The internet did not replace television, which did not replace cinema, which did not replace books. E-books aren’t going to replace books either. E-books are books, merely with a different form.

via A List Apart: Articles: Web Standards for E-books.

ePub Zen Garden

CSS Zen Garden

In a sense, Americans seem to have done with mysticism what we’ve done with every other kind of human experience: We’ve democratized it, diversified it, and taken it mass market. No previous society has offered seekers so many different ways to chase after nirvana, so many different paths to unity with God or Gaia or Whomever. A would-be mystic can attend a Pentecostal healing service one day and a class on Buddhism the next, dabble in Kabbalah in February and experiment with crystals in March, practice yoga every morning and spend weekends at an Eastern Orthodox retreat center. Sufi prayer techniques, Eucharistic adoration, peyote, tantric sex — name your preferred path to spiritual epiphany, and it’s probably on the table.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Mysticism for All – NYTimes.com:

After three decades of ?guring how out the spine works, Stuart McGill has come to loathe sit-ups. It doesn’t matter whether they are the full sit-ups beloved by military trainers or the crunch versions so ubiquitous in gyms. “What happens when you perform a sit-up?” he asks. “The spine is ?exed into the position at which it damages sooner.”

via The man who wants to kill crunches – Health – Macleans.ca.

Interesting points. The comments on the article go both ways.

As new digital book tools and services roll out, we need to be able to evaluate not only the cool features they offer, but also whether they extend (or hamper) our rights and expectations.

The over-arching question: are digital books as good or better than physical books at protecting you and your rights as a reader?

via Digital Books and Your Rights: A Checklist for Readers | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Espresso doesn’t cost enough.

via What’s It Worth? « Why Not? Coffee.

Interesting…

READABILITY is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading. Follow the steps below to install READABILITY in your Web browser.

Readability – An Arc90 Lab Experiment.

Ohhh – my eyes thank you so much. Now I can actually read in the browser as opposed to copy/paste text. So nice.

TBUZZ is pretty neat, too.

But let’s stop talking about “backups.” Doing a backup is too low a bar. Any experienced system administrator will tell you that they have a great backup plan, the trouble comes when you have to restore.

via Let’s stop talking about “backups” – Joel on Software:

Twice in October on the home machine – dead internal drive.

Here’s a screen I captured on my iPhone, by holding down the button on top of the device and clicking the big round button near the bottom. It then goes into the queue of photos where you can email it anywhere.

or this way?

How to take the shots:

1. Download and install the Android SDK. Don’t worry – unlike some SDKs, installing the Android kit is completely straightforward.
2. Enable USB Debugging on the device by going to Settings -> Applications -> Development and checking the proper box.
3. Plug the Android device into the USB port.
4. Find the folder containing the SDK you just installed. The location will vary depending on which operating system you’re using, and where you chose to install it. On all platforms, the folder name should begin with “android-sdk-”. For example, the folder for the current build on OS X is “android-sdk-mac_x86-1.0_r1?
5. Open the tools folder within the Android SDK folder.
6. Double click the file titled “DDMS”. This stands for Dalvik Debug Monitor Service.
7. In DDMS, your device should be listed. Highlight it by clicking on it.
8. In the application’s top menus, go to Device -> Screen capture.

I can subscribe to my notes and/or the notes of my friends.

Let’s see how long this might take to get into the Notes.

it removes the signature from the original message

it removes certain unnecessary empty lines

it positions the cursor below the original message, instead of above it (in other words, bottom-posting instead of top-posting)

via quotefixformac – Project Hosting on Google Code.

W00t

This one goes out to all the night owls. As much as I love my iMac, I was surprised to see how little control it gave me over the screen’s brightness. I often work on my iMac late at night in an otherwise darkened room, and even at the lowest brightness setting, the iMac is really, really bright. All of the Mac laptops I’ve used have the ability to dim the screen down to completely dark, but the iMac does not.

via Monitor too bright? Put on some Shades:

In August, we posted a photograph of some odd, rare clouds known as Morning Glory clouds without providing an explanation for how they form. In response to reader interest, we followed up with meteorologist Roger Smith of the University of Munich, who has studied their formation.

via Weird, Rare Clouds and the Physics Behind Them | Wired Science | Wired.com.

Sometimes, you’re on a team, and you’re busy banging out the code, and somebody comes up to your desk, coffee mug in hand, and starts rattling on about how if you use multi-threaded COM apartments, your app will be 34% sparklier, and it’s not even that hard, because he’s written a bunch of templates, and all you have to do is multiply-inherit from 17 of his templates, each taking an average of 4 arguments, and you barely even have to write the body of the function. It’s just a gigantic list of multiple-inheritence from different classes and hey, presto, multi-apartment threaded COM.

via The Duct Tape Programmer – Joel on Software.

“Globalization has neutered the Republican Party, leaving it to represent not the have-nots of the recession but the have-nots of globalized America, the people who have been left behind either in reality or in their fears,” said Edward Goldberg, a global trade consultant who teaches at Baruch College. “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”

via Op-Ed Columnist – Our One-Party Democracy – NYTimes.com.

For some users, the computer is unfathomable – leading them to make bizarre assumptions about technology and the effect of their own actions. Here are a few irrational beliefs such users develop.

via 10 habits of superstitious users | 10 Things | TechRepublic.com .

A companion to the Post-literate Technological Age.

When the best someone can come up with is a vague recollection of a program’s icon, it says to me that we’ve entered a “post-literate” technological society, one in which people have lost not just the ability to read and write about a topic, but also the ability to speak about it, all while retaining the ability to use it.

But I was uneasy because I was feeling jaded. I thought it was because of the typical “overdoing it” reason, but there was more to it. It was affecting my ability to think critically/deeply about a subject.

via Twitter vs. Why we can’t concentrate? | Swaroop C H – India, Technology, Life Skills.

Thanks to Sam D. for the tweet.

£400 million ($668 million) will be spend on installing and monitoring CCTV cameras in the homes of private citizens. Why? To make sure the kids are doing their homework, going to bed early and eating their vegetables. The scheme has, astonishingly, already been running in 2,000 family homes. The government’s “children’s secretary” Ed Balls is behind the plan, which is aimed at problem, antisocial families. The idea is that, if a child has a more stable home life, he or she will be less likely to stray into crime and drugs

via Britain To Put CCTV Cameras Inside Private Homes | Gadget Lab | Wired.com:

A developer evangelist is a spokesperson, mediator and translator between a company and both its technical staff and outside developers.

via Developer Evangelism – home of the Developer Evangelist Handbook:

Thanks for the pointer @mollydotcom