Glen's Weblog
I am back in Melbourne visiting friends and family, and we worked out that future trips may not be quite as successful. In a couple of months, the distribution of my high school / uni friends will be:
It's interesting to ponder who will not return.
The following has happened more than once:
andras: "That Wired article you shared was a good read."
[5 minutes]
gmurphy: "Yes, that was a good article, thanks for filtering it for me."
andras: "Weren't you the one that shared it?"
gmurphy: "I did, but I didn't bother reading it until you told me it was good."
Everyone wins! Although after reading this, people will likely put less stock into the things I share, decreasing the chance that they'll read them, subsequently decreasing the chance they they'll tell me whether I should bother looking at the full thing. Complicated.
(Even now, the lies continue - I'm still only 1/3rd of the way into the article. I guess this all goes to show that the quality of things has become so predictable that opinion can easily be timeshifted into something more useful).
While I may write something more about how awesome I'm finding the Kindle to be, here are two quick notes:
1. You can use Mobipocket Reader to convert files of different types (including PDF and RSS feeds) and send them to your Kindle - this allows you to use your Kindle like a regular eBook reader. If Amazon had included something like this, I think there would be a lot less complaining about Amazon owning the experience. The daft thing is, Amazon owns Mobipocket.
2. While the charging light goes on when a USB cable is plugged in, it doesn't appear to actually charge the Kindle - in a few short hours of testing, the battery meter continued to go down normally (and the charging light doesn't go on when the Kindle is off). The Kindle's DC port takes 5V 2A (compared to USB's 5V 200-500ma), so it's possible that a USB > DC tip could work.
So I got myself a Kindle (given that I only read books once, the negatives don't really bother me, and the browser lets you read blogs without paying). One of the first things I did was ask the built in 'NowNow' service about whether the Kindle would support PDF, and got back the following highly-bitchy answer:
"Not directly, you need to convert the files
Unfortunately, none of us answering your questions has ever seen or used a Kindle. We're not Kindle customer service representatives and we don't have any special information about how to use one or any of its features. NowNow never even bothered to tell us that we'd be answering questions from Kindle users. So unfortunately, I don't think you're going to find much help here with your problem. Your best bet is to try to contact Amazon's customer service (which is not us) and maybe someone there will know more about it:
[...]
Sorry I can't help. I checked through the user guide and I saw nothing about disabling the buttons. I tried, but I'm sorry they haven't given us a way to answer this type of question.
Good luck!!"
(This is not to pick on NowNow - the rest of the answers provided were great, and pointed me in the direction of a PDF to .mobi converter).
So I love the new Apple Wireless Keyboard, however, you should be aware that it's a pretty crappy PC keyboard - as the fn key doesn't work (at least not in Vista or XP), you don't have access to pgup, pgdown, insert and (most importantly) forward-delete, which makes deleting files pretty hard.
You can use SharpKeys to rebind some existing keys, but it's not a perfect solution.
I bought the wireless keyboard as I wanted to reduce the distance between my mouse and my keyboard - ideally I'd like the new wired Apple Keyboard (which I also own) but without the numpad area.
Despite currently being the top result in searches for his horribly-misspelled name, I am not the person all you inbound searchers are looking for.
Blogger needs a "this really doesn't need to appear in my feed" button.
TFOT has a hands-on look (with video) at the Lumus Optical glasses, which promise low-profile see-through AR. This is the first new information on the Lumus HMD since their website surfaced sometime last year.
[Posting because I've only so-far seen this article in appear in my keyword alerts]
Despite its pretty limited featureset, I love my iPhone - it is typical Apple - do a very small range of things, but do them really well .. so well that people actually use the feature and think you invented it. After realizing this, drooling over OmniGroup apps, reading about font-smoothing choices, and after setting Vista back to Classic mode, I began to again look at OSX as a platform choice. So with Parallels and Nicholas' subtle evangelism pushing me over the edge, for the third time I'm giving the whole Apple thing another go with a new MacBook.
Maybe I'll be more accepting of the OS because I'll attribute failures to Apple "not focusing on it" rather than "being stupid" as I had before. I'm also not writing much code anymore, so my use should be pretty different to the previous attempts.
It's time for ranting, regardless - I still don't like the window management as I use apps with large numbers of palettes (Photoshop). In MS' world, an application controls a big window with an ugly grey background that contains all smaller windows and palettes/panels - this neatly separates different applications, and lets you define regions of the screen to be dedicated to a single application, which works well with large monitors. Apple's approach is like having the same thing but being stuck with a maximized transparent main window, making your windows all kind of blend together in confusing ways (especially since palettes of unfocused applications are hidden, meaning that a refocus can cause windows all over the screen to appear and disappear.
I'm also getting bitten by the different focus models - In MS' world, application focus doesn't really matter if you're a heavy mouse user, since clicks always 'carry though' to the application, even if it isn't in focus, in Apple's world, your first click on an unfocused application only focuses it - this forces you to keep track of what application is in focus, since a click you do to focus an app may end up doing something if the app is actually in focus, or vice versa. It doesn't help that the visual distinction between focused and unfocused windows is even more subtle than Vista's.
Lauren gave me a week before I give up, though I think that was wishful thinking since 'someone' has a G4 Powerbook that is suffering from a distinct case of "I wish I was Glen's nice fast MacBook that will have no owner when he gives up on it".
I was prepared to hate it - the lack of fringe-essential features had me in purchase-decision oscillations all night, but after lining up from 10am, spending all day baking in the California sun and finally being blasted out into the media frenzy outside of the Palo Alto Apple store, I can say that I really do like this phone.
The crowd of media and onlookers outside the Palo Alto Apple store (Steve Jobs is just out of frame on the left, he was surrounded by young children, like some kind of crazy angel)
It's not as powerful as WinMo, and it's a hideously limited platform (being forced to use iTunes sucks, the lack of dial-up networking still makes me cry and not being able to select/cut/copy/paste is infuriating), but it's still a happily compelling experience. For example, I didn't expect to pay any attention to the YouTube features, but then ended up spending most of today watching bizarrely entertaining videos of pets and ninjas.
Bring on the software updates and fixes, and for the hardware, I'll be first in line for iPhone 2.
On the heels of the discovery that Safari for PC uses OSX-style font-smoothing, Spolsky has the most concise writeup of the various font-smoothing techs and why users of one system get used to it and end up hating the other system.
It will be interesting to see if this affects SafariPC adoption at all.
Two months ago, I posted about how my experiment in giving up caffeine wasn't producing results. Now, after about four months without daily caffeine, it's time to revise that opinion and to consider the experiment a success.
After two or three months of caffeine-recovery-induced sleeping ten hours a night, I now sleep about seven and a half hours a weeknight and about nine on weekends which is about what I was doing before I stopped the caffeine. Falling asleep is much easier, and I rarely have the same hideous insomnia that I used to. I also now eat toast and beans (black) or toast with avocado and smoked salmon for breakfast, which seems to do all the things they say a good breakfast should, despite my years of skepticism. I'm a lot more productive at work, and can focus far more on single tasks than I used to be able to. Unfortunately, like being happy and not depressed, I think being well-rested makes me a little less crazy-creative in favor of being more methodological :\
Like my pretend environmentalism through not driving because I can't be bothered getting a California drivers' license, I think what helped most with the schedule changes was laziness - I had started riding my beloved bike to work, but then told myself that if I got up early, I wouldn't have to ride (using traffic as an excuse). Because of this, I now leave home around two to three hours earlier - today I got to work at 7:15am, and it's great.
I've put on a little weight in the months since I said goodbye to caffeine, but I think that also has a lot to do with the union of eating Google food and eating dinner with Lauren (previously I had stopped eating anything substantial for dinner). I figure if I get back on Traineo I should be able to trim that off relatively quickly - a decent set of scales, traineo's graphing and knowing that someone was watching was enough to let me drop 12 pounds in a few months last year.
Like when I quit smoking, I still allow myself the occasional caffeinated drink, usually coffee with Lauren at Caffe del Doge; as mentioned previously, I'm so bad at noticing correlations between what I do and how I feel that I never really get physiologically addicted to anything, so I'm not worried about relapse (and part of the reason I gave up was so that I could get the effect when I needed it).
I've just finished reading The Tipping Point, Blink and Freakonomics, books that form such a tight PopSci triad that an amazon search for the title of either of the first two returns all three in the top three results, and I also finally got around to watching Bowling for Columbine. While I didn't really spend much time on these (they're all pretty light, and can be consumed in a week), I feel that like Guns, Germs and Steel and The Corporation before them, they all should've finished about two-thirds of the way in.
These otherwise-highly-recommended books and films all reach a climax (that is, they get to the fricking point) about halfway through and then peter out with ever-more-boring examples and views of the data that are so detailed that you are left feeling dirty after having just been exposed to the blinding light of the authors' raw "but I spent so long working on this bit that I just *have* to include it" cries and screams.
This problem is exacerbated in the first three books, which finish about two-thirds of the way through the printed pages to make way for lengthy authors' afterwords (stupid second-editions!), so you're reading along thinking that you're just in a lull and about to get good in the remaining giant wedge of paper, and all of a sudden you realize that you're ten pages into supplementary material and that the fun got up and left hours ago.
It's all rather like watching The Matrix Trilogy.