David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start & Design for Hackers.
Before the iPod Shuffle came out, I had a vision for the iPod. I thought it would be useful if it included a main unit with large capacity, but had a small part of it that would clip off when on the go. The technology for playing the music, as well as the controls – like the iPod shuffle controls –, could go on the small unit. I hadn’t envisioned eliminating the display from the small unit though.
If you are a Movable Type blogging customer of FatCow such as myself, you have (or will) likely experienced some annoying problems after their upgrades. In addition to having to change your perl path to FatCow’s new perl path, you will also need to change your “Local Site Path” under Movable Type’s “Weblog Config.” To find out what your new path is, run “mt-check.cgi” in your Movable Type directory, and peep the “Current working directory.” I was getting this error message before I changed this:
mkdir /u: Permission denied at /home/users/web/b194/moo.kadavy/mt-blog/lib/MT/FileMgr Local.pm line 104
Hopefully that helps someone who is having a similar problem
These updates are annoying the hell out of me. I have always liked how simple FatCow is. I sure hope this doesn’t change that. Hopefully they will be upgrading their Perl Modules, because they don’t have many of the ones that are needed to run alot of the good Movable Type Plug-ins. The most amusing glitch is how fucked my stats are. I find it hard to believe that 226 people in the world know who Saul Bass is, much less that there have been that many people who have searched for Saul Bass this month, and much less that they have all come to my site. Also, judging by the number of comments I get, I’m thinking I don’t quite get 5,000 visits a day…especially not after having (allegedly) no visitors the first two weeks of February.
Computer lingo is full of metaphors for the physical world. You have a “desktop,” “trash,” “wallpaper,” “folders” and you “surf” the “web.” We have created a world which mimics the physical world to make the transition to computer use easier.
But sometimes, excessive computer use can have us doing strange things when we’re in the “real” world. Merlin Mann of 43 Folders is experiencing this problem. Apparently, he uses Markdown, which enables him to write his posts in a unique sort of textual shorthand that converts into valid XHTML. He uses it so much, that when he is writing in the physical world, he is now making asterisks instead of dots when writing a bulleted list, among other less-efficient annoyances.
This reminded me of some frightening symptoms of Techfluenza I have had in the past. The first time I experienced this problem, I was organizing a file cabinet for CDs of Architectural project images. They were stacking units, and I wanted my Inbox to stay on top, so as I was writing the label for the Inbox, I began to place an exclamation point before “Inbox” so it would read “!Inbox” (for those unfamiliar with this practice, placing an exclamation point at the beginning of a file or folder name will ensure that it will remain at the top of the list of your file browser). Another time I was struck with Techfluenza, was when I was building my carpet sample rug. I was trying different configurations, and changed the tiles around, but decided I wanted them back the way they were before. So, as I summoned my “undo” command, I embarrassingly (if you can be embarrassed when you’re alone) realized I was not in Photoshop.
I don’t spend enough time in the physical world to have more examples. Do you have any?
I just ran across an article on blogs in the Omaha World Herald (this link will be dead within few weeks, a testament to the tech-savviness of the OWH).
They define a blog as “An online diary; a personal chronological log of thoughts published on the Web; also called Weblog, Web log” and make no mention of the benefits of blogging for businesses, self promotion, just how RSS allows one to “read entries from several different blogs on one site,” how blogs help power popular search engines such as Google, or how blogs are turning marketing and advertising upside down. I know newspapers are written at the third-grade level, but this is ridiculous.
The article explains how to set up a weblog like this: “Anybody can do it. If you’re technically savvy, you can create a Web page for your blog that’s based in your own machine. It’s not easy – there aren’t any places to click or windows to open, just long strings of computer commands.” Huh? In all fairness, they do go on to mention blogger.com.
Then there is the blogs that they link to in the article. I get the feeling they didn’t spend very much time scouring the internet for the best in Omaha blogs. Kenneth Ross’s blog is a pretty decent representation of what a blog is, but Cathie English’s blog hasn’t been updated in over nine months! Jitterblogs.org opens to an excessively prominent disclaimer, which links to another page, which links to five blogs, two of which have zero posts, one that has one post (from five months ago), and another that also hasn’t been updated in five months. Certainly, simply by clicking on “Omaha” in someone’s blogger profile, they would have stumbled upon the hub of Omaha-based blogging.
Maybe they don’t want to generate too much interest in blogs, seeing as how blogs and technology such as RSS threaten to make newspapers, and the old method of advertising that powers them, extinct.
Jason Kottke has posted about Saft, A Safari Plugin that saves time. Amongst the features it has (many of which I had wished for before) are:
If I have a bunch of tabs open in Safari that all relate to a specific job or task, Saft adds to my Bookmarks menu a “Bookmark this group of tags” function (as well as other “why didn’t Apple think of that?” functions), which bookmarks all of the tags in that open window, and places them in a bookmarks folder. This already came in handy to me earlier today when a client handed me a list of websites and said “These are my competitors.”
Want to read that whole window full of browser tabs, but can’t get to it right now? You can save the window, and reload it later. Saft will even remember the browser size and position.
You can set your Saft preferences so that just typing “a” into your address bar will take you to Amazon, or so that typing “dict blog” will bring you to Dictionary.com search for the word “blog” (a default Saft preference). Any such searches will also be loaded into your contextual menus, so that if you select a word in your browser and right-click, you can search for that term on any site you have set in your preferences.
For those times when you have a bunch of tabs open Safari crashes. When you restart Safari, Saft will ask you if you want to restore those windows.
Many browsers already have this, but this will highlight text on the page that matches what you type. Great for “clicking” on links without a mouse.
I tried the demo this morning and didn’t even flinch at the $12 price tag. Learning to use this along with Quicksilver, and you’ll wonder how you ever functioned before.
Don’t make me rate all of my songs. Having songs rated is great for enhancing the Party Shuffle, and populating the “My Top Rated” playlist, but rating can be a hassle. Use the power of the Internet, and assign all of my songs an average rating, which takes the average rating of each song from all of the iTunes libraries across the world. Then let me override this rating by making my own rating, which is then sent to the database and calculated back into the average rating for that song.
I’m sure Apple has probably already thought of this and is working on it, but hurry up!
[4:16 PM – Title has been edited to be more descriptive]
[4:16 PM – One more thought]
Imagine the sales potential for the iTunes Music Store to know your ratings of songs, and to know what other songs are enjoyed by people who rate that song highly.
A fellow employee of RDG has joined the blogosphere. Our IT guy, Joe Schmidt, of joeschmidt.com, after starting a few internal company blogs, has written joeschmidt.com’s first post. I’m really looking forward to seeing what his intelligent, yet sick, twisted, and sometimes disgruntled, mind will create.
I know that he will likely be concealing his identity for some time, but since he is such a handsome fellow, I feel I must show you what he looks like.
Welcome, Joey!
Now that kadavy.net is included in the sites drawer for NetNewsWire 2.0b10 (a great RSS Reader for the Mac), I figured it was time to gain a little edge with my own favorites icon (that little icon that is showing up next to the web address on your address bar on most browsers).
To make one for your site, design a 16×16 pixel gif and upload it to your root directory with the name “favicon.ico”. It’s best if you can stay within the standard 256-color 216-color web palette.
Tip: When working at the pixel-level in Photoshop, it’s a good idea to have one window zoomed way in (like 1600%) so you can see each pixel clearly, but also have a second window open for the same document (Window < Arrange < New Window for document name) at 100%, so you can simultaneously see what it will look like at actual size.
As part of the giant overhaul I am preparing for kadavy.net, I was checking out all of the available plugins for Movable Type. So far,
I also thought I saw one that would automatically generate hyperlinks for certain keywords that you could specify. That would also be a must-have. In exploring these plugins and Movable Type Template Tags, I am really beginning to appreciate how incredibly flexible Movable Type is.
Ethan Marcotte at sidesh0w.com says “No CSS for you, IE/5 Mac”. What a great idea! In case you didn’t know Internet Explorer for Macintosh is dead. Of course, the content will still be there for all of the technodolts using IE 5/Mac. That’s one of the many great things about separating style from content. Given all of the bugs for Internet Explorer / Windows, I’d like to do the same for that browser. I probably can’t get away with that.