Nate Anderson thoroughly disassembles RIAA CEO Cary Sherman’s New York Times op-ed, a blabbering, rage-filled diversion-fest so badly conceived and written that it makes me question the editorial standards of The New York Times.
Welcome to the club. We have T-shirts.
I’m ashamed that sometimes I still do this.
If, like me, you are a fan of the web comic xkcd, then surely you are aware that part of the fun of each comic is the pithy text contained in the title attribute of each graphic. A DFW-style footnote for each comic, if you will. The problem when viewing these in a browser is the tooltip that appears when mousing over the image goes away after a few seconds. And sometimes these ‘footnotes’ are a little lengthy.
Lucky for me I rarely read xkcd with a browser. I use Reeder, both on the Mac and on my iPhone. And the iOS version of Reeder seems to have a feature that was built just for this. If you pinch-to-zoom on the image in Reeder, it expands to fill the screen. Touch the image and you get the title attribute displayed along with an option to save it locally.
That is attention to detail.
Awesome short film, with an interesting ending.
A supremely talented, razor-sharp writer.
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.
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.
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 starting 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.
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.
Genius little menubar utility that lets you open browser links in their own tab by using a three finger tap. When I use my wife’s computer, I get pissed that she doesn’t have this.
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.
Comic book artist Frank Miller lays some smackdown on the OWS fools:
This is no popular uprising. This is garbage.
These guys made a pretty sweet sling for a camera. I wanted one, but they were out of stock. Now they won’t make it anymore because of a patent troll. If I knew who their cowardly “competitor” was, under no circumstances would I purchase anything from them, or from anyone remotely related to them. And then I would kick their dog.
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.)
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.