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Blogging the Moment

Happy iPod Day

If you're bored of the usual apple rumors, may I humbly suggest iPhone @ home, the "superset of all Apple rumors, ever."

Major Threat Redux

The working-class London borough of Hackney is furious that Nike is selling t-shirts with the Hackney logo without asking for permission to use (much less license) the decades-old icon. In keeping with their act first, act later practice, Nike has agreed to discuss the issue with Hackney.

Stay Free! brings us another Nike kerfuffle, "Just Coopt it."

I'm sure this story will follow a similar arc as the Minor Threat "controversy" (see kottke, torrez, me, mike, mike again, and anil) - debate among bloggers, coverage in alternative weeklies, GIF apology.

Chimpanzee Media Monitoring (really!) were the first to blog the story, and you can read the statement from the Mayor of Hackney. The Hackney city council is asking for financial reparations to fund sports activity, and assurances that the clothes were not produced in sweatshops.

I wonder if it's too late for the District of Columbia to argue that Minor Threat (and by extension, Dischord Records) is a local treasure. Reparations should be paid to local musicians and educational programs.

Cell Phone Comments

Ours is a Nokia house. Adriana has been loving the N90 and it's sweet camera, which for my money is two or three times nicer than the next best camera on a phone, which belongs to my beloved n70. And of course both phones sync wonderfully with our Apple computers. This is the perfect amount of PDA in my phone - I need to be able to check mail & appointments but rarely do I need to write mail or create appointments. When I do need to do that, the features are available, albeit inconvenient.

I've also been playing with the Spring A920 as part of their Ambassador Program. As far as I can tell, this program is a raging success. The blog chatter is off the charts, and if I'm at dinner with six or seven folks there's a good chance four of us may whip out the phones and start playing songs. This phone is great as a walkman or mini-boom box. However, there's no way will I pay $2.50 for a single or $4.99 for a ringtone.

I have played with the idea of using my Sprint phone as a primary phone, but the lack of syncing with OS X is a deal breaker. And although Nokia's "smart phone" utopia has never quite materialized and probably never will, it's still pretty good and I don't want to give it up. I love the music capabilities of my Sprint phone, but I simply don't need them. iPods are good for music, and in my estimation things will stay that way for the forseeable future.

Finally, the Sprint Ambassador program may be a victim of it's own success. I searched for some fun Sprint A920 ideas or tricks that I wouldn't have known about on my own, but all I could find was a bunch of blog entries. Relevant blog entries, but almost all of them talking about how good the Sprint A920 is at downloading music when that music is free. Yes, that is true. No, that is not what I need in a phone, especially when the music stops being free.

Looking Southwest

Looking Southwest
Originally uploaded by david.

Adriana and I took a walk through midtown last night and ended up at the new Apple store.

Lists make for lazy English, but here I go anyway:

• Apple is clearly channeling the Louvre. It's placed in the most Parisian-feeling corner of the city, just a half of a block away from Manhattan's Grand Army Plaza.


• Steve Jobs is clearly channeling Willy Wonka, all the way down to the Glass Elevator.


• FAO Schwarz looked like a deserted film set. Kind of sad for me, since it used to be my favorite store. My favorite was the basement in the old Forbidden Planet (on 11th st., not 13th). They had tens of thousands of back issues of comics in hardly sorted white cardboard boxes and Go-Bots. Every Go-Bot. Come to think of it, that is the exact opposite retail experience of the new Apple Store.


• One of the City's great architectural treasures, The Plaza, looked like the crummy construction site it is after her very public battle with the Hotel Workers Union. Just down 59th St. the Time Warner Center looked lonely and dark.


• No, we didn't go in.

So, to sum up. Glossy screens: bad. People: idiots. Steve Jobs: insane. This post: too long. Blah.

John Siracusa on the technology industry glossy screens.

Remnick, The New Yorker and the War

Jason linked to an NPR interview with David Remnick, the Editor-in-Chief of The New Yorker. It's notable because it's the first time I've ever heard or read anyone take Remnick to task for his pro-war stance in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Remnick hems and haws and says "No one got the story quite right." This is one of the most enraging cop-outs that I hear reported over and over as an excuse for the press' total lack of spine and vision last year. I wish Remnick would simply apologize, which is clearly the right thing to do. There's more shame in not owning up to your mistakes than in admitting them. It seems like a minor point, but I naively hold the magazine to a higher standard.

I know Art Spiegelman left The New Yorker largely because of this issue, and now I see he's doing covers for Harper's, which seems silly and derivative. All in all it's just a minor footnote to this whole sad episode.

Apple G6

The Apple fan community (mob?) is whipped into a tizzy over this bootleg "G6" being sold with a pirated version of OS X for Intel. I don't get the animosity. This thing looks pretty cool to me. This is probably exactly what a low-end Mac would look like if Steve Jobs hadn't put the kibosh (kibbosh?) on clones when he came back to Apple.

I'm still waiting for the "Google OS" to to emerge in a similar manner, which could simply be a nice Ubuntu box with the Google bookmarks and APIs baked into Gnome.

Birkin Still in Beta

Paging Mena Trott!

I bought this second-hand [sporran purse] in Edinburgh three years ago, and a more useful little thing one couldn't own. It's the envy of Paris. I gave up on the [Birkin] bag right away. That bloody thing. I told Hermes they were mad to make it. My one was always full and it ended up giving me tendonitis.

Jane Birkin abandons the Birkin, via Agenda Inc.
Also of interest: Tom Cruise is "still in Theta." Mena's Corner is now no longer a dinosaur feed according to NetNewsWire. Stingy Bar and Scribbling.Net remain.

mny1tiu

My dreams are answered
Originally uploaded by david.

I like to watch The Wire, Deadwood and whatever's playing on New York 1. Customers of Time Warner Cable can now get NY1 on demand, as if it wasn't already convenient enough that they replay every story every hour.

Anil jokingly calls NY1 "The Subway Strike Channel." I'm not laughing! As gothamist and others (including the New York Times, but behind their paywall) noted, NY1's strike coverage was unrivaled. If they offered a "Best of the 2005 Subway Strike Coverage" DVD for $30, I'd buy it. I am hoping for another strike this year, even though I know that's impossible, just so NY1 can cover it again.

Good Accounting (In which I Become a Corporate Schill for American Express)

Since I started working for myself in the middle of last year, I've had to change my entire approach to how I approach and arrange my finances. I've fastidiously kept almost every receipt and missive from cable, mobile, credit card, student loan companies and anything that could remotely approach relevance come the Ides of April. Despite this, the pile of paper and impending math is intimidating, and I am constantly afraid of the mess that is my accounting "system." Since I do so much banking on-line, I'd been frustrated that my credit card companies couldn't offer me a spreadsheet of all my purchases, which would make all of this math much easier. I still get mail every week from American Express addressed to $$FIRST_NAME$$ $$LAST_NAME$$.

This week they offered $$FIRST_NAME$$ a "Year End Summary." Curious, I clicked through, and my dreams were answered. Here are all my purchases, not only in PDF, CSV or XLS, but broken down by category. I am floored! There's even an "interactive" version where you can re-categorize misfiled items, although it appears they did a great job. And they should, it's what they do!

Highs and Lows:

• $2000 in "travel" expenses, broken down into airfare, lodging, and other. "Other," the largest chunk, consists entirely of Subway and Amtrak fares. South By Southwest accommodations and three plane trips account for the balance. It would be nice if they could connect the name on the reservations, in two cases Adriana's, into the spreadsheet since I can't write off her tickets on my taxes.


• $1300 in restaurants - less than I would have guessed, but probably because it's so common to pay with cash in New York.


• $0 automobile related charge, account related charges and late fees.


• $[embarrassingly large number] in "Merchandise," the vast majority of which is mobile phone and server costs that I passed on to clients and co-workers. The rest is video games and books. Why did I make three trips to H&M in July? And Apple - wow. Just, wow. Five trips to Whole Foods: $474. Got to get that under control this year!

Tabla Spices

tabla_spices
Originally uploaded by Alaina B..

Yojimbo

Yojimbo is a new snippets-saving app for OS X. I've been enjoying it and I'll probably stick with it. It allows you to drag text files, text snippets or URLs into an unobtrusive sidebar, which adds them to your "library." Your Library is a sortable Mail-like view of all your snippets, and you can sort them into sub-libraries that are like iTunes playlists.

I've tried a bunch of note taking solutions but never quite stuck with one. vi was my old favorite when I was on Unix and a terminal was always open, but that's often not the case on OS X. BBedit is fast, and I love the diff tool and other flourishes, but keeping "notes.txt" open all the time felt ... wasteful. Voodoo Pad was fast and fun, but I always forgot to open it, and then I would have versions that were out of sync. I felt like I had to maintain it more than I wanted to. Most commonly I had a file of URLs and short snippets "to sort," but that was obviously suboptimal. I know people love and swear by DevonThing, but it just seemed like overkill for my needs, which are "keep" and "search." The absolute best-in-class notekeeping app in the world is still Microsoft OneNote, but Yojimbo is the first piece of OS X software that deserves mention in the same sentence as the heretofore undisputed champion.

There are some more features I'd like to see. I suppose this is a wish list of features that would be true of any of the above apps as well, but like I said Yojimbo is currently closest to my ideal.

• Clipboard Integration - Jumpcut is still the best-in-class OS X clipboard manager, but it's getting a little long in the tooth. I'd love to be able to sort and save anything from my clipboard within Yojimbo. I often realize too late that I actually wanted to save that thing that was in my clipboard ten minutes ago. A nice view of the last n (50?) items from my clipboard which I could easily mark as "saved" would be a lively feature people would appreciate. Like I said, no one besides Jumpcut (not even Quicksilver or Launchbar) does this right.
• "Smart" Collections - Right now you can create as many "collections" as you like, but their behavior is static. What I really want is smart collections as intuitive as iTunes' smart playlists. For instance, I'd like everything that starts with "#!/usr/bin/perl" to be a code snippet, and I'd also like to to look at everything I bookmarked last Tuesday. Luckily for Bare Bones, the company that produces Yojimbo, the text factory tool built into Uncle BBedit is a great start on the kind of intelligent regular expressions that regular people may want to use.
• A Better Dock Icon - The Dock icon looks amateurish, dare I say beta. It's the kind of "cool" dock icon that a college kid would put out or that would be attached to an internal build of an application. I don't keep any "persistent" icons in my dock, but at any given moment I may have fifteen to twenty applications open and Yojimbo's icon just doesn't sit right yet. Unless you're the Adium duck, your icon should make some attempt to describe what your app is doing, even if it's in a very abstract way (a la Camino or NetNewsWire's dock icons). And no, "kick ass" does not qualify as descriptive enough.
• Image support - This is the one area where OneNote eats Yojimbo's lunch $4.99/lb buffet style. Image support would be useful in a million ways, especially for web developers who often have desktops full of chopped up web mockups and icons. I could say "media" support, but I don't care about audio at all. I know other people will, I just don't.
• Outlining - I don't need this, but if I can't have smart collection lists I'd like some way to group items together logically, and an outliner is a tried and true way to accomplish that. It only needs to be one level deep, and it doesn't need any of Omni-outliner's magic. It should output OPML and XHTML lists regardless.
• Scriptability - This is a no brainer, and I'm shocked that it was absent from the first release. Bare Bones has always had fantastic Applescript support in their software, but in this case it's totally missing in action. Blog posts always start as fallow thoughts and bits of text or a few URLs open in tabs. Scriptability would also allow cool things like social bookmarking support. A few examples:
  • Show me all my bookmarks about espresso!
  • Post this to my weblog! Anil will link to you. This can work quickly with Atom, MarsEdit, or XML-RPC.
  • Immediately slurp in my photos tagged nyc!
• MacBook Tablet Support - This is obviously notional, but it has flawless support for capturing chicken scratch and funny sketches so that the app is ready when Apple drops the Maclet on us. This is another area where OneNote absolutely thrives.

Didn't mean to spend so long on that. While writing this post I realized that I really want a better "snippet" management app. All told, Yojimbo 1.0 is a great start.