Talamathi

Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

2009-03-17T07:58:00.001-05:00

I just want to say that this piece is the first one about the print industry’s problems to make any sense to me.

“When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”

Technorati Tags: repost, print

Crisis of Credit Visualized

2009-03-02T19:55:00.002-05:00

A lot of my friends have really liked this video, so I thought I’d mention it here, the Crisis of Credit Visualized (pointed out on Daring Fireball)

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags:credit crisis

Nepal photo from Flickr: light show from renjo la

2009-02-27T08:18:00.003-05:00

light show from renjo la
Originally uploaded by sikari kukur

I haven’t posted in a while due to busy-ness. I did run across this photo of Makalu mountain that is just beautiful.

Technorati Tags:
Flickr, Nepal

Picasa for the Mac

2009-01-05T19:30:00.001-05:00

Google has announced in a couple of places that they’ve released a beta of Picasa for the Mac (or in their terms, it’s “in Google Labs”). I’ve downloaded it, and hope to try it out once I have some real time. What I’d really like to see is how well it works with iPhoto. Given how iPhoto and iTunes (among others) integrate with the Mac, that’s really important if something like Picasa is going to survive on the Mac. Once I try it out, I’ll post something here.

So, uh, why care? Despite how nice iPhoto generally is, Picasa on the PC is actually a nicer program. In fact, it’s one of very few Windows-only programs I actually enjoy using, and even want to have ported over.

Technorati Tags: Google, Picasa, iPhoto

Google Mobile App Easter Egg

2009-01-01T22:32:00.001-05:00

I thought this was a joke, but after a little bit of searching around, I managed to find the “Bells and Whistles” option. Don’t believe me? Check out the image.

Technorati Tags: Google, iPhone

PHP Markdown Extra + PHP SmartyPants Typographer Text Filter for MarsEdit

2008-12-31T10:03:00.001-05:00

This happened over a month ago, but a really nice thing to come along was the release of “PHP Markdown Extra + PHP SmartyPants Typographer Text Filter for MarsEdit.” I still use MarsEdit 1.2.1, well, because I don’t really post enough to justify getting an update. That means some of how this works might be different. But, basically, after you put the folder in

~/Library/Application Support/MarsEdit/TextFilters

there is a formatting option to pick the new Markdown and SmartyPants filter. This means that the preview will now be run with a PHP version of SmartyPants, and the enhanced version of PHP Markdown.¹

Blogger doesn’t use Markdown, or SmartyPants, so it has to be converted before being sent. For this, I’ve been using “Translate Markdown to HTML,” from Drew Thaler.² This has been updated to 1.0.3, which I am guessing probably makes the change even easier. In order to get this to work with my newer Markdown and SmartyPants, I changed two lines.

The first line, near the top, sets the variable markdownPath. Change this to

set markdownPath to do shell script "/usr/bin/find \"" & marsEditPath & "\" -name \"PHP Markdown Extra + PHP SmartyPants Typographer.pl\" | /usr/bin/head -n 1"

The second line, near the bottom, is the line

set processedText to do shell script ("\"" & smartypantsPath & "\"" & " " & "\"" & unprocessedPath & "\" | \"" & markdownPath & "\"")

I changed this to

set processedText to do shell script ("\"" & markdownPath & "\" < \"" & unprocessedPath & "\"")

basically processing using the new Markdown/SmartyPants combo.

Which for me, is most useful just to get footnotes, like this one. ↩
Unfortunately, it looks like his hosting server is down, so for most people I suppose this is academic. ↩

Technorati Tags: MarsEdit, Markdown

Comics without the newspaper

2008-12-30T21:54:00.003-05:00

I happen to love newspaper comics, but over the years I’ve either not gotten a newspaper, or not gotten a newspaper carrying all the comics I’d like to read. I know I’m not alone in loving comics; just take a look at Comics Curmudgeon. The people who both read and post comments there clearly love comics, which is half of what makes it fun. Add in to it with some of the cartoonists clearly joining in with the joke, and really its a lot of fun.

The lack of print has made things difficult in the past, but I have tended to get by. The general solution most people use is to go to the online sites of newspapers carrying the comic of their choice, in particular, one that also puts it up online. The more industrious of us use things like the Perl tool dailystrips. Basically, you tell it the pattern for finding a comic of a particular date, and it scrapes the website for that comic. This works, but has some hangups. Most importantly, it means the newspaper is not getting any money for the ads they could be showing you. Additionally, it means the tool needs to run every day, if one can have any hope of following the comics regularly. Finally, dailystrips hasn’t been updated since 2003. It has amazingly worked for the most part,¹ but eventually it will stop working.

In the last year, new solutions have been cropping up. The New York Times has a good article detailing some of them.² I first noticed that GoComics was offering RSS feeds for each of their individual comics. I have about 40 comics I read daily, and this helped me prune down the way I get comics otherwise. It actually fit in with how I get the web-only comics, which of course were using RSS already.

The second change is rather recent; in the last month or so, Comics.com became free. And in addition, they provide a single RSS feed for each user, containing the comics in them. Again, I was able to prune that list.

For one reason or another, this didn’t completely prune my list of comics I had to use other methods for. This is where Comic Alert! comes in. They provide a link in an RSS feed, pointing to the page from a site providing the comic in question. This is different from dailystrips in that you actually go to the page, thus seeing all the ads the newspaper wants you to see.

The very most recent change, noted by the New York Times, is how GoComics now has Safari Mobile-friendly (i.e. iPhone and iPod Touch friendly) pages. This is a nice touch, as I’m often using the mobile NetNewsWire app in the morning. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to make use of any user settings as of yet.³

While it’s nice to see all of this happening, it’s not entirely clear how sustainable all of this is. Comics.com doesn’t seem to be showing any ads as of yet, and it seems unlikely that this will remain the same. Hopefully, when everything settles, some of the good of this will stick around.

Partially due to forum posts on the SourceForge page, where people (used to) update the pattern for finding comics as older ones fail. ↩
It’s interesting to compare the (probably staged) photo of Stephan Pastis drawing with the process Scott Adams describes (and has a video of). ↩
Not to mention that GoComics is insistent on pushing the paid “pro” features at every turn, without mentioning at first that they are such. ↩

Technorati Tags: New York Times, comics

Edit Mail’s data detector iCal events directly in iCal

2008-09-25T20:28:00.001-05:00

I didn’t mention it at the time, but a hint I sent in to Mac OS X Hints was accepted (for some reason, they list me as anonymous). What reminded me was it getting rementioned on Macworld.

Technorati Tags: Leopard, Mac, Mac OS X Hints, Macworld

802.1x in your pocket

2008-07-25T07:26:00.003-05:00

A comment by Jeff reminded me I never went and confirmed how the iPhone 2.0 software does with 802.1x. I hope Jeff does come back and tell about his experiences, but here's what I’ve seen so far:

Basically, it just works. As in, it works even better than on a Mac. After the iPhone/iPod Touch sees the network, it asks if you want to join and figures out all the encryption details for itself. Unfortunately, on the Mac (Leopard at least) you need to tell it if you want LEAP, PEAP, etc. So basically, I hope this stuff percolates back to Mac OS X from the OS X on the iPhone.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, iPod

COTA riders get help from Google in planning trips

2008-07-18T08:34:00.001-05:00

There was great new yesterday in the Columbus Dispatch:

Riders can go to the COTA Web site, www.cota.com, and punch in the starting and ending points of their trip, along with the date and time the trip will be made. Google Transit processes the information and tells riders where and when to meet the bus that will take them where they want to go.

Actually, I’m not sure why it was necessary to identify one of the people they interview as homeless, but that’s a totally different topic. I will say that I tried it out, and was generally impressed. It gave me the general route I sometimes take. The one thing I would say is that it appears COTA has given Google only the major pick up spots for each bus. So while there’s one just a minute away from where I live, Google would have me walk to a stop seven minutes away. Similary, Google tries to guess the route the bus will take, by using those major stops. That means it didn’t even show the circuitous route of the bus I take that means it’s just a minute away. This seems to be more an issue with COTA than anything, and isn’t a major one. It is something to keep in mind when using it, though.

(Via the Columbus Dispatch.)

Technorati Tags: Google, repost, Columbus Dispatch, Google Transit

AT&T iPhone 3G plans: $70-$130 single, $130-$360 family | iLounge News

2008-07-01T12:34:00.001-05:00

One last post before I go and do some actual work: AT&T has finally announced the plans for the iPhone 3G, most particularly for the family plans:

AT&T has announced its AT&T Nation and AT&T FamilyTalk plans for iPhone 3G. Its AT&T Nation plans, meant for individual users, range in price from $69.99 to $129.99 a month, and include unlimited data, Visual Voicemail, and unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling.…AT&T’s FamilyTalk iPhone plans cover two lines and include unlimited data, Visual Voicemail, unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling, and unlimited nights & weekends…

(Via iLounge.)

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, repost

macosxhints.com - Prevent creation of the Mail To Do folder on IMAP servers

2008-07-01T12:24:00.001-05:00

A post today on Mac OS X Hints handles something that has annoyed me with using Gmail IMAP with Leopard’s Mail.app. Specifically, there was an issue with To Dos:

For a while I’ve been annoyed at Mail.app’s creation of the Apple Mail To Do folder on my IMAP server (I use Dreamhost). No matter what I did, it just wouldn’t stay gone. There’s this hint, and there are some thoughts in the comments, but no real fixes.

I returned to my problem today, and found that by going into Mail » Preferences » Composing, I was able to solve the problem. In the ‘Create Notes & To Do’s in:’ drop-down menu, select On My Mac. Close the preferences, then delete the Apple Mail To Do folder on the server.

That’s it! No more ‘Apple Mail To Do’ folder on the server; just locally.

I added a comment to this for someone who was having trouble with this on Gmail, that after doing this, I:

followed the steps above,
quit Mail.app,
opened Gmail in the browser,
went to “Settings”, then “Labels”, and finally
removed the label there.

The next time I opened Mail.app, the “disconnected triangle” appeared next to the Gmail To Do, and then it and the Gmail To Do section disappeared. It hasn’t reappeared yet. Hopefully it fixes that person’s problem, too.

Technorati Tags: Gmail, Leopard, Mac, repost, Mac OS X Hints, IMAP

Blank Mac screensaver

2008-07-01T10:38:00.001-05:00

Thanks to FeedBurner, I can see how people (all two of them!) come upon my site. Frankly, the search terms are fascinating. One that has come up frequently enough is “blank mac screensaver”, and things like it. I thought this was odd, since I was certain that a blank screensaver came with Mac OS X. Well, I just looked, and not so.

Since this is an easy one to help people with, I’ll demonstrate two ways to do it. The first is the easiest: go to the Versiontracker page for Blank Screen Saver. I haven’t tried it, but it looks like others like it and it does the seem to do what people want.

But you can also make one yourself, using Quartz Composer! To start, you want to make sure you have Apple’s Developer Tools, which now come on an installation DVD with every Mac (I believe), or you can download from the developer site (after registering for free).

Once you have the Developer Tools, open Quarts Composer, which is in /Developer/Applications. Now:

Choose the “Blank Composition” template.
In the toolbar of your new composition, click on the “Patch Creator”. It’s the “+”.
In the search box for the patch creator, type “gradient”.
Select the patch named “Gradient” whose category is “Renderer”, and drag it to the main window (the one labeled “Untitled - Editor”)
Select the new patch, and either click on “Patch Inspector” in the toolbar (the “i”), or type ⌘-i (Command-i).
Using the drop-down menu at the top of the window, go to the “Settings” pane (or type ⌘-2).
Set the number of gradient points to “2”. This isn’t really necessary, but seems like it would speed things up a little, at least.
Go back to the “Input Parameters” pane.
Drag the black color from “Color #1” to the color box of “Color #2”.
Save the composition to Your home folder → Library → Screen Savers, with whatever name you’d like.
Open the screen saver preference pane, and select the screen saver with the name you picked. That should do it!

Technorati Tags: Mac, Quartz Composer, screen+saver

How to make a Mac screen saver that shows your uptime in Leopard

2008-07-01T09:41:00.001-05:00

About nine months ago, I wrote about how to make a Mac screen saver to show your uptime, using Quartz Composer, a package from Fink, and Quartz Composer patch called Shell Command Patch. Not long after, Apple released Leopard, which seems to have changed Quartz Composer enough to break Shell Command.

I was getting all geared up on writing a post about doing this using another method (completely redoing it and everything), but looking in to this further just showed me I’m an idiot. It turns out the difficulty I was having is that Quartz Composer patches are saved in different locations. To be clearer:

In Tiger (10.4), patches are kept in /Library/Graphics/Patches/.
In Leopard (10.5), patches are kept in /Library/Graphics/Quartz Composer Patches/ or ~/Library/Graphics/Quartz Composer Patches/.

That’s it. Seriously. Incidentally, I found this information at Kineme.net’s page on the topic.

The new version of the Developer Tools does in fact come with an example patch that can run a command line tool (in “/Developer/Examples/Quartz Composer/Plugins/CommandLineTool”), but why mess with something that works?

Incidentally, I did have to mess with some of the parameters, also, but I don’t know if it’s because I’m using a different display (with different dimensions), or what. The following changes worked for me:

In the Image with String patch, I changed:
- The font size to 14
- The image width and height to 800 each
For the billboard patch, I changed the width to 0.25.

Otherwise, everything is the same.

Technorati Tags: Leopard, Mac, screen+saver, uprecords, Quartz Composer

BibDesk and QuickLook

2008-06-29T21:15:00.001-05:00

I have a strong need use BiBTeX files, but fortunately life is generally made a lot easier with BibDesk. As I only need to deal with bibliographies in spurts, invariably there’s a new version when I get started. I didn’t think Leopard would inspire any changes to BibDesk, but indeed it has.

The first change I noticed is that it saves a file for each publication, so that Spotlight will play nicer with each one (notice how it is also using QuickLook to present it like a card from the card catalog:

This turns out to be really useful. Almost immediately after messing with BibDesk again, I needed to search for an author. Interestingly, BibDesk uses a different QuickLook style if you use QuickLook proper:

I actually have no idea how they pull that off, but it’s very nice. Looking at all the other features BibDesk has, it has become very clear to me I am a total novice with it (they have a whole page for AppleScripts!).

Technorati Tags: Leopard, Mac, QuickLook, BibDesk

NY Times: Can Weeds Help Solve the Climate Crisis?

2008-06-29T07:45:00.003-05:00

Normally, I don’t post these kind of articles, since, well, horticulture isn’t exactly my cup of tea. But this article caught me right away. Lewis Ziska, a weed ecologist with the Agriculture Research Service of the USDA, wasn’t able get funding to create a lab that would allow him to examine the effect of elevated carbon dioxide concentrations. His solution was really quite ingenious:

When he checked, he found that in fact the temperatures in Baltimore run 3 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer on average than those of the surrounding countryside, and the concentration of CO2 in the local atmosphere (440 to 450 p.p.m., or parts per million by volume) is well above the current global average. This, coincidentally, matched almost exactly what the panel on climate change predicted for the planet as a whole 30 to 50 years in the future in its “B2 scenario,” a middle-of-the-road projection that envisions continuing greenhouse gas increases but also some success in abatement programs.

Technorati Tags: repost, New York Times, environment, weeds

Really interesting report on the future of electric cars

2008-06-26T08:09:00.002-05:00

Normally, I listen to the Newshour with Jim Lehrer in podcast form, since it’s usually not very video intensive. Barring that, I do TiVo it so I can always watch it later. But their report on electric cars sounded too good to not watch:

Rising oil prices and improvements in battery technology are fueling new interest in developing electric cars. Spencer Michels reports on how industry giants and start-up car companies alike plan to release new vehicles by 2010.

Fortunately, they do video streaming also, which is where I found the video of their report. It honestly seems like PBS, NPR, and the like taking the most advantage of new technology lately.

Technorati Tags:Newshour, electric car

SmartSleep 1.2

2008-06-25T14:53:00.001-05:00

Almost a year and a half ago, I listed out a bunch of Mac applications that would be useful for some newly converted friends of mine. This is sorely in need of an update, but until then I’ll just occasionally post what others have to say. Macworld just covered SmartSleep, which can be great for people with laptops:

Patrick Stein’s Smart Sleep, a System Preferences panel, lets you choose between four different sleep modes:

Sleep and hibernate: Default mode.

Sleep only: No RAM written to disk.

Hibernate only: Power fully off.

Smart sleep: A special mode whereby your machine will generally just sleep, but will sleep and hibernate when the battery is below a certain power level you specify via a slider. If the battery is below five percent charge, then it will only hibernate.

After Apple made hibernation the default mode when closing a laptop, people are supposed to wait (up to a minute!) for it to finally go to sleep. This tool can be great for doing what really should be built in. It has to be the number one complaint I’ve heard from friends getting MacBook Pros.

(Via Macworld.)

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, Macworld, SmartSleep

Car Gas Mileage May Not Be All It Seems : NPR

2008-06-19T22:20:00.003-05:00

I’m not really sure how to react to this story from NPR:

Car Gas Mileage May Not Be All It Seems : NPR

Here’s a quiz. Which saves more gas: trading in a 16-mile-a-gallon gas guzzler for a slightly more efficient car that gets 20 mpg? Or going from a gas-sipping sedan of 34-mpg to a hybrid that gets 50 mpg?

If you guessed the second choice, you’re wrong.

Even a small improvement in gas guzzlers saves more gas than a big improvement in cars that already save. But cars aren’t advertised that way in the U.S.

I’m not sure I buy the setup of the argument (not having kids, I don’t live in a world where you wouldn’t just replace the worst efficient car) but that seems like a different argument. My problem is that it (and essentially the same story I found) doesn’t even bother to give a method to convert for yourself. The options are that they think everyone can figure it out for themselves (I doubt it), or they thought it was too hard to explain.

Anyhow, I expect anyone who bothers to read my posts regularly probably is in a decent enough position to figure this out themselves, but I’ll put it here for anyone who might come upon this. If M is the car’s milage, then you can figure out the number of gallons it takes to drive 100 miles by:

100/M.

Like I said, pretty simple, which is why I can’t understand not even mentioning the formula, or at least using the phrase “inverse relation”. Oh, well.

Technorati Tags: NPR, repost

Merlin Mann and the NY Times article of email problems.

2008-06-14T21:24:00.002-05:00

I’m not vain enough to think anything I say really holds much weight with others. Fortunately, Merlin Mann had a similar, but much better phrased, reaction to an article in the New York Times today about email overload. At some point I want to at least write down my thoughts of trying to keep an empty inbox while using Gmail with IMAP.

NYT: Businesses Fight the Email Monster They Helped Created:

If you’ve seen the video of my Inbox Zero talk at Google, you may recall the moment when a few attendees start mentioning the hundreds of internal email messages they receive (and send) in a given day. I still remember, because I almost fainted…

Technorati Tags: Gmail

iPhone SDK on iTunes

2008-03-13T11:36:00.001-05:00

I haven’t seen this anywhere, but it looks like the iPhone SDK Event is available in podcast form on the iTunes Store. I suspect it hasn’t been mentioned elsewhere because everyone has already seen it, downloaded the SDK, and is busy making awesome iPhone and iPod Touch apps. Since I haven’t seen it yet, this is great news.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, iPod, iTunes, podcast

802.1X Coming, Apparently

2008-03-06T13:11:00.004-05:00

Far be it from me to live blog, and it looks like details are yet to come. Still, according to Jacqui Cheng’s liveblogging at the iPhone SDK event, 802.1x is coming to the iPhone (hopefully the iPod Touch also) in the next software update.

Update (2008/03/06): I had to go to a meeting during the announcement, but it looks like the iPod Touch will also get the “enterprise” features in June, for a “nominal fee”.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, iPod

iPhone & iPod Touch 1.1.4: No *EAP for you!

2008-03-05T08:39:00.001-05:00

Recently the iPhone and iPod Touch bumped up to version 1.1.4. Not too surprisingly, 802.1X support is still not there. So no LEAP or PEAP (or some other EAP) for anyone today. Or yesterday. Or the day before.

As an aside, I was hoping wireless improvements in Mac OS X 10.5.2 would possibly translate to 802.1X coming to the iPod Touch/iPhone someday (as they all share the OS X code base), but so far it would seem no luck.

Lastly, Andrea left a comment that there is a petition for Apple to add 802.1X. There are currently 1870 signatures! And since I enjoy setting up false hope for myself: maybe after the iPhone SDK comes out, adding 802.1X will become a priority. Right? Right!?

Technorati Tags: iPhone, iPod

Shiva Ratri

2008-03-03T15:12:00.001-05:00

For those who would like to know such things, this Thursday (March 6) is Shiva Ratri.

Technorati Tags: Nepal, Shiva+Ratri

Why ZFS Matters to Mac Users

2008-02-21T08:37:00.002-05:00

I have been having a bit of an ongoing discussion with a friend over Time Machine. A lot of this has been about the problems Time Machine currently has, and where it can/should go. What little I know about ZFS has made me think it could play an important role. This kind of feeling usually tells me I need to learn more about a topic. Often it often means my initial suspicions are wrong, but so far there haven’t been any disappointments yet.

Just today, I came upon the blog post “Why ZFS Matters to Mac Users”. It feels like I’ve read this before, but it’s relevance strikes more much more, now. Currently, the most notable to me is

block-level checksumming to detecting errors
the ability to handle snapshots efficiently and quickly

Clearly, ZFS is much more than this, but with my mind on how Time Machine could be better those seem like useful thing to keep an eye out for as ZFS becomes much more prevalent in the Mac world.

Technorati Tags: Mac, Time+Machine, ZFS