From Technology

Two Years

Two years ago today, this happened. And I don’t mean my son’s tooth coming in; of course, I mean that I first tweeted. What a weird two years. As I’ve become increasingly engaged with some kind of Twitter community, I’ve encountered: love, anger, births, deaths, proposals, breakups, people gone missing, people found. Warmth, filth, and everything in between. Competitiveness and apathy. Most of all, I’ve found laughter. Wait, what? Those things aren’t weird at all. They’re what life is made of, online or off. Turns out we aren’t really living all that differently because of Twitter, we’re just doing it…

Keys to the Kingdom

My Kindle arrived yesterday. First impressions were not quite up to the technolust I feel when opening a box “Designed by Apple in California,” but pretty darned good. Amazon has done a nice job with the packaging and merchandising here. I particularly appreciate that the Kindle arrives already linked to my Amazon account. It literally works right out of the box. This also makes it painfully easy to immediately start buying content. After all, I want to read more than just the user’s guide on this thing! I can tell I’m really going to like the ability to download free…

Cooking: humanity’s ‘killer app'”?

As reported in The Economist, Harvard’s Richard Wrangham has a theory that “cooking and other forms of preparing food are humanity’s ‘killer app’”: Cooking is a human universal. No society is without it. No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal in the evening, usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running. Dr Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval. In fact,…

Batch-adding ISBNs in Delicious Library

If you are ever looking to get a whole mess of ISBNs into Delicious Library (say, for example, from a different book database), and have DL2 freshly slurp all the books’ info from the web, you should use this Applescript. It saved me Lotsa Work™. (I tend to prefer Bruji Software’s Bookpedia over Delicious Library from a straight-up features standpoint, but I do use both)

A bucket is for carrying things somewhere, not storage

Twitterman Alex Payne wrote a pretty interesting an provocative post the other day, titled “The Case Against Everything Buckets.” Rather than try to recreate his argument for him, go read it yourself. I’ll wait here. At least in principle, I agree with Alex’s assertion that it can be immensely better to have your information available in an app that actually can do something with it. Nine times out of ten I prefer not to have information in any app at all, I like most of my stuff in the Finder where it is easily backed up, found, and mashed into…

Prettify yer beige

I used to spend a lot of time customizing the appearance of my Mac. Tweaking desktops, icons, themes, everything. Now that I’m all grown up, I spend my time customizing the functionality of my Mac. It’s beautiful enough on its own. But every once in awhile I still get the bug to inject a little more visual personality. From now on, I’m going to turn to Prettify. They’re doing a nice job picking out the best stuff from around the web. Prettify — Nice icons and wallpapers.