Derik DeLong wrote about How to learn to cook:
"Not that scary."
How I did it: Lots of practice and watching a more experienced cook. I bought some books, read up, copied everything my friend did and it wasn't long before I got the lay of the land.
It took me 6 months.
It made me Happy 
Watching this movie late at night probably wasn’t a good idea. It was entertaining, but I wouldn’t watch it again.
Shipped on 04/06/10.
This disc includes the following episodes (13-16): "Conceptual Blind Spot," "Someone Else That Looked Like You," "The Nightmare Quiz Show Live!" and "Dead Calm."
Received on 04/05/10. Go to http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Fantastic_Mr._Fox/70109889 to rate it.
d00d: @thoughtsimple Ha, not really. I understand the excitement over a new toy, but honestly, the best the iPad has to offer won't be for a while
d00d: I didn't regret waiting until the iPhone 3G and I won't regret waiting until the ipad price drops
Cory Doctorow wrote a piece on why he won’t be buying an iPad (which extends to why you shouldn’t either. I don’t agree with his article, but the vehement arguments against some of his have been equally asinine.
Joel Johnson wrote an otherwise brilliant piece that says:
So what if you can’t make iPad programs on an iPad. I don’t complain I can’t make new dishwashers with my dishwasher.
Doctorow doesn’t outright call this out as an issue, but it fits with the theme of what he wrote. The problem is this is analogy is flawed. Let’s see if you can tell the problem with it if I put it in mathematical format.
iPad programs : iPad :: dishwasher : dishwasher
It becomes rather clear, doesn’t it? It’s essentially saying that iPad programs are iPads unto themselves. Let’s make it even worse.
Apologies to Dan Jalkut (I love MarsEdit; don’t hate me), but this gem is even worse.
“You can’t write apps for the device.” Yeah, and you can’t publish a book with a book. Or write a pen with a pen.
Joel’s analogy almost worked because he started talking about appliances. It goes wrong from there, but the groundwork is there. The above is just wrong from the get-go.
This isn’t to say I agree with the concept. Is it important to be able to develop iPad applications using an iPad? No. The ability to create content for a platform using the platform itself isn’t important. It’s really not. Computers are one of the few (if only?) devices that do this extensively. Let’s use some other (slightly more valid) analogies to argue against this idea.
You can’t make PS3 games using a PS3. You can’t make movies using a Bluray player. It’s easy. I’m sure you can come up with some as well.
The fact is that for consumer devices (which the iPad is), it’s not important to be able to develop content for it with the device itself. I agree with you. But I’m also begging you all to stop using bad analogies to argue this truth.
d00d: @blankbaby A delicious ending. And far better than cutting to commercial. Take that people on TV!
d00d: @chartier Loved the piece, didn't love the analogy. I'd compare it more to making PS3 games on a PS3, or movies on a Bluray player
d00d: @blankbaby can I join you? We can talk about how I'm an inferior human being for not getting one right away
d00d: @GlennF ah, I always just use the machine.username.member.mac.com address
d00d: @GlennF I still like using Back to my Mac to ssh directly into my computers, was the laptop not connected with Back to My Mac?
d00d: Attention LotR fans: http://shirt.woot.com/shirts/13218
d00d: Fascinated by the interest some companies are taking in the iPad that had none in the iPhone/iPod Touch
d00d: @jsnell Interesting, curious that it's iPad only for now then. An iPhone isn't ideal, but good in a pinch (the resume helps)
d00d: @jsnell Any reason you can tell that it couldn't work on an iPhone?
Shipped on 04/01/10.
This disc includes the following episodes (5-8): "Tasogare," "Domecoming," "Re-L124C41+" and "Shining Sign."d00d: I'm looking for a "mark all goofy April fools stories as read" button in Google Reader
d00d: Had a problem with Netflix and it was resolved on the phone in under 3 minutes, other companies take note: this is how it should work
Received on 04/01/10. Go to http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Zombieland/70123542 to rate it.
d00d: Signed up for my alma matter on LinkedIn, now I get spammed with email at least once a day, peachy
Received on 04/01/10. Go to http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Where_the_Wild_Things_Are/70108988 to rate it.
d00d: @chartier Or they could rename the iPad the GiPod.
It’s been a long time since I took a hard look at my backup situation, but a series of blog posts in my reader has caused some naval gazing.
My backup plan was once dead simple. I used CCC or Super Duper to create a clone of my boot drive whenever I thought of it. Sometimes I was good and did it weekly, sometimes I went months without.
Thankfully I had no crashes during this period. I never had to experience the frustration of losing a month of data.
Time Machine! I was so excited when I finally got a drive to use with it. I turned it on and got frustrated any time it monopolized my I/O attempting to back up. Honestly I can’t tell you if specifically Snow Leopard fixed it, but I haven’t gone searching for the Time Machine menu to stop the backup for a long time.
I still did my Super Duper backups, but it became less of a priority because it wasn’t automated.
It finally happened. I lost my boot drive (which was under warranty thankfully). I could cool off the drive and get a few minutes of work, but not enough time to do a Super Duper backup and I/O just made it die faster. I was using my Super Duper drive to temporarily back someone else up.
Luckily, I had a Time Machine backup ready to go. That was almost not the case as just weeks before I finally replaced the power supply on my Time Machine disk (thank you OWC for quick diagnosis and replacement).
It was time to see if the machine would do its job.
Once I got my replacement boot drive, it was time to stick in the SL disk and try the restore. As you can already guess, it worked. I selected my Time Machine disk and initiated the restore.
Your mileage may vary, but Time Machine is now my preferred method for incremental and bulk backup. There are a few reasons why.
Time Machine works great if you have a desktop or regularly connect your computer to a series of peripherals, but I haven’t chained a laptop down like that in years. Needless to say, the cloning plan I used on my MacBook wasn’t working for me.
I could in theory use a Time Capsule to use Time Machine for this situation. Problem 1 is that I’m cheap. Time Capsules are expensive. Problem 2 is that assuming I could get it accessible using Back to My Mac behind my FiOS router, it’s not really supported.
The solution was to use Crashplan. If you use their software to backup to another computer belonging to you or a friend, it’s free. I have a computer that’s on a lot with lots of storage and it’s own backup plan in place! I installed the software, told the Mac Pro to use a specific hard drive as the destination, and initiated backup from the MacBook.
Now anytime the two are on at the same time, the MacBook will back up to my Mac Pro regardless of local network or over the Internet proximity. Crashplan has fantastic in the background incremental backup. It meets the requirement of doing its work without me.
I only have it set up to back up my home directory, but I don’t store significant irreplaceable data anywhere else, so at worst I reinstall and then restore my home directory.
As written (correctly) elsewhere, my backup plan is incomplete. One fire at my house would wipe it all out. More specifically, my plan doesn’t include offsite backup.
When I finally stop being cheap (can’t help it), I will probably sign up for Crashplan’s subscription service. I have two options for that.
I’m not saying my plan is a blue print for everyone else. I am saying that you need to consider the profound importance of a backup strategy that requires no action on your part. The biggest risk in any backup plan is always you. Backups are for the improbable situation. The most probable unfortunate event is you failing to connect your backup drive and running your backup software. Take it out of the loop, or at the very least, make it a redundant bonus.
d00d: @jsnell Oddly enough, despite it's speed issues and lack of a good web browser, the stability was so damn good, I switched
d00d: Got sent to Technorati on a link today, when was the last time they were relevant?
d00d: Just recommended an iPad to my parents (because it actually fills exactly their needs)
d00d: RT @nick: I hope you all defriended anyone who's against health care reform, because it's wise to sequester yourself from all opposing p ...
d00d: @ejacqui I'm told on good authority that Fig's in Boston makes a Fig pizza that tastes just like Peking Duck on pizza
d00d: Gah, why is it so hard to figure out if I can use BTTM in all its glory with an AEBS and FiOS?
d00d: @rgriff Very nice Rob! I'm expecting great things.
d00d: @danfrakes I'm hoping it turns out to be a real success for Rob.
d00d: @danfrakes You mean it's not good to declare war on your own userbase?
d00d: And no, I don't count "Republicans are evil, uninformed bigots" and "This bill is clearly win for everyone" as real information.
d00d: I'd love a "turn off politics tweets" option for a day or two. No one I follow is giving me any real information.
d00d: Wells Fargo, What part of me not calling back the first two times you left voicemail made you think calling the third time was a good idea?
d00d: And seriously, you signed up at Disqus to do that? http://disqus.com/fuckdifuck/
d00d: To the dingus at 84.63.126.122 in Germany, I know the f-word and spamming it on comments on an old post is infantile
d00d: I rage out every time iPhone podcast downloading fails when "processing" that last bit of data
d00d: Hmmm, BusyCal doesn't automatically bring in iCal calendar groups
d00d: For some reason, my iPhone can't connect to Twitter.com over 3G.
d00d: @chartier Could take the cheap way out of the comment problem. Install Disqus on your WordPress Blog, import all the comments, then switch
d00d: Scumbags at TheiPhone AppeReview http://bit.ly/d4nL0f
d00d: @danfrakes now you need to share your favorites
d00d: Thinking about buying BusyCal so I can use Google Calendar to edit my MobileMe stuff, can't find any valid coupons though
d00d: Nothing I love more than unsolicited financial advice from Wells Fargo. Stop calling me.
d00d: Totally loving the Instapaper support in Tweetie the last few days
d00d: @danielpunkass They have one, but it just publishes to Facebook. Based on what they said, I don't think they see value in improving it
d00d: @dmoren You had to remind me how nice it'll be today as I'm stuck in an office building.
d00d: Got a quick half hour of God of War 3 in last night. Fantastic so far.
d00d: @danielpunkass On just one question?Doesn't make any sense to me, but then again the week before notice in the mail didn't either
d00d: Why does the census need my age on April 1 if I'm telling them the date of my birth?
d00d: @GlennF Yojimbo's use of a single large database makes it unsuitable for use with Dropbox barring a near full rewrite
d00d: @MikeTRose problem with replacing iDisk with Dropbox type mechanism is you effectively kill syncing on apps utilizing it's WebDAV nature
d00d: @FiOSTV Fair enough, that will be huge when it is released, keep up the good work!
d00d: @FiOSTV Will the list of drives be big enough to be able to shop around effectively?
d00d: @FiOSTV What's the plan then? Only certain drive enclosure and drives are approved?
d00d: @FiOSTV Honestly, once it was enabled, I'd just go buy the cheapest enclosure I could buy and slap a big, cheap drive in it
d00d: @chartier Isn't that functionality in the latest betas?
d00d: @danfrakes I'm looking forward to trying Dropbox sync out, any thoughts on it bein app? Call me old school, but I liked it as a pref pane
d00d: It's trying to figure out whether an older but higher end line of Sony tv us better than a later but lower end line one
I blew through most of the series over the course of a couple days. Now I’m prepared for the second season premiere on Tuesday. Great series.
d00d: I've come to realize I don't regret my Office to iWork decision at all
d00d: Hey, anyone else hear about this census thing? I got something in the mail saying it's coming soon... in the mail
d00d: Tiny bubbles under my iPhone's screen make me sad
d00d: It seems to me that Android's biggest failing right now is the fact that OS updates aren't released for all phones at once
d00d: @flargh must go Facebook Fan it then
d00d: @flargh I've tested, quite there is nothing. I keep a bottle anywhere I'll be for more than a day.
d00d: @flargh Ah, ok, wasn't sure if perhaps you'd gotten a sneaky peek. I demand a review so I know whether to spend a trivial amount of money.
d00d: @flargh Graphics look good. Have you played them yet Peter?
Everyone is jumping all over this book because it’s successful and they’re not. That’s for the record.
I’m getting closer to the end and it’s starting to get more interesting, though the tangents are getting more frequent. I’m hoping the ending ties them all together.
d00d: Reading a certain video game blog editor's Twitter has made me realize that he hates his readers/commenters. That's a sign to step away.
d00d: This is probably my last year with Vonage. Paying $80 on top of my yearly bill (1/3 of it) for fees is too much.
d00d: @flargh how did I know you'd respond?you're right, styrofoam cup is the key.
I’m a fan of Low End Mac’s Mac catalog. It’s a quick and easy way to go look up vital stats about old computers, such as when they were released, the original specifications, and the original price. I’ve settled many quibble’s using its information.
However, their other columns present sometimes out of date, and sometimes even wrong information. For example, Charles Moore often writes about the failure of IMAP. This goes back years, but let’s check out the latest installment.
Why am I not an IMAP fan? Guess I’ve spent too many years with slow Internet access and prefer to have my email archives on my hard drive and accessible without being online. Not many wireless hot spots in this neck of the (literal) woods, and with IMAP your messages remain on the central mail server, whereas POP downloads all messages in your inbox onto your computer where you can access them for reference whether you’re online or not.
I appreciate that IMAP can be a good choice for people who need to access email from multiple computers, but for my own accounts where that is more convenient, I use Gmail with POP access configured to leave the messages on the Gmail server, which seems to me the best of both worlds.
The entire argument centers on the idea that IMAP doesn’t allow for email reading and searching when you’re not online. That would be a great argument against its use in some cases (as it is for webmail) if it were true. It’s not.
The fact is that IMAP email clients for as long as I can remember have cached the contents of your IMAP account. Mail.app does it. Entourage does it. Thunderbird does it. There may have been cases in the long past when this was turned off by default, but I can’t remember the last time I had to check the “Cache my mail” option.
If you’ve ever watched Mail.app’s Activity Viewer when working with an IMAP account, you’ll notice it making a series of connections as it traverses your folder structure, downloading headers, and the message bodies of all your email. It writes them to your disk and from that point on, if you try to look at that email and you’re offline, it simply reads it from the disk.
It seems totally obvious if you take a moment to think about it. When you do a Spotlight search, it goes through all your email trying to find that phrase. Does it really seem practical or even possible (when accounting for speed) that it would be prodding a server for all that information every time you did a search? Of course not.
The fact is that there is no good reason to use POP over IMAP anymore. None. Well, that is unless you have a hankering to use Claris Emailer again.
Do not watch this movie in a dark room with really good headphones all alone. I made this mistake and one scene severely freaked me out due to great use of tension and stereo channels.
Spooky.
So, I finished the book last night. I had a scant 60 or so pages left in the book last night and for some inexplicable reason, I felt compelled to finish it. I layed in bed, watching the clock increment in 15 minute blocks as I read intently. Great book, but I felt like ass this morning.
The recent Firefox 3.6 update made me re-examine my add-ons as always. What struck me as odd was that Google Gears wasn’t compatible. Clearly that was a mistake. Google couldn’t possibly ignore the chosen browser of most of the tech elite.
It’s not totally ignored no. Indeed there’s a ticket for the problem. It has a Medium priority. Medium? Not working with Firefox isn’t that important?
That got me thinking. The last time I checked, the latest Safari in Snow Leopard wasn’t supported. Still true. Also has a Medium priority.
So, it’s not supported on Safari in Snow Leopard, the latest Firefox, or Chrome for Mac OS X. That leaves… nothing. No Snow Leopard support using the latest browsers.
There’s two conclusions. First, Google Gears isn’t a priority for Google. Second, Mac OS X support isn’t a priority for Google. Take your pick.
Edit: Turns out that I missed the Google announcement that Gears was effectively dead in favor of HTML5’s storage capability. While a move to a standard is good, nowhere on Google’s Gears site does it mention this fact. Indeed this fact probably makes all non-security Gears tickets a “WONT-FIX” but it’s very poorly being communicated and does nothing to address the fact that today’s sites with offline capabilities still use Gears.
In order to get any satisfaction as a Snow Leopard user, you’ll need to download Firefox 3.5.x. That’s a little backward.
Update: Finally, some kind of acknowledgement.
Netflix hasn’t been doing so hot lately and the last disc in the season came yesterday but it wouldn’t play more than halfway through the first episode. Hopefully I’ll get the replacement to watch this weekend.
Derik DeLong adopted this goal
Derik DeLong adopted this goal
Clearly an "Improvement". Jeebus Apple.
The three or four of you that have forgotten that you have me saved to your RSS reader of choice will likely suddenly realize that I’ve not written in a long time. I didn’t fall off the face of the earth or even end up in a ditch. The fact is I saturated myself in what I loved.
I love Macs and technology in general. Combine that with my work ethic-like approach to new things, and you can see how I could burn out. It became a job. An endless job of trying to turn a few grains of actual information into an expansive network of information. At one point, the site was effective enough to give you a way to track what I did minute to minute.
I’m not by any stretch of the imagination famous and it seemed to be too much. I began to feel paranoid about who knew what. It’s not even that I necessarily did anything bad or worth being ashamed about, but being approached by people about things you didn’t even give a second though to has a strange effect on one’s psyche.
As an aside, I feel that now that I’m back on Twitter. A casual mention of a product is enough to get a response from a corporate representative. Empowering and creepy at the same time.
Backing off from this site and eventually my Mac blogging job gave me some relief. It also afforded perspective about what’s really important to me. As much as I like keeping up with the latest in the technology world, treating it like a competition wasn’t making me happy. It made me frustrated.
By treating it as I should have all along, I could start to enjoy technology once again. The thrill of poking around at software had returned. I was doing it for fun and not to write another article late at night that ultimately was filled with information to keep commenters from turning into hecklers.
Make no mistake. The internet is filled with anonymity-empowered asshats. You can’t publish something to the internet without some basement dwelling, pop-tart scarfer correcting you on some minor, inconsequential piece of information. These are people so frustrated with their own situation that they’ll do anything in their power to transfer their angst to you.
The worst part is that it works. It gets to you. You can do great work. You can do it for years. You can bring great information to the table. The moment you have a typo, you’ll get the most vicious comment. It’s enough to drive you to rage and want to forsake the whole lot of them (and by whole lot of them, that include people genuinely appreciative of what you do, but don’t want to seem like sycophants by chiming in with “Great article” comments).
There are times when rather than using reason and wit to address and embarrass a jackass, you’d rather tell them “fuck you and the horse you rode in on.” You can almost taste that anger relief. It’s so sweet. You suck it up, try to be the bigger man, and bottle it.
It’s been a while since I’ve dealt with it, but it’s not far from my mind and in my travels across the web I find instances every day. These are established people in the industry that I respect and are generally the most patient I’ve found.
I think it’s time I return to the web at large, or, more aptly, a return to small portions of it. No longer am I going to try to be part of every growing trend. If the last couple of years have taught me nothing else, web services come and go. As much as I enjoy Twitter, the people that are proclaiming that it’s taking over the web are so far up their ass that they can’t see that Twitter will have its day and fade to the background, just like every other fad.
Twitter is the new Usenet. And I mean really, who remembers Vox? Do those web “experts” that proclaimed the death of email realize that all those email killers are dead?
I’m not going to get as invested as I once did. I’ll move with software and web services as the times dictate, but never build anything up as the solution to everything. Being obsessive sucks the fun out of things.
So… I’m back.
And the world yawned. Jabber and Sametime have had this from the beginning.
It seems to me, that's not quite right.
Great Commercial. Why can't they make commercials like this here?
An Indian man with a fetus in his stomach. This case called “Fetus in fetus” and the fetus is the man’s dead twin. As the man grown the “parasite” twin did to. Watch this incredible medicin video, but have in mind, there are some shocking scenes.
Keep your eye on the bottom left corner of the screen. I haven't laughed this hard in forever. Pure Gold.
Watch this replay as France's star player levels Italy's Materazzi, for which he recieves a red card. Some of the worst sportsmanship ever from one of the sport's best
Get a tour of Leo's house and his set up. Those were the good ole days of TechTV. They were all actually worth watching unlike the network now.
This month we present you with the lovely, Lauren Reeves, a former Alaskan ABC news reporter turned NY actress, comedian, and model – and of course, a bonafide Mac Geek! (How BIG a Mac Geek? Well, she sent us her submission in APPLEWORKS for crying out loud! I mean, even WE don’t use AppleWorks!). A regular on Letterman, SNL, and Conan O'Brien...
Undercover reporter Michelle Madigan (Associate Producer of NBC Dateline) got a little more than she bargained for when she tried to sneak in to DEFCON 2007 with hidden cameras to get someone to confess to a felony. When DEFCON staff announced the “spot the undercover reporter” game and told the...
Derik DeLong commented on an entry by fullamef titled "Untitled" regarding be wonderful:
I’m not biased. You are absolutely, without exception, wonderful.
"But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be."
The Merlin Show arrives Monday, February 26th, at thirty theoretically productive frames per second.
Derik DeLong added an entry about go to macworld:
I went to MWSF2007 and even got to see the Keynote first hand. It’s seriously something every Mac user should experience.
Derik DeLong added an entry about buy a hybrid car:
I got a 2007 Camry Hybrid. Quite simply, this car rocks. It may not have the mileage of a Prius, but it’s such a pleasure to drive.
Last updated:
April 11, 2010 03:00 AM
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