Category Archives: Technology

Palin Speech

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I really liked it. Even better was the way the family was highlighted. The best defense is not to be distracted by side issues.

Note. We don’t have cable, and since we’re in the middle of nowhere, that means we don’t have TV. But because of the rise in multimedia delivered over the internet, I was able tonight to see a political convention speech live for the first time since 1996 (when we got rid of cable).

Updates: transcript here.

I liked this article about Palin’s experience. (Note from my previous article, however, my real interest isn’t experience so much as career path.)

Upgraded my blog

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I know I talk about this too much, but there it is. WordPress has made great strides forward since I began using it. And now I’m at a host that gives me ssh access, so I can use rsync, which makes it a piece of cake, compared to using ftp.

But still, it’s too much work. I hate doing this. (I know, I’m an ingrate. I appreciate all the lunatics who work on WordPress only to give it away to whiners like me. But still. It’s too much work.)

Accordance 8

Well, I just shelled out the money for an upgrade to version 8 of Accordance. I may discover more later, but I already know of three compelling features.

First, when you have two panes open, it will highlight the words in one that correspond with the ones your mouse cruises over in the other (assuming both texts are tagged).

Second, it will let you adjust the leading.

Third, fuzzy searching. I don’t know how good this will be, but I know I need it. My problem is that I remember there’s a verse I want to find but I don’t know what translation it’s in. For example, I search for “Jesus wept” and get the “no matches” dialog, because I normally use the NRSV, where John 11:35 reads “Jesus began to weep.” (Inexplicably. That verb must be the “aorist of but-it-ought-to-be-imperfect.”) Then I say, “[curses] it” and ask Mr. Google to find the verse for me.

Google Calendar

It’s been a couple of 2-3 years since the last time I played with Google Calendar. At the time, I thought it was interesting, but not compelling enough to migrate away from iCal. (Or even go to the trouble to integrate it with iCal.)

Today I played with it some more, and I liked it. Not least because it enabled me to publish a calendar that I could then subscribe to in iCal. This might have been one of the reasons I didn’t like it back then: I didn’t have any truly public calendars. Today I do, both at the church and with some of the other organizations I’m part of. The only thing I used to want to share was my personal calendar, but I didn’t want to make that public, and my wife refused to get a gmail account. Anyway, that’s history, and now I see how wonderful Google Calendar is. My bad.

Anyway, now that I’m a late adopter, I want to point out something else I like about Google Calendar. Take a look at these two events. First, iCal:

Calendar Detail (iCal)

Now compare that with Google Calendar:

Calendar Detail (Google)

You see the difference? In the month view, Google shows what time the event is. If iCal could do that it would be a huge win.

Another thing I like about Google Calendar is the extra views: 4-day and Agenda.

And, frankly, it isn’t any harder to edit an existing event in Google Calendar than it is in iCal. In fact, iCal has gotten harder to work with in Leopard. Brilliant decision that was.

Calibri, Cambria, Consolas, etc. for free

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If you got a copy of the latest Microsoft Office, then you might have noticed it came with some new fonts that look better than the last batch of fonts Microsoft had designed for them. (Which seem no longer to be given away for free.)

These new fonts are called the Microsoft ClearType Font Collection. If you don’t want to upgrade your copy of Office, you can buy them from Ascender. But they’re not cheap.

But if you’re cheap, and you have any old copy of Microsoft Office, what you can do is to download the OpenXML file converter from Microsoft, and get them for free.

Update: I’m guessing that if your Mac came with a “trial” version of Office, that would be enough to install the OpenXML converter.

My next computer…

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So I’m typing this on the ancient (2005) eMac. It’s a fine computer, although, once you move to flat screens you can never look back. Plus, it’s a powerpc chip, so Leopard is the end of the line; Apple’s going to un-support PPC starting with Snow Leopard.

Also, it’s too slow to run Handbrake, and it’s no speed demon when I do anything with ImageMagick. Other than that, it’s a fine PC and I could cheerfully go on using it indefinitely.

But what would I replace it with? Well, I could get a Mac mini for $800 and up, or an iMac for $1200 (and up). There’s a lot to be said for both possibilities.

But here’s another thought. How about getting a Windows laptop and putting Linux on it — or better yet, a windows laptop with Linux preinstalled, like the Dell Inspiron 1525N. That would cost me $575 and up.

(Or I could build my own system for probably the same price. That isn’t as much fun as it was 10 years ago, mainly because I wouldn’t save any money over store-bought, but it would let me upgrade the hard drives over time. I’d probably never get the power management working right, though.)

Linux runs every single program I use on a daily basis, except two. One is MarsEdit, which I’m using to write this post. The other is iTunes, which I use to sync my iPod. (I don’t think I’d need Handbrake with Linux; I assume someone has already put a pretty front-end on ffmpeg.)

I could live without MarsEdit, not because it’s bad software — in fact, it’s excellent, best-in-breed software — but because I just don’t blog as much as I ought to.

That leaves syncing my iPod. And there I’m stuck.

But wait. How about this: run Windows in Virtual Box on Linux, and run the Windows version of iTunes? Whoa! That’s, like, genius, dude.

(I wonder what’s the cheapest I can get a legal copy of Windows for on eBay?)

Anonymous Font

Most of what I do on the computer is in a terminal window. I actually bring up gvim to write my sermons, but unless you’re in the trade, you wouldn’t see the difference. The point is that less and less do I use fancy graphical interfaces with fonts and so forth to do my work. More and more do I regress back into the comfortable 80×24 existence of my tender years. (Except I prefer something more like 80×35 or 80×40, if I can get it.)

Terminal windows require a monospaced font. Monospaced fonts are fonts where each letter takes up the same amount of room: a capital I and a lowercase w are equally wide. Here are some examples:

Monospaced Fonts

The problem is that most of them don’t work so well. Some are just wrong. For example, Courier New is too spindly to be of any use at all. Others make terminal.app crazy (DejaVu and Liberation, I’m looking at you). So mostly, I use “Monaco” or “Lucida Sans Typewriter”. The problem with those is they aren’t really programmer fonts: they don’t help you distinguish between ambiguous glyphs like lowercase L and 1, or capital O and zero (0), like this:

Anonymous Font (letters)

Plus, every programmer worthy of the name wants their typewriter text to look typewriter-y. I used to think this was to be like K&R (Courier), but later on I realized it was to be like Knuth (CM Typewriter).

Anyway, a couple of years ago, I stumbled onto profont, which seemed like it was exactly what I wanted. But it wasn’t.

Today, I found Anonymous. Behold:

Anonymous Font

Light but not spindly. No way to confuse your ones and L’s. Oh, joy! Raptures!

Remembering Midway

I was surprised and pleased when I saw that Wired’s interesting historical fact of the day for today was the Battle of Midway. Good on yer, Wired!

(It’s an interesting observation they make. The “tech angle” here that this was the 2nd naval battle in which the fleets never made visual contact with each other. That is, it was a naval battle decided not by battle ships but aircraft carriers. We lost only one, the Yorktown. I’ve been aboard the aircraft carrier Yorktown, but it wasn’t the one sunk at Midway.)

iPod Movies

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I’ll be doing some air travel this summer, and ever since I got my iPod — egad! I never wrote a blog entry about the wonder that is my iPod! what kind of lazy blogger am I? I’ll do that Real Soon Now. Anyway, about my air travel…

So, I went to the iTMS store to see what it would cost me to get a movie for the trip. I was stunned to see how much they cost. (For example, $14.99 for The Incredibles.) Very quickly I decided that I would have to make my own, because the store-bought ones were just too spendy for my limited budget. I already got a copy of The Incredibles, for example. So all I had to do was learn how to rip dvds for ipod.

By that query was I introduced to Handbrake. And you know what? It just works. I give it a “Cool Tool” award. Thumbs up.