Avram's journal

I haven’t done this in a while:

1. Tweetie, a Twitter client for Macs. I think there’s also an iOS version. The free version is supposedly ad-supported, but I haven’t paid and I’ve yet to see an ad.
2. Visor still does the same stuff it did back in 2006 — hotkey-activated Terminal window that pops down from your menubar — but it’s got a new developer. Still free, too.
3. F.lux is free software (for Mac, Windows, Linux) that shifts the color temperature of your monitor at night, to make it easier for you to get to sleep after a long evening spent staring into it.
4. Quicksilver, which still does all the cool stuff it did back in that 2006 entry. I tried out the 30-day free trial of LaunchBar, and found it slightly more capable, but not enough so to justify spending money on it.
5. DateLine displays a linear calendar on your screen (I’ve got it running across the bottom of mine), and has a menu for adding new events to iCal. It’s free, or you can spend less than $5 to register and get a few extra features.
6. TextExpander is the commercial version of Textpander, the abbreviation-expanding program. I shelled out for it at some point in the last five years; maybe the old version wouldn’t work with Leopard?
7. Notify is my current email notification program. Not only does it tell me if I’ve got unread mail in my gMail inbox, it also lets me read the mail, delete it, or mark it as read, all from the menu, saving me from having to load gMail into my browser more than half the time.
8. WeatherDock shows me the weather in my menubar. Also in my Dock, which I hardly ever look at.
9. Caffeine keeps my Mac from going to sleep. Click the icon and it fills with coffee, and the computer stays awake. Click it again, and it goes back to normal.
10. Little Snitch checks for programs attempting to establish outgoing Internet connections, and lets me establish rules for allowing or disallowing them. I currently have it switched off.
11. Standard MacOS X Bluetooth control.
12. Standard MacOS X WiFi network strength indicator.
13. Standard MacOS X battery/power indicator.
14. Standard MacOS X keyboard and character menu.
15. Standard MacOS X date & time display.
16. Standard MacOS X Spotlight icon.

For the third time in the past month, I’ve seen one of you talk about having to get links into an LJ post for fear that you’ll never find them again if you close your browser tabs. While I certainly don’t mind seeing the links, I shudder to think that so many of you may be relying on your browsers not crashing for days or weeks at a time, so I’m going to tell y’all about one of the handiest web services around: del.icio.us.

It’s a free social bookmarking service. I’ve been using it for a couple of years; it was down a lot at first, but it’s been reliable recently. You can auto-import your browser’s bookmarks file, but I didn’t bother, because that’s not how I use it. For me, my bookmarks file is for stuff I use a lot (so I get auto-completion in my location bar, and scanning by Quicksilver), while del.icio.us is for long-term storage of links I’ll want to find again later, with tagged-based sorting so I’ll be able to find them.

Here’s how it works: When you find a page you think you’ll want to find later, pop it into your del.icio.us account, along with a brief description and a few tags. Months or years later, when you’re thinking “I knew I bookmarked an article a while back about anti-abortion activists who get abortions anyway”, you just go to your account, click the tag for abortion, and hey, there it is.

More tags: Here's everything I've tagged with history. And here’s everything that I’ve tagged with both mac and freeware.

(Note: Tags on del.icio.us are space delimited. Tags in LiveJournal are comma delimited. The difference will probably annoy you at some point.)

And since it’s a social service, you can see other people’s tags, subscribe to other users or tags, even recommend a link to a particular user. Here’s the Help page. If you use del.icio.us with Firefox, you’ll want to use the official extension — it gives you a button in your menubar that you can click that pops up a window with the URL and title of the current web page already entered, and it does type-ahead completion with your tags.

• A George Carlin sketch come to life — it’s Meat Cake!
• Now there’s a grabber of a lede: “A man who was attacked by an alligator this morning was naked and smoking crack at the time, Polk County deputies who rescued him said today.” (via Boing Boing)
• The things you can buy in Utah!
• Researchers at Los Alamos have been training bomb-sniffing bees.
• Asteroid’s Revenge is a free Flash game in which you control an asteroid smashing into fleets of spaceships. (via Daring Fireball)
• Cabel Sasser reviews the Nintendo Wii (I am so gonna get me one), and provides video of what he calls “the greatest, weirdest, most terriblewonderful User Interface Design idea of all time”: the Help Cat.

• Distinguishing Bolts from Screws, a 21-page document (in PDF format) by the US Department of Homeland Security, March 2006. Covers important supplementary criteria such as Under-head Fillets, Bearing Surfaces, Head Angularity, Shank Straightness, and Thread Concentricity. Someone should write this up as a d20 supplement.

• Do You Know Oatmeal?, US Dep’t of Agriculture, just a single page photo.

• Index of Blank Forms, Dep’t of the Army Military Publications Pamphlet 310-2. Just a cover shot.

• Psychological Aspects of Equipment Design, US Air Force, 1949. Don’t let Gary Gygax see this!

• Sprocket Man, a PDF comic book about bicycle safety from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. Check your handlebars and put your helmet on....

• A Winning Combination: Wild Horses & Prison Inmates, from the New Mexico Bureau of Land Management. I’m seeing a new line of romance books here.

• And from the Canadian government, we have Who Are the Zombie Masters, and What Do They Want?. Calm down, cadhla, it’s actually about health care politics.

(listed on Free Government Information, discovered via Kevin Huizenga)

• Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada has a new ad campaign: Yale, Shmale
• PingMag is a great blog for visual inspiration. Check out these articles:
  • Oded Ezer does experimental typographical art in Hebrew.
  • Gez Fry dropped his diplomatic career path and became a pro illustrator in two years of self-training. (The article title, “How Japanese style illustration works”, is sadly deceptive.)
  • Chopstick design! I hadn’t realized that Japanese, Chinese, and Korean chopsticks are all designed slightly differently. (And Kwytza Kraft recycles disposable wooden chopsticks into lamps, jewelry, bowls, tabletops, bags, etc.)
  • MisFormers are sculptures made out of Transformers figures.
• When did the Muslim world start getting good cartoonists? I’m used to Islamic cartoons being crudely-drawn with blunt, boring symbolism, so when I checked out this Iranian collection of political cartoons I wasn’t expecting much. But wow, that’s a lot more sophisticated than I was expecting (though most of the cartoons aren’t from the Middle East). I was especially impressed by this piece from Iranian artist Mohammadreza Doustmohammadi, enough to look up his website. Antisemitic, sure, and somewhat conceptually disordered (What’s the cowboy imagery in there for? Is it because the six-pointed star looks a bit like a sheriff’s badge?), but graphically very good. And this one is just brilliant.

• Male workplace restroom etiquette leads to scientific breakthrough
• Wacky Japanese video Hard Gay Ramen! Because nothing sells noodles like public humiliation. Skip the first 45 seconds or so.
• Is all of Garfield just the hallucinations of a starving cat?
• The Art of the Shiv: Slideshow of improvised weapons confiscated from inmates at a New Jersey prison.
• “Spanish for Dummies”

I’ve got links about all of them in my Del.icio.us account:

• Stephen Kilnisan, jeweler and techie, is also the unofficial historian of New York’s diamond district, the stretch of 47th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues through which most of the diamonds sold in the US first pass:

  His eye is caught by two gentlemen huddled in conversation outside 11 W. 47th St. “You see that?” he says. “They’re making a deal.” He narrates the transaction as it unfolds. “One of them pulls out a pouch containing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of diamonds. They haggle for a while, then the handshake. Deals are still made on handshakes here.” In fact, according to the Diamond Dealers Club bylaws, “Any oral offer is binding among dealers, when agreement is expressed by the accepted words ‘Mazel and Broche’ [‘good luck and a blessing’] or any other words expressing the words of accord.” Even more remarkably, since the Talmud prohibits resolving conflicts in non-Jewish courts, disputes on 47th Street are not handled by civil courts but upstairs at the Diamond Dealers Club, where a board of arbiters presides over oral hearings (notes are never taken and the hearings are never recorded) and deliver judgments based on common sense, trade customs, and principles of Jewish law. For generations, this is how diamond dealers throughout the world have conducted business, and it continues to be the principal mode of operation on 47th Street.

• The Monkey Chow Diaries — can a human being subsist on nothing but monkey chow? Probably not.

• The Mini-Microsoft blog’s FAQ on Microsoft’s review, promotion, and job-change process.

• The nest architecture of the Florida harvester ant — Walter Tschinkel of Florida State U’s Dep’t of Biological Science made casts of the structure of ant’s nests by pouring orthodontal plaster into them. He also tried using metals, thus learning on all our behalf the valuable lesson: “Pouring red-hot aluminum in the bottom of a 2-meter pit runs the risk of having ones socks catch on fire from the radiant heat.” There are photos! Of the ant’s nest models, not the burning socks.