(PAW2009 37/52)
A sink-full of crab apples, from the tree in our back garden. They were destined to become a tasty crab apple jam. (I, of course, am not responsible for the translation from dinky little red fruit to jar of jelly. That would be my wife’s department.)
The pile of interesting things I find online continues to grow.
- Some advice on how to fry an egg. That's advice I need, desperately.
- A video explaining how a diff (the automotive kind) works. A brilliantly clear demonstration of something I have never previously been able to get my head around.
- In my recent run down of software I rely on, I really should have included Instapaper. It's a simple little application for those times when you stumble across something online that you want to read, but you just don't have the time. Especially useful is the way it can slurp text down to my phone for later offline reading.
- My dad's training firm has a bright'n'shiny new website: Goody Training Solutions.
- One of my favourite SF novels is John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids. io9 flagged up an interesting essay that uses it to demonstrate a possible difference between the outlook of British and American science fiction.
- A little bit of Brian Houston, playing his first widely-heard track — but not the way he played it then.
- Further to my previous mention of Spotify, it's now out for the iPhone.
‘Til next time…
“The Lochmaben Harper” is one of those appealing folk songs telling a story that gets a smile. Yet, as is often true, a lot relies on the performance.
I took some photos a few years back, at the launch of Emily Smith’s second album. She introduced the song with a bit of the tale, and sang it with the wit and the wink it needs and deserves. I remember it as a brilliant gig all round, actually.
Emily’s won a bunch of awards, and is well worth listening to. You can get her music, including this track, on iTunes.
(I can’t find “The Lochmaben Harper” on YouTube or Spotify, but you can find some tracks in each place: on Youtube and on Spotify.)
(PAW2009 36/52)
A really shoddy phonecam pic, but the best camera, &c…
Techy, geeky stuff again. I’m going to stop apologising for that. For a while, there, I toyed with launching another blog as an outlet for the geeky things I like to post; I’m aware that it’s not really the cup of tea of everyone who reads here. I was going to call it Heartless Gravity. (Extra points if you figure out why.) For now, though, I’ve decided to keep it all here.
Having just gone through a (relatively painless) operating system upgrade, I’ve been noticing the little things, software especially, which make my day go just a bit more easily.
- 1Password is very first on the list of software that I'd have trouble functioning without. With so much business being done online and web applications as far as the eye can see, I've ended up with what feels like hundreds of username/password pairs to try and remember. Better that everything has its own (difficult) password, so 1Password remembers them all for me and I only have to remember its single (stonkingly complex) master password. Best make sure that database is backed up...
- MobileMe is the over-the-air syncing service from Apple. It was a little flaky when it first launched, but now it keeps the diaries and address books on my computer and on my phone matched up without me having to do anything about it. This is the service that got me away from pen and paper for everything, which is enough of an achievement alone.
- Caffeine is dead simple. It's a little icon in the menubar of my Mac that deactivates the screen saver, sleep setting or anything else that will affect the screen when the computer is idle. Don't try and give a presentation without it.
- Things is a simple, slick task tracker, and it even syncs to my phone. I could never do lists, but over the last few years I've developed a serious habit. Things tracks everything for me. If you take it away, I'll never get anything done.
- TextMate is just a text editor. Like Notepad, or TextEdit. A big, smooth Lexus hybrid, or a Porsche 911, is just a car. Like a Corsa or a Fiesta. TextMate can be the Lexus or the Porsche. Or a Landrover. I do more and more of my writing in plain text, before dropping it into Word or Pages or whatever, and I've tried a ridiculous number of text editors. TextMate won that race.
- ChronoSync keeps my local copy of all my work documents in step with what's on the file server in the office, so I don't have to think about it.
- Spotify sits alongside iTunes, keeping my ears happy through the day.
And that’s just the software, and only that of it that’s always running every day. There’s plenty more.