Utility

What if the scoring sheets for a squash match used this technology? You could record the progress of the game along with all of the interaction between referee and players. This could be cool!.

The Pulse smartpen captures handwriting and simultaneously records audio and synchronizes it to the writing, so users never miss a word. Pulse is available in two models. Priced at $149, the 1GB model provides storage for over 100 hours of recorded audio. At $199, the 2GB model doubles the storage capacity and provides more flexibility for downloading future applications. In addition to the Pulse smartpen, consumers may also buy Livescribe dot paper and the latest accessories, such as the Premium Leather Case $24.95, 2-Pack of Journals $24.95, 4-Pack of College-Ruled Notebooks $19.95 or 5-Pack of Ink Cartridges $5.95. The Pulse smartpen, dot paper and accessories are also available for purchase at www.livescribe.com. Livescribe :: Press Center.

From The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint

Metaphors for Presentations

Years before today’s slideware, presentations at companies such as IBM and in the military used bullet lists shown by overhead projectors. Then, in 1984, a software house developed a presentation package, “Presenter,” which was eventually acquired by Microsoft and turned into PowerPoint.

This history is revealing, for the metaphor behind the PP cognitive style is the software corporation itself. That is, a big bureaucracy engaged in computer programming (deeply hierarchical, nested, highly structured, relentlessly sequential, one-short-line-at-a-time) and in marketing (fast pace, misdirection, advocacy not analysis, slogan thinking, branding, exaggerated claims, marketplace ethics). To describe a software house is to describe the PowerPoint cognitive style. Why should the structure, activities, and values of a large commercial bureaucracy be a useful metaphor for our presentations? Could any metaphor be worse? Voice-mail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin?

A better metaphor for presentations is good teaching. Teachers seek to explain something with credibility, which is what many presentations are trying to do. The core ideas of teaching—explanation, reasoning, finding things out, questioning, content, evidence, credible authority not patronizing authoritarianism—are contrary to the hierarchical market-pitch approach.

Especially disturbing is the introduction of the PowerPoint cognitive style into schools. Instead of writing a report using sentences, children learn how to make client pitches and info-mercials, which is better than encouraging children to smoke. Elementary school PP exercises (as seen in teacher’s guides, and in student work posted on the internet) typically show 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation consisting of 3 to 6 slides—a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Rather than being trained as mini-bureaucrats in PPPhluff and foreshortening of thought, students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to The Exploratorium. Or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

– Edward Tufte, October 16, 2003 Read the rest of this entry »

11 Ways to Optimize Your Mac’s Performance:

9. Keep an Eye on Activity Monitor There may be other things hogging your processor’s attention or sucking up RAM. How will you know about them? By using Apple’s Activity Monitor, which comes with OS X. Activity Monitor will tell you about CPU usage, RAM requirements, virtual memory usage, and whether a given application is a PowerPC or Intel (Universal) build. Check it occasionally to see if there are any red flags - or keep it running for a few days (with one of the useful Dock icons or floating windows enabled) to keep an eye on when things are spiking.

It’s a fine idea, but could be part of the problem.

I have been running Activity Monitor quite constantly since late January.

the underlying “pmtool” loses memory. a lot of memory. It starts off consuming just over 1MB of “real memory” (1.4MB).

After 18 hours that will be about 80MB of real memory. So if limited memory is the problem, and you keep it running for a few days, well…

An Avatar Is Born - Electronic House Magazine

What can you expect from an Electronic House Home of the Year grand prize winner? For starters, it has to be a great house—one whose occupants don’t like leaving and always look forward to returning. It must have innovative home technology.

OK. I admit it. I don’t run a stock browser (Safari) on my Mac.

Back a while ago I started to experience “loss of minimize” on my system (after update to 10.4.6). The Minimize button, keyboard shortcut, menu item - all disabled. Mostly only happened with Safari left running a long time. Sometimes (most) it would cause all the other applications to lose Minimize as well.

I switched to Firefox for a while. Decided to try and “fix” Safari. Spent a week finding a “culprit” and finally switched back to Safari full time.

Now comes 10.4.7 - back comes the death of Minimize - with a vengance.

I couldn’t remember any web thing that Firefox wouldn’t do, but I still don’t like the lack of a left-hand margin of sufficient size on the toolbars. It just doesn’t look great. But you know? It works! More things work better/differently than with Safari (read that Wordpress editing, phpMyAdmin)

• Safari Bookmark Exporter
• Schubert PDF plugin
• Web Developer add-on
• Sage (RSS)

Read the rest of this entry »

Forward Looking Statements: More on Haystack

Haystack powers allyoucanupload and will soon power all of Webshots (Webshots is a photo sharing community with 19,000,000 members who have uploaded over 375,000,000 photos).  Allyoucanupload is an image hosting service that we built to run alongside Webshots.

by way of Scripting News

I went to look at both allyoucanupload and Webshots.

So how far does my picture actually travel?

Click here to actually see some detail

When would I decide to “throw” my picture into the cloud? The only reference that I have is the URL I get back. I already “lost” a couple of GIF files into the object store.

Interesting.

Central Desktop:

Central Desktop:

What is it?

Central Desktop: Easy to use  collaboration software.  It can be used it to create custom "extranet" workspaces. It includes tools to manage software deployments, assign tasks, track progress against milestones, document versioning, and more. It just does a whole bunch of stuff pretty darn well.

Reviewed by Doug Mitchell

Looks interesting, wonder if this will help Face??

(Via WorkHappy.net: killer resources for entrepreneurs.)

(Via Sam’s random musings.)

Yes, Sam. This might be exactly what would make a good start. Lots of questions about “getting the data back out”, and about the utility for the novice.

At $99/month it might be easily justified as a “funding a project” cost and run a 6 month experiment.

BBEdit Gems | All BBEdit, all the time. If you write webpages, you probably use CSS. (if you don’t use CSS yet, it’s the best thing to happen since HTML itself: it simplifies the whole webpage-styling issue enormously: see The CSS Garden.)

Have you looked at iTunes?

Some of us “abuse” our tools.

I just recently created a single frame movie (using iMovie) that has an image in it.

I have copied this movie into iTunes any number of times.

What I do is add metadata that helps me track and find my home-brewed DVD recordings. Each copy of the movie gets the metadata for the movie(s) contained on my DVD.

I have Smart Playlists (in a playlist folder) that allow me to track and catalog my movies.

Yes, my simple list that might be 2K bytes of information has grown (4KB per movie) but what the heck, that’s only 1MB for tracking 250 movies. A small price to pay for the convenience.

If I was really insistent about it I could track down an image for the film (IMDb?) and use that as the single frame.

Import image into iPhoto, create a “slideshow” movie, put the movie into iTunes. That takes about 400K, so it isn’t really an option.

Now if iMovie had some Automator controls…or was AppleScriptable

Paul Thurrott’s Internet Nexus:

Needless to say, the Apple Web isn’t going to put up with that kind of abuse. One of the more friendly responses was from Les Posen, who actually took the time to answer each of Winer’s somewhat rhetorical questions about iTunes. The fact that Posen’s post is so long should alarm people. I think it proves that Winer has a point.

Some would suggest that the terseness of my response to Dave’s questions is a bad thing (see The iPod is too fancy for its own good post on my blog). Length of a response shouldn’t alarm people, except that they might actually have to read something. Here’s a terse answer.

• You can tell if a “tune” is on the iPod by looking in the iTunes. The iPod is listed in the Source panel. Highlight the iPod and the list of tunes shows up on the right. You can tell if a tune is on your computer by looking in the “Library”.
• If you have copied a tune to the iPod you have 2 copies. One on the computer, one on the iPod.
• If you do a “Get Info” on a tune in the Library you are shown where the corresponding file is. You can also use the menu command “Show Song File” to open a Finder window at the location of the file. When tunes are on the iPod the “Show Song File” is disabled, and a “Get Info” does not show the location of the file.
• To delete - highlight the tune and use the delete key, or the menu option “Clear”.

Turns out that the iTunes help covers most of the issues raised. Typing in simple questions in the help system’s “Ask a question” box locates answers quickly, within 1 or 2 entries by rank.

Scripting News: 12/23/2005:

Let’s say I bought an audiobook, it comes on eight CDs, I rip it into eight folders, write a script to name the files 001.mp3, 002.mp3, 003.mp3, etc. From there, if I copy the files to the Archos, it does the right thing when I start playing the first file, it goes to the second, then to the third. But the iPod can’t be made to care what the filename is, so it plays them in the order of the ID3 info, which is almost completely random because the ripper has no idea that the eight CDs are actually one big document. So the Archos wins, I can use it to listen to this book because it’s a Really Simple MP3 player. The iPod which adds a layer on top of the filesystem, manages to remove just enough functionality as to make it completely useless for this task.

Read the rest of this entry »

Howtoons!

Howtoons are cartoons showing kids of all ages “How To” build things. Each illustrated episode is a stand-alone fun adventure accessible to all. Our Howtoons are designed to encourage children to be active participants in discovering the world through Play-that-Matters — fun, creative, and inventive — and to rely a lot less on mass-consumable entertainment.

This pointer is for Christine

Andrew Weil: Tech Nation:

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Dr. Weil, the author of “Healthy Aging: A Lifelong Guide to Your Physical and Spiritual Well-Being.” You know him best from his numerous bestsellers on healthy living and his public television specials. They talk about the science of Healthy Aging. [TechNation audio from IT Conversations]

(Via IT Conversations.)

Stanford iTunes

Most interesting. Most interesting.

Making Light: Folksongs Are Your Friends

Don%u2019t ignore warnings. If someone tells you to beware of Long Lankin, friggin%u2019 beware of him. If someone tells you not to go by Carterhaugh, stay away. Same goes for your mother asking you not to go out hunting on a particular day. Portents about weather, particularly when delivered by an old sailor who is not currently chatting up a country maid, are always worth heeding.

for Christine

43F Podcast: The ‘to have done list’:

43 Folders: The ‘to have done list’ (mp3)

Don’t get freaked out by the items on your to-do list; think of your tasks in terms of what they’ll mean to you once they’re done. (07:36)

Related

• 43F Post: Building a Smarter To-Do List, Part I
• 43F Post: Building a Smarter To-Do List, Part II
• Book: The Now Habit by Neil Fiore
• Book: Getting Things Done by David Allen
• Subscribe to the 43 Folders podcast
• More info on the 43 Folders podcast

(Via 43 Folders.)

Tumbleweed Tiny House Company | Houses

6 x 8 FRONT GABLE

These things are cool. Need one of those smart cars out front

X’s Prismatic Ponderings… » MacCentral: Parsnips organizes text culled from any application:

MacCentral: Parsnips organizes text culled from any application Parsnips enables you to drag and drop text from various locations – including Web pages, files, e-mails and instant messaging sessions – to the application, where you can give it a title, an associated URL and keywords. Later, you can use Parsnips’ search engine to find retrieve items based on keywords, specific words or Boolean combinations of them, or a range of dates

Are you hunting for a “text snippet” organizer? Are you impatient and can’t wait for the “Tiger” release of Mac OS X? Have you looked at DevonThink? Their “professional” price of $70 is less than I thought it was.

Devon Technologies - DEVONthink

DEVONthink is the Mac incarnation of the real paperless office. It’s a notepad, outliner, scrapbook manager, information manager, freeform database, archive, bookmark manager and image database. Your personal »supplementary brain«.

Joel on Software - It’s Not Just Usability an application that does something really great that people really want to do can be pathetically unusable, and it will still be a hit. And an application can be the easiest thing in the world to use, but if it doesn’t do anything anybody wants, it will flop

when you read this, look at the categories (where they are depends on which style is being used).

From what I can tell the categories still need to have unique names. The first attempt was set a subcategory.

This attempt adds the parent.