This video has been around a while, but I finally watched it after DrHorrible twittered it. It really is pretty fuckin’ cool:

(PS: If you go to YouTube, you can select the High Quality version.)

So, I’ve been using twitter sporadically. I’m still feeling it out and not sure if I will continue using it, but signs point to yes. For now.

It’s like a weird form of irc-like chat in slowmotion, where you start off ignoring everyone in one gigantic world-wide room. Everyone is also ignoring you. You can befriend somene, which means you have essentially unignored them and now receive their messages. They’re not seeing yours, though, until they befriend (or “follow”) you.

You can also see who someone is following, but not who is following them.

I’m r3v there.

Also, for a complete waste of time, check out the mesmerizing Twittervision.

Our friends have this company called BecauseWeCan.org and they rock. They do custom design|build work with the help of their trusty robot Frank. (Frank is a CNC router ShopBot.) They really create some awesome stuff. Go and take a look. If you really want to be blown away, check out all the work they’ve put into designing Backbone Entertainment and Three Rings Design in the “Great Things we Do” section.

Yesterday we went over to their house for Frank’s birthday party. If was fun, even though he’s a bit of a show off when he’s been drinking.

Anyways, last year they showed off the ShopBot abilities at the Maker Faire. I believe they are doing so again this year.

01/01/07 - Comic History, originally uploaded by finrod.
Congrats to one of my fave webcomic dudes, rstevens. He’s managed to crossover from webcomic-only to web & print. In some papers, his strip, Diesel Sweeties, has replaced the venerable Foxtrot, which I love, but won’t miss since I don’t read dead-tree newspapers anymore. Foxtrot hasn’t ended, mind you, just gone Sundays only. Bill Amend’s had a brilliant run and deserves his semi-retirement.

Anyways, congrats to Clango & the crew. And rstevens.

I’ve added a new link to the “SocialNetworking” category of links. It’s for LibraryThing, a social networking site about books. It’s not the first one (I believe reader2.com (also linked) holds that honor) but I do think it has a lot of potential.

They recently got hit with a tidal wave of traffic, thanks to the WSJ and BoingBoing linking them on the same day. Since they have managed to survive the onslaught (after a few upgrades), their userbase and database have both grown tremendously.

The site allows you to enter your library of books, then rate, review and tag them as you see fit. The possibilities are plentiful from there. You can find people who thought similarly of the book as you did, and then see what else they’ve enjoyed. You can also see people who’s collection is very similar to your own, and then peruse it to see if they’ve got anything you might be interested in.

Be sure to check out the Zeitgeist link. Lots of good timesinks for readers there.

Also, the site supports importing catalogs of books from other book websites and apps such as Delicious Library.

My Library Thing links: My profile & My catalog.

IMG_0614.JPG, originally uploaded by r3v||cls.

What’s a Schmap?!

So, I got a mail from this company/website/service called Schmap. They’re asking for permission to use four of our Napa photos in one of their guides. Technically, the photos are on their short list, so I don’t know if they’ll be used or not yet, but I gave them permission after a careful read through the Terms.

I’d never heard of them before, but it turns out they make a free, downloadable travel guide. Pretty neat idea. Unfortunately, it’s Windows only right now. They’ll have a Mac version by November, though.

I collected the four photos they like into one album, in case you’re curious.

For quite some time, I’ve been needing a good app to organize various bits of data. Notes, snippets of code, shopping & to do lists, serial numbers; all sorts of things. I had been using a great little app called Notebook from Circus Ponies, but it didn’t quite do everything I wanted for quick storage, easy retrieval and organization.

Enter, Yojimbo from one of my favorite developers, Bare Bones software. (Creators of BBEdit, TextWrangler and Mailsmith.)

I’ve used Yojimbo for a few hours, and I can already see it’s probably the best tool for personal data management. Ever. It has a ton of strong points and I encourage anyone in need of this kind of app to download the demo. (It’s a 30 day demo, and the app is $39. Not cheap, but worth it, in my book.) These are some of the things that make it a powerful tool:

Quick, Easy Input - While Yojimbo is running in the background, you can copy data in any application, hit F8 and get a quick input window to make a new entry.

Print PDF to Yojimbo - If you buy a lot of stuff online, you might be aware of the rather cool feature in Mac OS X that let’s you “print” to a PDF file. This is excellent for web receipts. Well, Yojimbo lets you print a PDF directly into it’s database so you don’t have to keep a folder of PDFs, which is just the digital equivalent of a drawer with a buncha slips of paper in it.

Automatic Data Classification - When you enter new data into Yojimbo, the quick entry pane checks what you have on the clipboard and guesses what sort of data it is (e.g. serial number, URL, block of text) and then gives you a customized form to better input the data and save it appropriately.

Organization - The app’s UI is the design that’s become somewhat ubiquitous on the Mac. (…and with good reason!) To sum it up quickly, it looks like Mail. You can create folders collections for manual filing and recognized data types are sorted into smart collections automatically. You can also label and flag items.

Easy to Find - All of the text content in the Yojimbo database is indexed, thus allowing a very fast search. It even indexes the contents of the PDFs it’s storing.

Built-in .Mac syncing - Special bonus for those that use .Mac: Yojimbo integrates with the .Mac synching automatically. Once you install the app, just go into your sync prefs and turn it on.

Anyways, download it yourself and play around with it. I suggest you watch the little introduction movie at the beginnning, it explains some of the key features so that you can be up and running in seconds.

For those of you who 1) Don’t read Boing Boing everyrday and 2) are interested in Second Life, I felt the need to re-distribute this post of Cory’s. My commentary is below.

Via Boing Boing:

User creates virtual ecosystem in Second Life: Cory Doctorow:
Wagner James Au sez, “While taking a break from the UK game industry to raise her child, a programmer created a self-contained ecology on a Second Life island, with numerous species and natural phenomenon that must work together to keep the system function: clouds rain on the land, nourishing the plants (which also respond to sunlight), bees spread pollen to help the plants reproduce, birds eat seeds to keep the plants from growing out of control, and so on.”

If I was to turn off the clouds the whole system would die in about six hours,” Laukosargas Svarog tells me. “Turn off the bees and [the plants stop] growing, because nothing gets pollinated. And it’s the transfer of pollen that signals the plants to drop seeds. The seeds blow in the wind, and if they land on good ground according to different rules for each species, they grow when they receive rain water from the clouds. It’s all interdependent.

Link

(Thanks, James!)

Wow. Simply fucking wow. The SL engine that Linden Labs has given it’s users to play with is amazing. I’ve taken a look at their scripting language and it’s pretty impressive. There are lots of things I can imagine doing with it, but what Laukosargas Svarog has done is beyond… well, just you know, beyond. (And no wonder. She’s an ex-game designer who worked on Black & White, which was quite revolutionary.)

I haven’t checked it out in person (or is that “in person”) yet, but plan to very soon. If you SL, then here’s the SLURL.

Anyways, it’s a bit inspiring. I need to spend more time in Second Life. And I should read New World Notes more often.

Cya in the metaverse/grid/matrix/SL/whatever… Look for Zero Division.

First, I’d like say that I’m happy that the OnMac.net competition was won before Apple announced Boot Camp. I’m glad we didn’t steal the wind from the community’s sails. That would have sucked.

Second, it could be coincidental, but AAPL jumped up significantly and it looks like it was due to the Boot Camp announcement. This makes me happier than the first thing. That was really more of a warm fuzzy, anyways.

Third, let me clear up the “we” in the first paragraph. I didn’t work on Boot Camp, and didn’t know it was coming. (Yes, we keep shit secret from each other at work. Yes, it’s that tight. Yes, it makes it harder to do things.) So, for me, it was a pleasant surprise.

Enough with the meta-commentary, now, on with the actual thoughts on the matter… Read more »

I’m going to take a couple minutes on this lovely Friday to pimp a couple of Mac OS X shareware apps that I deem worthy of my money. Both come from the same developer, David Watanabe. The guy really gets Mac OS X application design. His apps are useful, elegant and downright pretty. And useful. Yes, I know I said that twice.

I’m going to talk about two apps. One more pretty, the other more useful.

First, the pretty. NewsFire is an RSS reader. Yes, there are, what seems like, a plethora of these out there. And most of them are free. So, what got me to switch away from my previous favorite, NetNewsWire and pay 16.99 Euros for a new reader? The look and feel of NewsFire. No, really. A lot of RSS readers out there make me feel like I’m reading my email or Usenet (if you don’t know what that is, get the fuck off my blog) and neither of those tasks have ever really been pretty experiences. NewsFire, though, changes that. The display is elegant, and it just moves smoothly and easily. As feeds get new items they slide up to the top of the list (if you like) and when you quit it, it doesn’t just disappear, it fades away like it’s riding off into the sunset. It’s just sexy.

It has it’s useful features, of course. Smart feeds (i.e. smart playlists from iTunes or smart folders from the Finder) which is something I grew to love in NNW. It’s also got a great feature that allows to you ’scan’ a website for RSS feeds… very useful for when the site’s designer doesn’t make it obvious. One feature it’s missing i the “Dinosaur” list from NNW. That let’s you easily find feeds that haven’t been updated a while in case you want to prune them.

You might think this is expensive for an RSS reader… but I have one running pretty much all day… and good software design is worth supporting.

Second, the useful. Inquisitor is a very nifty extension to the search feature in both Safari and Camino. It allows you to have instant results, and suggestions, pop up for your search terms as you type. By default, it searches Google or Yahoo, and you can opt to search several other sites like Technorati, Flickr or Amazon. That’s the real power with this tool, in my opinion. That and the fact that you can configure other search engines with minimal effort. If you click on the screenshot to the right, you can see I’ve increased the number of instant results, left the suggestions at three, and added a custom search engine (Thottbot for WoW).

At 5 Euros (6.18 USD at the moment), it’s also very affordable. Small price to pay for a nice utility and supporting innovative app design.

Ok, I’m actually going to talk about a third app of his too. David also wrote Acquisition. That’s probably the most popular and successful of his holy trinity of apps and and so needs less pimpage than the others. It’s a P2P (gnutella) app that integrates well with iTunes, and has some other really nifty features and a great UI. I haven’t used it in a while, as I don’t need gnutella P2P apps all that often… but I bring it up because I just found out that he added BitTorrent support as well… very intriguing. I’m going to have to dig back into it again.