blog.mignault.net

Deeply tindertwingled

Grand Text Auto » Programs Ted Nelson Likes: “When I pressed him to mention any programs – including small-scale ones like games – that influenced him, he said he wasn’t a game guy and just mentioned some other ‘full platforms’ that aren’t computers: Tinderbox, Emacs, and Flash.”

2 out of 3 ain’t bad. Which 2 I mean is left as a really simple exercise for the reader. I wonder if Mark Bernstein’s seen this?

(Via.)

UPDATE: He’s seen it.

Technorati Tags:
mac, emacs, tinderbox, hypertext, ted nelson

The original A-lister

Kent’s Bike Blog: One Watt Planet Bike Blaze (and some other lights) Reviewed:

“Back in the early days of personal computers, Byte magazine was the magazine for computer nerds. A guy named Jerry Pournelle (yeah the same Jerry Pournelle who writes science fiction novels) wrote this column that was supposed to represent the ‘normal’ user’s view of computers. But his column became popular, people sent him stuff and when he’d have a problem, he could make phone calls that ‘normal’ people couldn’t. I remember one instance where he had a problem with some Microsoft product and Jerry’s solution was something like ‘so I called up my buddy Bill Gates and he flew a couple of techs down from Redmond to look at my system…’ OK, maybe it wasn’t quite that extreme, but it was close.”

Pretty damn close. I can remember reading those Pournelle columns with a good deal of outrage. He was sort of the original A-list blogger, now that I think of it. Pournelle, though, did usually attempt to figure out problems with the Frankenputers he used to accrete, rather than the modern blogger waiting all of 5 seconds before throwing the problem onto the mercy of the LazyIntarWeb.

(Via novia.)

Technorati Tags:
blogging, geek

Unity for Mac

I was looking at the OmniFocus forums yesterday, trying to figure out a way I could sync the app between my work and home machine (I spend a lot of time thinking about this sort of thing) and there was a post from Tom Negrino on how he does it:

I’d like to sync OF between my MacPro up in my office (where the app and its database lives) and my MacBook down in the house, but I’m not going to try to figure out rsync to do it. I don’t even have OF installed on the MacBook, but I still use the laptop to enter and edit info in OF when I’m not in my office.

How, you ask? Both machines are running Leopard, and I use Leopard’s Screen Sharing to view and work with the MacPro’s screen from the MacBook. It works great.

I used some of the tips from Macworld’s Screen Sharing article to improve the sharing experience.

http://www.macworld.com/article/1310…harepower.html

This works easily for me because my house and office are on the same LAN, but I think it will work over the Internet, too, though you may have to fiddle with router settings.

Until the Omni folks deliver their own sync features, screen sharing does it for me.

And I sort of like this idea, with 2 exceptions:

1. I don’t actually use OmniFocus on the iMac, the only machine I have running Leopard, and
2. I find it kind of clumsy to have to switch to that damn window every time I want to use the app.

And then it hit me, thinking about that recent post about NYPL and Mac virtualization, is that what I really want is Unity for Screen Sharing! Wouldn’t it be great if I could run an app on another machine but have it be just another window? X11 does this, right?

Well, VMWare guys, are you listening?

Technorati Tags:
apple, geek, mac, vmware+fusion

Not-so-simple quiz

SimpleBits ~ SimpleQuiz › Part VIII › Titles:

“Q: When marking up a book title or publication, which of the following is the best choice?

<br /> A. </p> <p>My upcoming book, <em>SimpleQuiz: Get Down With Markup</em>, will be a bestseller.</p> <p>B. </p> <p>My upcoming book, <i>SimpleQuiz: Get Down With Markup</i>, will be a bestseller.</p> <p>C. </p> <p>My upcoming book, <cite>SimpleQuiz: Get Down With Markup</cite>, will be a bestseller.</p> <p>

Interesting issues, discussed in the comments to the post. Some are saying C, since it’s a title. That seems wrong to me. Some are saying B, since it’d be typeset that way, which also seems wrong (presentation vs semantic.) Choosing A wouldn’t seem to be any different from B, except that <em> is supposed to mean emphasis; it’s only a synonym for <i> because most browsers have chosen to render it that way. Very interesting discussion in any case; well worth reading the whole thing.

(Via mph.)

Technorati Tags:
geek, web, markup, semantic+web

NYPL’s new MyLibraryDV and Macs

Reading the NYPL monthly newsletter this morning, I saw what looked like a great new service: MyLibraryDV. From the newsletter:

Download classic films, Hollywood hits, lifestyle programs, and more — for free! All you need is your NYPL library card, high-speed Internet access, and MyLibraryDV to access more than 1,000 movies and TV series, including favorites like Antiques Roadshow and America’s Test Kitchen.

Well, that, and a Windows machine, or an Intel-equipped Mac with BootCamp, Parallels, or VMWare Fusion:

Can I use a Mac with the service?

The Download Manager for MyLibraryDV is a Windows .exe file that can only be installed on computers running Windows 2000 with SP4 or Windows XP with SP2, which enables you to run Windows Media Player. You can use a Mac to operate the Download Manager and view videos if you have an Intel processor and Windows 2000 with SP4 or Windows XP with SP2 operating system installed and running. Macs without this capability will not be able to install and use the Download Manager.

So the answer here is “not really,” though of course you can make the case that a Mac running Windows does it better and more stably than a PC. (Ask me sometime about the epic struggle it was to burn 3 Word docs to a CD on a Windows laptop yesterday. Why people put up with this stuff is beyond my comprehension. Well, besides “they have to.”) But anybody with a G* is out of luck. NYPL, you’re better than this. Really.

Technorati Tags:
libraries, mac, nypl

“Email is for old people.”

More on the oversimplicity of “Digital Natives” etc. (The Googlization of Everything):

As Henry Jenkins writes, there is so much interesting stuff going one out there among age groups, among members of communities, and across oceans that flattening out everyone into “generations” or “natives” and “immigrants” is just false and useless.

It also has real-world implications. Once we assume that the kids out there love certain forms of interaction and hate others, we forge policies and design systems and devices that meet our presumptions. By doing so, we either pander to some marketing cliche or force an otherwise diverse group of potential users into a one-size-fits-all system that might not meet their needs.

Also see the first comment for the predictable “it is TOO” take on things, replete with the usual ageist assumptions and based mainly on hypotheticals and anecdotal evidence.

Technorati Tags: culture, digitization, geek, libraries

A very small Wacom

Colors:

Colors! is a simplistic digital application for Nintendo DS based on modern painting-

techniques developed for drawing tablets in programs like Photoshop. By taking

advantage of the pressure sensitivity of the DS touch-screen it becomes a perfect

portable digital sketch-book.

A reason I might want a DS, though apparently it requires some hacking to get this to run on a DS. I’d been idly thinking about getting one for things like Brain Age and the new “visual training” game Flash Focus. I’m not really a gamer, but Nintendo really seems to know how to get people like me to play their games.

Technorati Tags: nintendo, ds, puppy, puppy

Tracking the wily changes

I was one of those Mac greybeards (though I lost the Classic fetish, natch; I don’t enjoy spectacular crashes) whose formative word processing time was spent using Microsoft Word 3.1, maybe the best Mac word processor ever made. Mac Word has gone the usual MS application route of feature bloat, making the easy excruciating, and Total World Format Domination (including what appears to be the deliberate trashing of backwards compat in the newest Windows versions; is this actually true?)

So I was an early convert to Nisus Writer, which in its Classic versions offered some heady geek-level features (Perl for macros! Regexp!) but still could just straight-up open up a vein. I’ve followed them over to Express and now Pro, but there is one goddamn feature that’s keeping me from ditching the Big Bankcode Font W for good.

That is Track Changes. I desperately need Track Changes. We collaborate the living hell out of a document here at MPOW, and that means we TRACK CHANGES. To within an inch of a file’s life.

Nisus has been promising this feature, or least acknowledging the lack thereof, for a good couple years now at least, by my reading of their support forums. I’d like to see it move up on their priority list. I don’t want to have to buy YET ANOTHER Mac wp. Mellel didn’t do it for me, NeoOffice does some nice stuff but is heir to the death by a million small cuts that is OpenOffice on the Mac, and I don’t want to spend my sucker early adopter iPhone Apple Store credit for iWork (or is it iHardlyWorking?) Come on, Nisus, move it up.

Technorati Tags: mac, ms office, Nisus, office, word

WordPress upgrade adventures

Just updated the site to 2.3.1, a bugfix release. In the process, though I did backup the db, I managed to wipe out both my plugin and theme directories. So I went looking for an AdSense plugin, and found out about WP widgets. I could basically just make my own damn AdSense widget, which I did. However, when I reinstalled the simpla theme, I discovered that it isn’t widget-aware, but then also discovered that someone else had already made a widgeted version. So everything is pretty much as it was, and more easily maintained too, I’m hoping.

Gmail IMAP Watch, Day 6

dot unplanned » linklog: for jbm: Today’s No. 1 Gmail support question. Why don’t I have IMAP in my account?

Oh yeah? Here’s your support question:

I don’t even want your stinky Google-fected IMAP. Ha. Oh, all right, I do.

Technorati Tags: gmail, google, imap