Neal Sheeran

One of the things in my “to write about” list was a list of all the Mac software I find useful. I’ve had a draft sitting around and the interesting thing when I opened it back up after a year was how much has changed. “Must have” programs are no longer installed, long explanations explaining why I use program A over B no longer apply…because I’ve switched to program B, etc. Since I spend a fair amount of time tinkering with software, now is as good a time as any to write about some it. First up, stuff I use everyday.

TotalFinder

I can’t believe how long I used OS X’s plain old Finder once I started using TotalFinder. A configurable keyboard shortcut (I double-tap the command key) and a tabbed finder window slides up from the bottom of the screen. The default window size is configurable and two separate widows can be display side-by-side for quick and easy drag-n-drop. Another nice touch is the easy shortcut to display hidden files. I’ve used Path Finder previously, but I found it to be a bit too much UI-wise and it seemed slower than what it was replacing. I love the simplicity of TotalFinder.

Reeder

I was a NetNewsWire user for years. It was once of the first pieces of software I paid for that didn’t come in a box. Alas, it was startin to wear thin on me. Reeder has a much cleaner interface that is better for reading and the keyboard controls are excellent, and user-configurable. The iOS version is top-notch as well.

Twitterific

You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a Twitter client. I like Twitterific for the nice color schemes and the easy way to follow other people’s conversations. I use Tweetbot on the iPhone.

Middleclick

Genius little menubar utility that lets you open browser links in their tab by using a three finger tap. When I use my wife’s computer, I get pissed that she doesn’t have this.

Alfred

Great application launcher, plus a bunch of other things. LaunchBar is great too, but I like Alfred better for the configurable interface and I find it’s follow-on actions to be slightly easier to use.

Safari is my browser of choice. I was a Camino guy for a long time, but switched back to Safari a few years ago. I also have Firefox on hand as well as Chrome (which I rarely use.) I recently downloaded Opera and it looks promising.

More installments coming soon.

Filed under: Software | Link |

Here is a preview for Disney Pixar’s Planes.

Besides the obvious, I’m intrigued about this movie because of one small scene in Pixar’s The Incredibles; when Helen Parr/Elastigirl is flying the jet to the island with her kids hiding aboard, and Syndrome launches missiles to attack it.

The calls that Elastigirl (voiced by Holly Hunter) makes on the radio, with terms like “VFR on top”, “vectors to the initial”, and especially “buddy spike”, clearly indicate that whomever wrote the script—or that two minutes of it at least—knows a thing or two about aviation in general and military aviation in particular. I’ve always found it interesting that this movie, that has nothing to do with military aviation, used the correct terms in the correct context.

Live action movies, with plots involving fighter aviation, including actual military aircarft, and usually with technical advisors in the credits, screw this up wholesale all the time.

So if Pixar is going to make a movie about with military planes as characters, it could be one of the more accurate films ever. And it will be animated. Count me in.

(As long the Pixar team that made The Incredibles is involved, and not the gang the crapped out Cars 2.)

Filed under: Raves | Link |

One of the (many) reasons I haven’t been writing a lot here lately is I’ve been spending what little free time I have reading up on various web design topics and working on a re-design of this site. I’ve stood up my own testing site as I work on things like typography, layouts, grids, and other interwebs magic. Check it out and feedback is welcome. Since I have turned commenting off due to the spam getting out of hand, drop me a line on Twitter: @nealsheeran.

The site is, and will continue to be, under construction. That’s kinda the point.

Filed under: Web Design | Link |

Ezra Klein, the Washington Post wonderkid who thinks the Constitution is hard to read and stuff had this snarky, gotcha question for the Republican debate tonight on twitter:

Question for #Econdebate: “If we had the prime minister of Slovakia on the phone right now, what would you tell him? You first, Mr. Cain.”

Ahh, the classic stump-the-Republican-dummy question. Not really relevant for an “econdebate”, but no matter. Klein then completely wins the internet for the week with a very quick follow-up:

Correcting last tweet: PM of Slovakia is a her.

Absolutely priceless.

Filed under: Politics | Link |

I downloaded Mac OS X Lion the day it was released, but held off on installing it since I was traveling and far from my backup disk (yes, not smart, but also not the point). I’ve never been one to install a new OS on day one anyway. I usually wait a few days/weeks to see if there are any major issues. Let the fanboys be the lab rats, I say.

Well, it paid off when I came across this post at Ars Technica about many users of 2010 MacBook Pros having major video issues and “black screens of death.” The article points to this thread on the Apple Support forums, that as of this writing is a whopping 104 pages, all filled with posts by very frustrated users complaining about the issue. Most people had little to no problems under Snow Leopard and now the only explanation/recourse path given by Apple is to swap out the logic board.

I have a 2010 MacBook Pro and it is the best computer I’ve ever had.* I haven’t had a single problem with it under Snow Leopard and there is nothing new in Lion that makes want to get anywhere near this issue.

One thing I did learn was that the Mac App Store did update my Lion installer to 10.7.1 when it was released. We’ll see if a future update addresses this.

Update (25 Oct): Apple acknowledged the issue with an article here. And according to CNET, they have issued a software update for Lion users. Unfortunately, Apple’s KB article says that if this doesn’t work, users need to get in touch with Apple support for a diagnostic test. A problematic course of action for me since I live overseas. The original forums post is up to 129 pages now, with results for this patch being mixed. Still holding off for now.

---

* PowerMac G5 (2006-2010), PowerBook G4 (2002-2006), Dell Inspiron laptop (2001-2002), a Micron laptop (1997-2001), and a Gateway 2000 (!!!) 486 desktop with a whopping 8 MB of RAM and 120 MB harddrive that I got in high school in 1992. I played the shit out of Falcon 3.0 on that thing.

Filed under: Software | Link |

I’m a big fan of the bookmarking site Pinboard and I often peruse the ‘popular’ page to see what links other folks are squirreling away. I would venture that a majority of Pinboard users lean towards the nerdy/web developer type, until recently that is. The Pinboard developers explain why in a recent blog post, and I won’t ruin it other than to quote this gem:

If you wanted to read a 3000 word fic where Picard forces Gandalf into sexual bondage, and it seems unconsensual but secretly both want it, and it’s R-explicit but not NC-17 explicit, all you had to do was search along the appropriate combination of tags (and if you couldn’t find it, someone would probably write it for you). By 2008 a whole suite of theoretical ideas about folksonomy, crowdsourcing, faceted infomation [sic] retrieval, collaborative editing and emergent ontology had been implemented by a bunch of friendly people so that they could read about Kirk drilling Spock.

That’s one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time.

Filed under: Geekery | Link |

I have always been a fan of footnotes. No, not the dry, academic, here-is-the-obscure-journal-where-I-got-this-from kind, but the David Foster Wallace let’s-go-on-a-tangent variety. Bill Simmons is from the latter school as well, and footnotes figure predominantly in the articles on his site, Grantland.

From what I can tell poking around, javascript is used to measure the vertical position of the footnote in the text and the footnote itself is relatively positioned the same amount from the top. Nicely done.

Filed under: Web Design | Link |

News Corps is going to sell MySpace to Specific Media for $35 million, which is about $545 million less than they paid for it six years ago.

Cliff Notes Version, Not Without Biased Commentary: A shitty social website that is exponentially lamer now then when it started is going to “revitalize and transform” itself, care of an online ad company and…wait for it…Justin Timberlake. I’m not making this up:

Timberlake will have an office at MySpace’s Beverly Hills headquarters and a staff of about a half dozen people working for him “around the clock” developing his ideas for the site, said Specific Media CEO Tim Vanderhook.

I can’t wait. The interesting part is at the end:

At $35 million, Specific Media gets an Internet property for a price that Altimeter’s Li called “ridiculously low” and values each monthly U.S. visitor at about $1 each. Its new owners should be able to recoup their investment if the company gets each user to click on about 20 ads over their lifetime, she said.

Nothing earth-shattering about making money off of ads, but if getting ad clicks is really what it is all about, I wouldn’t have a lot of faith in the “revitalize and transform” part. And using anyone’s lifetime has a measure of ROI, especially for something like a social media site, is probably not very wise.

I’ll go out on a limb and predict that MySpace will continue to suck.

Filed under: Rants | Link |

Here is what’s in my camera bag:

• Nikon D40 - now four years old and showing its teeth. My biggest gripe is only three autofocus points.
• Nikon 55-200mm VR - first lens I purchased to go with the kit 18-55mm.
• Sigma 30mm/1.4 - hefty lens that is great for low light, but can be difficult (at least for this rank amateur) to shoot wide open.
• Nikon SB-700 Flash - pop-up flashes are for losers.

Note: I rarely use the iPhone camera (either my current iPhone 4 or on my old 3GS), either because the photo quality isn’t that great, especially indoors, and I honestly sometimes I forget that my phone even has a camera.

Here’s the software I use:

• Adobe Lightroom 3 - my primary tool for organization and editing of photos. My library has almost 9000 photos and a rough yearly average is 1500 photos. I’m not too aggressive about only holding onto true keepers, but I’m not afraid to delete stuff either.
• Apple Aperture - I keep Aperture around strictly for its tight integration with the rest of my Apple gear. I export my top pictures (about 220, mostly all of my kids) to Aperture for syncing with my Apple TV and iPhone and the easy availability of the Aperture library to other apps like iMovie and the new Final Cut Pro X. I wrote previously about keeping these keepers synched between Lightroom and Aperture. I also like Aperture’s Faces and Places capability. The latter I have to add manually since my D40 obviously does not include GPS metadata. As a side note, I don’t think I’ve opened iPhoto since I purchased my current machine (15 inch MacNook Pro) last year.
• Nik Software Complete Collection - I have the Lightroom/Aperture versions of these great filters such as Viveza and Silver Efex, although I haven’t used them too much. On the to-do list…
• Adobe Photoshop CS4 I freely admit that I’m a complete Photoshop noob and when I do use it, it is usually to use actions from Totally Rad and Pioneer Woman.

And here is my wishlist:

• Nikon D7000 - I thought the D90 was going to be my replacement, and then this came along. Need to save some lunch money first.
• Sigma 17-50mm/2.8 - A better low-light mid-range zoom, and significantly cheaper than its Nikon equivalent.
• Nikon 70-300mm VR - Need a bit more reach.
• Nikon 16-85mm VR - Not a fixed focal length, but a highly regarded all-around zoom.

Filed under: Photography | Link |

I just ordered David Mamet’s new book, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, about his path to conservatism. The Left can have all the Alec Baldwin’s, Sean Penn’s and Susan Sarandon’s they want. None of them can carry Mamet’s pencil.

Here is Mamet’s seminal Village Voice article from two years ago, “Why I Am No Longer Brain-Dead Liberal.”

And here is Andrew Ferguson’s excellent writeup in the Weekly Standard.

Update: Here is a John Podhertz column about Mamet. The story at the end is priceless.

Update 2: And here is a long transcript of Mamet’s interview on the Hugh Hewitt show.

Filed under: Books | Link |