To subscribe to all of these services individually would be far more than the cost of taking a single class.  It’s a great benefit even though I don’t really have the time or inclination to do much independent research.  Maybe I’ll start?

The MarsEdit screen is automatically divided into a top and bottom section to compose items before and after the “cut”.  It reminds me of years ago when I used the Clarify CRM software which had a top/bottom split window for public and internal case comments.  It’s a good design.

I haven’t figured out a way to embed YouTube videos using the rich text editor but I can switch to the HTML edit view to post an embed tag.  I’d like a little more native support for such a popular video sharing support, but I can live with it.

MarsEdit does have good support for posting draft versions, categories, and tags.  I think it will work well for me as an offline composer.

Most of my remote access to systems is done through ssh and if I need to run a graphical application I typically tunnel X over ssh.  Recently, however, I needed a persistent graphical desktop that I could disconnect from and leave running so I fired up VNC.  I wasn’t sure what a good VNC client for OS X would be, but after some Googling I found Chicken of the VNC.  The reviews I’ve found are mixed, but I like it and it suits my needs.  If you’re a Mac user needing a VNC client I doubt you’ll find one with a cooler name.

On the subject of cool Mac OS X applications, I’d also like to mention Sequel Pro.  It’s a very useful MySQL graphical client for OS X.  If you do any database development or administration with MySQL I recommend it.  It would be nice if it would support Postgres as well.  Apparently it’s on their roadmap.

Speaking of PostgreSQL, I came across the PostGIS project the other day during my web surfing.  MySQL apparently also has spatial extensions.  How the two systems compare I have no idea as this is far from my area of expertise.  I wasn’t aware that the free database systems had spatial extensions.  It makes sense that they would, I just never knew that because I don’t do that kind of work.  Good to know in case I do need a free spatial database system though.

On another note, I was logging into the Google analytics account for one of the nonprofit sites I manage the other day and it occurs to me that Google still doesn’t recognize Google Apps for Domains accounts as Google accounts for the purposes of using their applications.  I have Google Apps for Domains for this domain but I have to login with my GMail account to access Google Analytics, Google Wave, etc.  It’s not the end of the world but I’d like to just be able to login with my secretelite.com account.  If I could have Google Wave for secretelite.com I might actually use it.  Oh well.  Maybe some day..

I saw a story on Slashdot the other day stating that the Khan Academy delivers 100,000 lectures a day.  I’ve been a big fan of the Khan Academy for a long time so I was happy to see the coverage.  If you’re not familiar, Khan Academy is a series of lectures mainly on the subject of math (ranging from basic arithmetic through differential equations) but also including some content on science and economics and finance.  If any of those subjects are of interest to you, I highly suggest checking out the excellent free lectures.

WordPress 3.0 has been released. At some point in the near future I am going to upgrade this site and overhaul the theme. I’m not as thrilled with this layout as I’d like to be. Most likely because I stopped working on it in the middle of the project. Story of my life.

I upgraded my MacBook to OS X 10.6.4 last week. Unfortunately that broke my Time Machine backups. I’ve been using my Ubuntu server as a Time Machine backup system but with 10.6.4 it started verifying the backup and suggested I clear out the old backup and start from scratch. I wasn’t so worried about my backup history so I decided to do that but then I couldn’t get it to back up again. After much frustration and failed attempts at upgrading my Ubuntu server to get a newer version of netatalk I realized that the actual problem was that I needed to create the com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist file under the sparse bundle and add the following XML:

<?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“UTF-8”?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN” “http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd”>
<plist version=“1.0”>
  <dict>
    <key>com.apple.backupd.HostUUID</key>
    <string>YOURUUIDHERE</string>
  </dict>
</plist>

I try to make notes of this sort of thing in my wiki knowledge base, but in this case I left that step out. That was a time costly mistake.

I’m going to upgrade to an iPhone 4 in the near future. I’m still on the original 3G which is getting a little long in the tooth and the volume button just fell off which cemented my decision to upgrade. I considered preordering but I think I’ll wait until they are more general availability in case any problems start to be reported. Apparently there are issues with holding the antenna causing signal problems but that’s not a showstopper for me since I will no doubt get a case for it.

My friend Ken Foreman posted some example pictures on Facebook of panoramic pictures taken with the iPhone app Autostitch. I never use my iPhone camera but with the iPhone 4’s higher quality camera I expect I will start using it more and will definitely have to give Autostitch a try.

I mentioned the other day that I downloaded MacJournal to try as an offline composer. I’m writing this update with MacJournal and while I think it’s going to work well as private journaling software it’s not a great blog writer. It seems to be missing features such as posting items as drafts, etc. So I’m going to look for different OS X blog composition software.

And for today’s media item, my friend told me about this video on YouTube of a Lego printer someone made. It’s pretty impressive!

In the spirit of making my computer useful when disconnected from the network, I’ve downloaded MacJournal to test out offline blogging. I haven’t used an offline blog composer in years so I’m curious to see if they’ve gotten better. Too soon to tell.

What is interesting to me is that Diaspora has managed to raise $171,866.00 in about a month on kickstarter.com.  That’s an incredible amount of money in the form of gift contributions, not investments.

For those not familiar, kickstarter is a site that allows teams and individuals to publish an idea for a creative endeavour and set a fundraising goal.  Site visitors then have the option to pledge donations and if the goal is met, the project is funded.  The funding is in the form of patronage not investment so the creators retain complete ownership of their work.

This is not the first site that I’ve seen with a similar model, but in browsing the list of projects it seems that a fair number are getting the funding they’re seeking.  If I were in the market to finance a short film, musical composition, or free software project I would definitely try their service.