February 2009 Archives

This has been floating all over the Internet the past few days, so I figure I’ll pass it on. It’s a nifty visualization of what’s going on with the housing and credit crisis.

SeeqPod is a handy tool on the iPhone. Just visit the URL in Mobile Safari, search for whatever song you’re looking for, and more often than not it will find you a website where you can stream it. This is perfect for when you need a Disney cartoon soundtrack on the fly for an afternoon drive.

I’ve been pretty interested in the technology used in the Amazon Kindle’s screen because it’s such a departure from what we’ve come to expect from electronic screens. While it lacks standard features like a backlight and color, that’s not what it’s made for. Instead, it uses a screen that creates the closest paper-like experience that’s available. Here’s a macro shot of the screen, via Marco Arment.

It’s interesting how it looks more like globules and less like pixels. While it’s not color, it does display 16 shades of gray. The Kindle is pretty high up on my ‘List of Things to Buy When I Actually Have Money’.

I’m quoting Kottke’s quote from Alissa Hamilton’s upcoming book Squeezed.

In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn’t oxidize. Then it’s put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for upwards of a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it’s ready for packaging, companies such as Tropicana hire flavor companies such as Firmenich to engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh. People think not-from-concentrate is a fresher product, but it also sits in storage for quite a long time.

This really bums me out because I’ve been getting into Tropicana over the past few months (high pulp with added calcium and vitamin D, FYI). I decided to drink a glass after I read this and all I could think about was how my juice probably sat in a tank for a year. Not cool.

(via Kottke)

Brilliant capture of Noe Valley in SF.

(via Thomas Hawk)

One of the best aspects of applications on the Mac is consistency. For the most part, developers follow Apple’s HIG, the documents that define how Mac applications should look and behave. One of the consistent elements of Mac software is the title bar, the top-most element of the main application window. This space not only has a centered title (generally), but is also the target area for clicking and dragging the window. With the exception of the left and right side buttons, any area of this bar can be used to click and drag the window to a different location.

With the release of the Safari 4 Beta yesterday, this all changed. Apple has moved the tab structure from the space between the location field and browser window, to the title bar. This means that the once all-clickable bar has now been broken up into tabs.

To compensate for the change, Apple has made each tab’s title area act as the previous title bar (i.e. click and drag to move the window). The problem is that each tab now has two buttons which perform other actions: a close button, and a drag to reorder button. So now the user must hit a target area between not two button areas per window, but between two button areas per tab. And, to make matters worse, Safari 4 implements the click-through action, meaning these new buttons can be activated even when Safari is not the active window. This means that if say, iTunes is the active window, and a user wants to switch to Safari by clicking the title bar, they must consciously click in one of the now minuscule target areas to avoid closing or rearranging the contents of the window. This is a problem.

Obviously, I’ve only been using this for a day and half, but something just doesn’t feel right about the restructuring. While it saves the 20-30 pixels in height used in the previous tabs bar, it comes at a cost of user familiarity, which in this case doesn’t seem like such a good idea.

This is an older article written by Marco Arment on why the toaster oven is so critical in the kitchen.

Some of the best toasting bread is shaped a bit like a fat football. You know what I mean. These slices don’t fit in slot toasters, so you have to let it stick out the top and try to flip it in the middle of the cycle. You’ll never time it right.

I am fortunate enough to own a toaster oven, and this is the truth. If you don’t own one, now is a good time to change that.

I think I am in the heart of the spoiled generation he’s talking about. I found this a few months back and just rediscovered it. I think it’s great.

Today I finally got around to doing something I’ve been meaning to do for months: offsite backups. Like many others, I maintain backups at home using Time Machine, backing up to a Time Capsule. I recently began cloning my main drive daily to an external hard drive, so I have a bootable backup for whatever reason. But in the event of fire or theft, for all practical purposes I am helpless.

This is where offsite backups come into play. It boils down to having your data stored far away from your computer and house, either on an external drive (transported by you) or ideally, a server. I’ve actually known some people to physically move drives back and forth every week, keeping the contents current and whatnot, but this is not only a pain but a waste of time. While hard drives have gotten cheaper, web hosting has gotten even cheaper (if you sign up for Dreamhost, I’d love if you’d drop andynahman@gmail.com as a referrer!). And by cheaper I mean $22 for a year. So now, not only can you create your own place on the web eventually, you can also safely backup the files you can’t live without.

Now the process of setting up the backup system isn’t for the faint of heart, but I found a superb resource earlier today. Anyone can do this as long as they can follow instructions. Here is the tutorial I followed, and it worked like a charm. I’ll spare you the details here, but with about 15 minutes of work, you can have automated offsite backups running daily. Unforeseen disasters, bring it on, I’ll be waiting.