October 16, 2004
Saturday: Not on the Computer
Today was spent longboarding in Williamsburg, eating home made Mexican and watching episodes of "V" from the mid-eighties. Man. TV has come a long way since then.
October 15, 2004
Keeping the File Cabinet Empty
One of the things I least enjoy doing is keeping up with the file cabinet. We save bills, check stubs, warranty documentation, school papers, loan info and pretty much everything else that could come back to haunt us if someone makes an accounting error. The problem we have (like I imagine most everyone has) is that the papers add up quickly and we run out of space in the filing cabinet. Our garage ends up cluttered with boxes of old bills that in all likelihood we'll never see again, but are a pain to move around.
To remedy this problem, I'm devising a plan where we scan everything that we possibly can--that is anything that doesn't require us to retain the original document. That way we can hang on the everything for a year then throw it away and still having a copy backed up on the hard drive and on CD.
This will add a little time scanning, but it will make documents easier to find, archived for longer periods of time and take up a lot less space in the garage. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm looking forward to doing it (in a strange way) and plan on documenting the process here. I bet you just can't wait.
October 14, 2004
Obtaining The Free Music
I confess, I haven't bought a whole lot of music lately. I've downloaded it for free.
Legally.
I've found that there's hardly time to pay for music when so many people are giving it away. My favorite spot for finding free music is 3hive. It's a weblog created by someone who goes out and finds free promo downloads and links to them directly. Usually they're good for about 3 or 4 free songs a day.
Another place I recently scored 50 free songs is emusic.com. They give you 50 free songs for signing up, you can cancel at any time (which I did). Some of the bands I downloaded from there are Red House Painters, The Promise Ring, Moonbabies, Explosions in the Sky and others. You have to search a bit and there's some trial and error involved, but on the whole it's good (and free).
Other places I've acquired free legal music:
- iTunes has had a free song a week since they started. I've found some good ones there ocassionally.
- At work there are a couple guys with the same taste I have. We swap tunes every once in awhile (which is 100% legal under fair use laws).
- I've had good luck finding free music on Subpop and AudioLunchbox (what a great site!).
- Last.fm - this isn't music you can keep, but if you have a profile on Audioscrobbler [my profile], last.fm does a good job of dishing out music that fits your taste.
- Epitonic - Many more free songs.
- PureVolume - More Free Music.
- Rusty Spell's Online Mix Tape
If you have suggestions of other good outlets for free music, I'm open to suggestions. As it stands, I'd guess I have a good hour of new music a day. More than I can possibly digest and that makes me happy.
October 13, 2004
Quick Tricks
A few useful sites and tips I've recently found:
Better Spelling Quicker [From:What Do I Know] : Press F5 or Option+Esc to bring up an inline menu of spelling suggestions while typing in OS X Cocoa apps. Many other OS X shortcuts here [Apple.com]. Even more here [Rixstep.com].
An Alternative Search Engine with Potential [From:Doc Searls] - I've tried every search engine I've seen and so far none have come close to Google. IceRocket may just come close if you're comparing search results alone. The thumbnails and blog search are great, useful features and with everything else on their site designed so close to Google you can hardly tell them apart, it's a pretty good engine.
New Design Playgrounds - In addition to CSSVault, there are now CSSBeauty and Stylegala. For Flash I use Favourite Website Awards and Internet Tiny Awards.
[update 10/20/04 - added a link to additional OS X shortcuts]October 12, 2004
FlashBlog - All Flash Weblog Sofware
I recently found FlashBlog, open source weblog software with the front end entirely done in Macromedia Flash and the backend driven by PHP and MySQL. There have been several attempts at this, but this is the first one that looks to me like it has some real potential. I don't think that what they've created fully takes advantage of Flash's best features yet, but enough work has been done on it that someone with even basic programming skill could take it and really create an excellent Flash weblog.
There's a lot of work to be done, notably RSS feeds (which look like they'll be completed shortly), better archiving, alternate HTML/CSS content (probably could be done with RSS), direct link URL's and probably some work on the admin interface (which is decent already), but what has been done so far is truly impressive. They've overcome the hurdles of dynamically resizing the page content, using CSS for styles, a commenting system and the general overwhelming feeling a project of this proportion brings with it.
Kudos to Francisco Rubiales and those who are working with him and I hope to see this continue to be an active project that will be used on many sites in the future.
PS If you hadn't noticed already, the entire Flashblog site is in Spanish.
Also... if you're interested in Flash and Programming (or Flash without having to buy Flash) and you haven't already, check out Lazlo, a competitor to Macromedia Flex, previously $20,000 then $2,000, now open source.
October 11, 2004
Analogies
Tomorrow morning I take the Miller Analogy Test (MAT). In preparation, and out of curiosity, I took this "Difficult Analogies Test" it was kind of fun. I got an 18 on it. What about you?
October 10, 2004
Dell Desktop Design
I've often wondered if any of Dell's computer case designers have actually used the USB ports on the front of the computers they designed. Not only are they totally out of sight if your case is sitting on the floor when you lift up that stylish cover on the front, but the ports are also at a strange angle, making it very hard to plug anything in without getting down on the floor and looking up under the panel. Once you finally manage to get something plugged in, wires have to come up and around the front of the panel. Not only that, you almost have to unplug anything that's plugged into the front of the computer every time you are done because there's no way to close the cover with anything plugged in and it's very awkward sticking out. The same thing goes for the CD case. Every time you need to insert or remove a CD you have to open a door on the front of the case. Don't get me wrong, I don't actually own a Dell desktop (I do have a Dell laptop however) but I'm always baffled by this when I have to use one. Maybe someone who owns one could clarify this design decision for me.