn’t it ready in time for the general release of Mountain Lion?)

As for iCloud…. I’d love it if iCloud did what I want, though. I’d love to share calendars with my family members. I can do that now with Google Calendar. Apple says I will be able to do it now with iCloud. That would be a welcome improvement. It’s not clear that you can do that with your contacts, bookmarks, notes, and reminders, though.

(That is another problem with all the social-media linkage, as well. The social media sites all want me to have one persona. What good is it if Twitter is linked into everything I do, so long as it’s just one Twitter account? And Facebook won’t even let me have multiple accounts.)

Whatever.

Tab Sweep

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Charles Murray talking to Reason Magazine about his book Coming Apart. (My link is to a point 20 minutes in that I found compelling.)

The Institute for Justice asks if you should need the government’s permission to work?

A dozen extremely disappointing facts about popular music.

There’s a vulgar expression about pulling one’s head out of someplace else. But the anatomy doesn’t really work. In fact, the brain began to grow 2.5M years ago, when our ancestors started walking upright. Scientists now think that we solved the problem with our flexible skulls.

Appropos the previous item, in The Lost World, Michael Crichton once likened humans to marsupials. What do you think?

This USGS illustration shows how much water there is on earth. (“How deep is it?” “Deep enough to drown in.”)

Useful Tools

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Since I’ve been setting up a new computer, I’ve had the opportunity to think about the apps I use. I don’t have time or energy to put together a comprehensive list, but here are a few of my “can’t-live-with-them” apps.

Mac Mini at Work

Chrome (and the iReader extension), Safari, and Opera. Chrome is my main browser, but sometimes I need to work in two Google accounts at the same time. Then I fire up Safari. On very rare occasions I need a third online personality; when I do, I break out Opera. I also have Firefox, of course, but I hardly ever use it.

Xee and Skim. Macs come with Preview.app, which is fine, so far as it goes. It will let you open pretty much any type of image file. But it won’t let you go through a folder full of them in a hurry. That’s where Xee comes in. A side benefit of Xee is that it won’t screw up the EXIF data in your image files. Preview.app is fine for reading (and minor editing of) PDF files, too. But the user interface gets more bizarre with each release of Mac OS X. With Lion, I officially declare it a mess, and use Skim unless there’s a compelling reason to use Preview.app.

MacVim. Some people prefer Emacs or TextMate or BareBones BBEdit or TextEdit or whatever, but they’re wrong. Vi is right. MacVim is the best Mac implementation of VIM. Having said that, TextWrangler is a pretty awesome free-as-in-beer editor from BareBones software. It almost makes me want to try out BareBones’ BBEdit. I find TextWrangler especially helpful in converting text from one format to another.

NodeBox (and its derivatives, Nodebox 2 and Nodebox for OpenGL) are “generative design” applications. I’m not sure what that means, but whatever it is, it includes being able to write small programs to draw pictures. (Think of this as the modern equivalent of the venerable pic(1) and grap(1) programming languages. See also Graphviz.)

Handbrake and VLC. Handbrake is how I make backups of my DVDs. VLC is like the DVD Player application that comes with a Mac, except VLC works and it doesn’t crash all the time. How it does captioning isn’t the prettiest, I admit. On the other hand, it not only permits you to take screen captures, it provides a feature of its own to do it. I wish VLC remembered where you quit watching a DVD, but you can’t have everything.

MacPorts. Can’t live with them. Can’t imagine life without them. Therein lies the relevant conundrum. The HomeBrew project might ultimately supplant MacPorts, but I’m nervous about its install location. I’ve tried Fink, but not lately.

Kindle Touch

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The update I applied seems to make the Kindle a bit more responsive. Some of the books—but not all—seem to have better typography (e.g., they have curly “smart” quotes rather than straight "dumb" ones). So I’d say the update was worth the effort to download and install, but nothing spectacular. Ultimately, when you have an iPhone (or an iPad) then the user experience of a Kindle is going to be pretty “meh” no matter what.

Updating the Kindle Touch

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I got a Kindle Touch for my birthday last year, although it didn’t arrive until around Thanksgiving. It has been something of a disappointment. My one child got a Barnes & Noble Nook about the same time, and it is by far the better product. (I’m not alone in that assessment.) (While I’m sure about the Nook, I’m not sure about Barnes & Noble. I chose the Amazon product to access the Amazon market. If ebook readers used a common industry-wide format, the Nook would be a no-brainer.)

Anyway, the Kindle Touch is a few grams too heavy to be comfortable, and the user interface is … well, there’s no way to sugarcoat this: it stinks. You never know where to press because sometimes you press in the invisible right-hand zone to move forward. Sometimes you “flick” things up from the bottom. To go forward you tap the right side. To go backward you flick the left. And so on.

But I see there is a new firmware update for the Touch. I don’t know if it’s any good, but it can hardly be any worse. I’m installing it as I type this. I’ll let you know how it works out.

Command Line Interfaces of the Future

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This cracks me up: the Windows 8 server is going to nudge, and eventually force, administrators to give up their point-and-click interfaces in favor of something a little more up-to-date.

(I could have told you they’d eventually wind up here, after struggling for years with COMMAND.COM and CMD.EXE, only to see them finally produce a halfway decent shell—long after I’d moved on.)

(Via RedmondMag via someone I’ve forgotten (sorry).)

Still Waiting for the Kindle

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Well, I won’t get my Kindle Touch until Monday, but at least now that the Fire reviews have all posted, people are beginning to talk about the Touch:

Awkward delays arise, and repainting of the e-Ink screen sometimes lags. But, overall, the experience is quite good and, in some situations, noticeably better than using the previous iteration’s buttons. This is especially true of picking items from lists or selecting text in specific areas of the screen—touch, even on a screen that isn’t especially responsive, is simply much faster than navigating via repeated button presses.

Also this: “But if your focus is on reading, I would actually recommend the bottom of the line model. It’s lighter and more comfortable to hold in one hand, and the touch screen doesn’t really make the page turning experience that much better.”

Where’s My Kindle?!?

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So I got a new Kindle Touch for my birthday last month. Except I didn’t actually get it. I just got a promise it would eventually arrive someday Real Soon Now.

That’s okay. I can cope with delayed gratification. Except when suddenly everybody and their uncle is posting reviews of the Kindle Fire. Now I demand to know why the more exotic Kindles shipped before mine!