Excellent New Yorker article about the original BBC version of John le Carre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and its sequel, Smiley’s People, both starring Alex Guinness as George Smiley. Both of these are incredible and faithful six part adaptations and I’ve probably seen each one at least six times, and read the books twice (including the middle book in the trilogy, The Honourable Schoolboy.) Highly recommended, in spite of le Carre being virulently anti-American.
100 Mac Apps to Rule Them All | Mac.AppStorm »
I have 27 of these installed. I use about 5 every day (Total Finder, Alfred, Reeder, Twitterific, 1Password) and a few more that don’t get used much at all: Divvy and Moom are two window management apps that Total Finder has pretty much made unnecessary. And Byword should definitely be on this list.
iPad App Wishlist
I use my iPad to read a lot of stuff. Everyday I pick it up and open a bunch of apps and use some sort of refresh mechanism to refresh, download, etc. And since my workplace doesn’t have Wifi, and I don’t have a 3G iPad, in the morning before I head out, I have to do that multiple times.
I would pay a not-insignificant amount of money for an single app that I could open up and it would refresh Reeder, Tweetbot, Mail, Facebook, Instapaper, Longform, Readability, Flipboard, etc. One button…then take a shower, get dressed and the iPad is ready to go for hours of reading at work. Ahem, I mean when I’m on a plane or something.
I’m pretty sure even the capability to do this doesn’t exist in iOS, but I would be a happy camper if it did. If every text editing app can incorporate Text Expander snippets, surely this is in the realm of possibility.
I’m serious. I would pay serious coin for this timesaver.
Lightroom 4 Released »
I downloaded the beta when it came out, but have not messed with it. But it is on my OmniFocus to-do list, so that counts for something.
Along those lines, here is a good article about Lightroom file organization and workflow. My setup is different, but there are some good takeaways here.
You Should Install Collusion Now
I installed the Collusion plug-in for Firefix that graphically depicts all the third party sites that track you as you browse the web. I then visited the following sites: Drudge Report, The Daily Caller, ESPN, Politico and Macworld—5 sites in my “Daily Reads” folder that I visit…umm, pretty much daily. And this is what collusion showed after about two minutes:
Five of those circles are the result of me selecting a site to visit. The rest are not. Frightening.
The Corrupt NCAA
Back in October, I linked to a an article in the Atlantic about how corrupt the NCAA is. While browsing around, I happened to find that Branch has written an expanded version at Byliner, called The Cartel. An immediate download to iPad.
Along those same lines—the NCAA is an utterly corrupt organization that needs to be crushed—I stumbled upon Joe Nocera’s blog at the New York Times where he writes about this topic often.
I’m starting to feel a bit guilty about all those games I went to back in college.
Family Guy’s MacFarlane Puts Ideology Aside to Toast Andrew Breitbart »
Class act. More of this please, and less of the “glad he’s dead” bullshit.
Elementary… »
I’m not a “poetry guy”, but this is pretty funny.
Flickr Is Getting a Major Makeover »
Good to hear. A lot of folks have been down on Flickr lately, and I haven’t uploaded a new photo in a while. Hopefully this will change that.
Email Isn’t Broken; You Are »
Yes. I’m broken. Great article that seems to be common sense, yet I need to follow it more often.