And of course, I’m like, “We should sign up to be caretakers, and make some money off this.”

And then I realized it would never pay out, because the whole point is that we don’t believe the rapture’s a’comin’. And then we laughed till we hurt.

defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string start

defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string end

defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string middle

Then restart the Dock for it to take effect:

killall Dock

Update: Bryan’s comment made me realize I wasn’t really clear on what I was talking about here. In the Dock settings, you can choose to position it on the left, right, or bottom of the screen, but by default, it will be in the middle of that edge. These commands will pin it to one side. So for example, if you have your Dock on the left side like I do, and use the first command (with the start option), it will appear on the left side but right up against the menu bar. Or use end to get it up against the bottom – this is where mine is, see:

There seem to be two opinions on the iPad: the folks that say this is the future of computing, and the folks that say that first group is a bunch of rabid Apple fanboys that are willing to pay too much for an overgrown iPod Touch. There are some people in the middle, but they don’t seem to care in the least.

I fall into the first group, and maybe even with a hint of fanboy rabies.

Erin asked me the day before the iPad announcement why I was so excited about a device I probably wouldn’t buy, especially since I got a Kindle the week before. For me, it’s not about this device, I explained. The more important thing, I think, is what it will do for the industry. Let’s be honest: smart phones before the iPhone were not pleasant to use. Since it’s introduction, smart phones have improved across the board. Even if I don’t want what Apple is selling, lots of people will, and it forces the competition to step up their game – and that’s good news for us consumers. The iPad may not fundamentally change the world, but in a few months, you’ll be seeing people using them on subways and airplanes. How many times have you seen a Microsoft Surface in the wild?

So point one: the iPad is likely to inspire copycats and “iPad killers” that may or may not improve on the idea, but which move forward the ideal of personal computing in some way.

Point two: iPads (or the new class of devices into which the iPad falls) will change the way we do a lot of things in our daily lives. This is from The Unofficial Apple Weblog:

You know, at first I wasn’t so impressed with the iPad, but the more I thought about the ways in which you can use it, the more excited I got. As a piece of leisure technology – something you just have laying around your living room like a newspaper – it’s a lot more user friendly than a laptop or an iPhone.

I don’t see the iPad making a lot of headway in that space in the near future. Most people won’t spend over $500 for a device that falls somewhere between a glorified toy and a wimpy laptop; lots of geeks will, but not many regular people. I expect this type of device to be used in business environments a lot more, because it really does fit a space between phones and laptops that isn’t adequately addressed by netbooks. There are tons of things that could have been done on the iPhone, but for screen size, or on a netbook, but for horsepower and usability, and the iPad is going to exploit those areas.

Consider a doctor’s office. Docs could use an app that allows them to carry around their patient files for the day, along with every medical reference worth converting to digital media. A netbook might work, but in terms of speed and ease of use, an iPad makes more sense: the doctor can quickly tap around to look things up, make notes, and share information with their patient. The form factor makes it easier for someone to share what they’re looking at with another person.

Or, consider a conference with an expo hall. Conference staff greet attendees as they arrive and check them in on the spot, without having to deal with long lines at the registration counters. The exhibitors have a couple each to collect sales leads and show off product demo videos and things like that. If exhibitors are selling products, it can be used as a point of sale.

Most of the comments I’ve read about the iPad this past week are about how people will use it at home and how it will compete with the Kindle and netbooks that are already on the market. I’m much more interested to see what kind of business application come out of it, because I really think that the iPad is a lot more accessible for any kind of face-to-face uses like these.

And every time, I think, “I should make this better and get involved in this project. Maybe this could be My Thing.”

And then I remember that I don’t get around to most of the projects that are already My Things. But someday, somewhere – I’ll fix something.

Well, I’ve had my Kindle for just under two weeks now, and I love it. The original thinking was that it would fit on the little shelf on cardio machines better than a book would, and I would be inclined to spend more time working out if I had something to read. And that part worked – I spent well over an hour on the elliptical and stationary bike the other day, reading on my Kindle. But I’m finding that even away from the gym, I like reading on it better than other medium; for example, the e-ink screen doesn’t have the glare of glossy magazine pages, and is much more comfortable for long blog posts than a laptop screen.

Which brings me to Instapaper. If you do any significant reading on the web, Instapaper can make your life much better. This free service gives you a “Read Later” bookmarklet to click when you come across an article you’d like to (surprise) read later. Logging into their site will show you a list of the articles you have saved, and gives you the option of just viewing the text of each article without all the ads and whatnot. This comes in handy when used with the iPhone app, which can download just the text from all your saved articles. I used this every day on my metro ride to my old office.

That text parsing is also used to generate a Kindle-formatted file of your latest 20 articles – and this is where I get the most out of my Kindle. I save a crapton of articles in Instapaper, and every day I plug my Kindle into my laptop and download the latest 20 so I can read them comfortably on the Kindle’s e-ink display. As I read, I use the highlight function to note things I want to look up later or quotes I’d like to share on Tumblr.

Outside of Instapaper, I’m also fond of the PragPub magazine from The Pragmatic Programmers – also available in Kindle format – and I’m looking for more free periodicals that I can load on there.

When I first looked at the Kindle, I considered how many books I would have to read on it to break even. Most books are $10 for the Kindle version, which isn’t a significant savings over the paperback version, so it’s hard to justify $250 on a cost-savings basis. But I quickly found that most of my time with the Kindle will not be spent on regular books. Thanks to Instapaper, there’s no limit to the content I can read for free. Along with free magazines like PragPub and all the free post-copyright books available on Project Gutenberg, I doubt I’ll even wind up buying too many books on there. And even THEN – there are some that are free or dirt cheap, like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

In summary, I couldn’t be happier with my Kindle, even if the iPad does take a good chunk out of their market share (but I’ll get to that another time).

Window management on the Mac has always been less than perfect: the maximize button never quite does, and on apps like iTunes, it does something else entirely like switch to the mini mode. Cinch and SizeUp, from Irradiated Software, make it all better.

Cinch allows you to drag a window to the top of the screen to make it fill the screen entirely, or drag it to one side of the screen to size it to the half of the screen – pretty handy for viewing Finder windows side-by-side.

SizeUp takes it a step further by adding keyboard combinations for those actions and several others, like filling the top or bottom half of the screen, or one quadrant, or centering on the screen at half the screen size, or moving to the same position on another monitor or Space – all sorts of good stuff, really.

Cinch is $7 and SizeUp is $13, and I have found that the two in tandem are well worth the $20 total.

I almost said that I’m in the same place I was last year, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. 2009 brought me a wedding to a lovely lady, the adoption of an adorable dog, a zero balance on my credit cards, and just last month, a new job. It was hardly uneventful, but still: just like last year, I want to relax more, but also accomplish more on my own projects.

Like most years, I spend January 1 looking over blog posts and such from the previous year, reminiscing a little bit. There’s a new one this year: the Last Played field in iTunes. My current iTunes Library seems to have begun around March 12, 2006, as that is the earlier date I have. It’s weird to look at my music and see that I haven’t listened to songs I once loved in well over three years, and now, it feels wrong to play them and overwrite that date in Last Played. Is that weird? That seems weird. I don’t think most people actively avoid playing music just to keep from overriding an insignificant bit of metadata.

Anyway, I feel the same as I did yesterday. I still don’t really know exactly how I want this year to be different, but I hope I start figuring it out soon.

First, open /private/etc/hosts and add hosts for each client you want to host, so your machine knows to look for the domain on your own computer. I use local.clientname.com because it’s unlikely that most sites have a local subdomain, but you can use something different. My host file has these two lines at the bottom:

127.0.0.1       local.clienta.com
127.0.0.1       local.buffalostuff.net

Then run this in Terminal to flush your DNS cache:

dscacheutil -flushcache

Now, you can navigate to those URLs (http://local.clienta.com and http://local.buffalostuff.net in my case) and MAMP will serve up whatever it has.

That’s half the job. Now, you need to configure Virtual Hosts for the domains. In the MAMP Preferences, on the Apache tab, make sure the Document Root is set to your Sites directory (in my case, /Users/bboland/Sites/). Then, open /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/httpd.conf, and add a virtual host at the bottom of the file for each domain:

NameVirtualHost *

<VirtualHost *>
ServerName local.clienta.com
DocumentRoot /Users/bboland/Sites/ClientA
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *>
ServerName local.buffalostuff.net
DocumentRoot /Users/bboland/Sites/BuffaloStuff
</VirtualHost>

Stop and re-start the servers in MAMP. Now you can navigate to those two sites and actually get the right content.

The biggest problem I see with this is maintenance: any time you take on a new project, you need to make sure you update the hosts file and Apache config. But, since you only need to do it once, it’s not that bad.

• Our awesome wedding
• Our awesome honeymoon
• Turning 26
• Being in DC for four full years
• Leaving the job I’ve had for those four years
• Starting a new job
• Paying off my credit cards (thanks entirely to Erin)
• Various other more minor things

I still intend to write about that stuff soon-ish, but I’m not going to feel bad about posting about other, smaller stuff in the meantime.