Drew's Blog

My Yahoo! crashes Safari?

After seven years, I've removed My Yahoo as my browser home page. For the last week or two, Safari has been crashing halfway through loading my.yahoo.com. I don't know if it's Saft or PithHelmet, or if Yahoo changed their ads or code. Anyone else notice this?

Until I figure out what's up, Delicious will have to do. Random distractions are go!

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, osx, pithhelmet, saft, safari, web, yahoo

Out of the loop

I had to click seven different red boxes and surf around two half-page ads, but I just cancelled my MySpace account, and it feels wonderful. I know MySpace is the fastest-growing blahblah, and the founders have discovered a way to electronically wire crack to the brains of fifteen-year-olds, but it's never done it for me.

Maybe it's Saft or Pith Helmet, but MySpace has always been dog slow in Safari. The navigation, the iframeyness, the ease with which other users can hijack the entire UI: they've put me off from day one, but I felt like I had to be there in case something interesting happened. Nothing did, for me.

If I were dating, or if I needed to keep up more with the local music scene, MySpace would be indispensable. I have friends who use it a lot for those things. So far (and I created an account in its early weeks) I've mostly gotten messages that go like this:

Hey! Remember me from ten years ago when we said maybe two words to each other! Wow, here you are on The Internet, and I here I am on The Internet, and I'm talking to you on The Internet! Wow!

Let me know if MySpace is useful to you in ways I've missed.

Technorati Tags: myspace, web

A layer below the GUI

The downside to running your life in a screen session, as I discovered yesterday, is that it all goes away when you restart, and OS X doesn't warn you about quitting running background processes. I save more frequently now, to protect myself from stupid future myself. Sigh.

Technorati Tags: cli, osx

Ignore those other features.

In addition to the couple hundred real books I've been carrying around, I have a crapload of e-books on my PowerBook's hard drive. I just checked and it's 2,208. Yeah. If I read three books a week, those would take over fourteen years to get through. So it's doable, but I'd better get cracking.

Reading books on the computer is rough. I can handle short PDFs (it's a lot of PgDn) or Palm docs in their nifty reader app, but my eyes and back don't cooperate a few hundred pages in.

So, when I read this recommendation on Cool Tools, I was excited. I poked at eBay and managed to shake loose a Sony Clié PEG-T615C for about $40. After a day of playing around, I'm very pleased. I followed leads at ManyBooks and The Gadgeteer and settled on TiBR as my reader software. It has a wee battery display, and its interface gets out of the way.

That's the key to using the Clié as an e-book reader: getting the unnecessary stuff out of the way. The running program stays on the screen when you turn the Clié off and on, so you don't have to go through a bunch of menus and open dialogs to get back to your place. I could be making to-do lists and reading e-mail and editing Word docs, but for forty bucks, I'm happy to make this a solid, quick, single-purpose machine, a portable reading facilitator.

And facilitate it does. The T615C's screen is pleasantly bright, and after a minute's use, your brain adjusts to its wee-ness. It's no Librie, but it's a lot better than trying to read Ulysses on an iPod. The default font hasn't bothered me yet; it's pretty transparent. When I'm reading, the whole device fades away, except for the chunkily satisfying toggle you use to page down – I want that button on every gadget I own.

Two 64MB memory sticks (I think I've got the names of the different disk formats straight – they all sound the same) were included in the auction I won. 64MB is a whole lot of book (the complete works of Shakespeare take up about 600K), so I'm set for the foreseeable future. Batteries, don't fail me now.

Technorati Tags: e-books, pda, gadgets

It's begun.

I was just saying last week that I'm still completely happy with my three-year-old titanium PowerBook. Ashley asked how much I'm going to ask for it when I get a new computer, and I didn't know what to say. I hadn't even thought about it.

Normally, three years into a computer, I'm figuring out which credit card can be maxed out. My iBook's pokeyness sent me into deep spirals of depression every time it choked on an .avi. This PowerBook, which was top of the line when I got it from MacConnection in early 2003, has felt peppy every day since. I normally don't notice it; it's like water.

This design freelance gig might have changed that. I spend my days crunching 600MB Photoshop files on a dual G5 desktop with a gig and a half of RAM, which can be maddeningly slow. When I opened a project file at home this week, I realized my PowerBook is showing its age. The crunching! The swapping! Must… drag… layer!

So, anybody wanna buy a perfectly fine 1GHz TiBook? Only one dead pixel. C'mon. Daddy needs an iMac Core Duo.

Technorati Tags: apple

I don't know if this will end up as the title.

I've been on a freelance design gig for five weeks now. It's nice to have reliable money, but after a week or two you feel like a bedouin, being shuttled from desk to desk and Mac to Mac. I don't want to spend too much time tweaking System Preferences, since there's a good chance I'll have to do it all over when the regular user gets back from vacation and bumps me.

I decided to go geeky and do all my personal work in a terminal session. Now, every morning, I ssh into my PowerBook, which stays at home. From there, I use screen to open instances of lynx, slrn, mutt, and vim. That's right, this post is being written in nano, and when I'm done, mutt will send it to a seekrit TypePad address and posted here (I hope).

With this setup, I don't have to worry about leaving bits of personal data on a strange PowerMac. My timesheet is part of hftf.txt, my Huge F***ing Text File. Bloglines mobile feeds me RSS. Good ol' Usenet has endless Kibo to read.

…and it looks like I'm typing some weird computerey stuff. Awesome.

Paralyzed by the product cycle

On Warren's recommendation, I'm reading Ian Pearson's thoughts on the future. In his musings on advertising from five years ago, Ian is annoyed that tech companies still try to advertise today's crap like it's a special offer that will disappear soon, rather than a gadget that will be replaced by a better, cheaper gadget:

They probably think they are forcing me to buy the current offer and gain an earlier sale. In fact, they have managed to postpone my purchase for well over a year through this fear, uncertainty and doubt that is so prevalent in the PC industry. I want to make a bid, £1500 some time in the next 3 months - what will you offer me?

I don't have the money to make a lot of tech purchases myself, but I end up advising others on when to buy an iBook or TV, and I have a hard time convincing people to get over this fear and uncertainty. Everyone I know is paralyzed by doubt in gadgetry, and many of them are depressed when their iMac/phone/printer is replaced by a fancier model at the same price.

Tech companies are breeding despair in their customers, rather than elation. I don't think product cycles need to be longer, but I do think gadget makers would do well to teach customers that there will always be something better just around the bend. You can't wait forever. Or, if you do, you'll be behind the curve, and that's where we leave the incontinent and elderly.

Technorati Tags: business, future, obsolescence

Mutilating future is here.

Seth Godin points to a marketing stunt that brings us one step closer to The Running Man. It's "buy this magazine or the baby seal gets it," only real...ish. Internet real, anyway. Even if every net-pedant points to this site's entry on Snopes in five years when he gets a post about it, the world is warmed just a little bit to a guy saying "I'll cut off my finger if you don't send more eyeballs." Bear v. Shark is next!

Inching toward online backup

In Online Backup's Inflection Point, Fred Wilson points to Carbonite, a cheaper online backup service. I've been using .mac's new backup capabilities for some of my files for a few months now. Some go to my iDisk, some to my iPod. I also manually back up my PowerBook's drive to a FireWire drive every week or so with SuperDuper!. These methods back up my preference files, work, mail, and photos, but I'm starting to worry about the two drives of movies and music that are left out, giant piles of media precariously balanced on some wee drive platters.

Fred's right; it looks like it might be time to make the jump to online backup. It's offsite, so cat- and fire-safe. If I can let Azureus run overnight downloading, I should certainly be able to let a backup run overnight. And, as is pointed out on AVC, the first backup is the hefty one, with subsequent backups just picking up new and changed files.

So, I still won't have health insurance or a savings account, but goddammit, my 1,200 ebooks will be archived for perpetuity. That's the security of the aughts.

Update: No Mac support yet. Grr. Looks like I must dip into UNIXey goodness again.