LibraryThing

I've been using blippr for a while to record what films I watch, what music I listen to and what books I read, displaying the most recent in the sidebar here. However, I've found that it simply doesn't list a lot of the books I've read (films seem to fare better), and while you can add new items, it's a bit of a chore, and I've had one or two books that I just could not seem to add to the system.

I started looking around for alternatives, and came across LibraryThing. It may not be the prettiest site in the world (though it's not bad by any means), but it is really full of features. You can add books in multiple ways (the easiest of which is to type in the ISBN, or buy a cheap USB barcode scanner from them which integrates with the site), and it pulls in full details. There are no end of customisation options, including choosing which of the localised Amazon sites to pull information from¹, and the ability to add books to different lists such as Currently Reading or Wishlist. The blog widget is also highly customisable, and I chose one showing my reviews.

The social aspects of the site are very impressive: it can generate recommendations, you can join groups with particular reading interests, and the sheer number of reader reviews (many of which are very detailed and thoughtful) provide a lot of scope for future reading matter.

Using blippr was convenient because I could log all my watching, reading and listening in one place, but LibraryThing just seems a better choice for my reading style. Though the short form 160 character reviews of blippr good in many ways because they are easy to write, it's sometimes nice to write a longer review, which you can do on [LibaryThing][]. You can view my catalogue here, though it is currently rather small. I'm not planning on going through my bookshelves to add things, but I'll add new reads (and items to my wishlist) as I go along. If any of you are LibraryThing users, do let me know what your username is, because I'd love to look at your catalogue.

¹ It may be borderline obsessive, but it irritates me when sites which find cover images pull up ones from US releases, because then it doesn't feel like my book, film or CD. LibraryThing can use a UK site so you are likely to get the right cover, but you can also easily choose alternative covers. Why yes, I do organise my CDs and vinyl alphabetically... ↑

iPhone 4

If you've been following my rather over-excited tweets, you'll know that I recently got a new iPhone 4. I might not have bothered to upgrade, but for the fact that Mr. Bsag's phone (a Palm Treo) was failing rapidly and he was very keen to have my old iPhone 3G. Since I was outside my contract with O2, it seemed a good time to upgrade. I'm really glad I did. I bought it direct from Apple (unlocked), and just continued with my Simplicity tariff from O2, which is a rolling monthly contract you can cancel at any time. I was lucky to order before the rush, and it was delivered on Thursday, so I didn't even have to queue to get hold of it.

There have been many excellent reviews of the new iPhone over the past few days, so I'll just give you my initial impressions after living with the phone for a few days.

Design

The new design is rather lovely. When I saw the photos of it, I wasn't sure whether I liked the rather square, flat shape, but as with many Apple products, it's much nicer in person. It feels solid and high quality in some indefinable way, and though it takes a little while to get used to holding it after the curvier shape of the 3G, it is very comfortable. Before anyone asks, I do tend to hold the phone in my left hand (though I'm right handed — not sure what's going on there), and no I don't get the reception problems many people have talked about. I find myself polishing it quite a bit in a rather obsessive way, but I haven't felt the need to keep it in a case all the time, as it does give the impression of being able to handle life au naturel.

Screen

The so-called 'retina display' is really amazing. It may have a slightly daft name, but the clarity and sharpness is astounding. Even tiny thumbnails have all their details visible¹, and text is really easy to read, even at small sizes. As many people have said, it looks as though the display is printed on the front face of the glass. I'm sure that the novelty will eventually wear off, but for now, every time I turn it on, I utter an involuntary, "Woah!". I quite enjoyed reading books on the 3G (in Stanza) before, but now it is a real pleasure. In fact, reading anything (or viewing photos or videos) is a pleasure.

Camera

The camera on the 3G was pretty awful: it really failed in low light, it was low resolution, and the shutter lag was so bad that it was practically impossible to get a good shot. The iPhone 4 camera is really very impressive on all counts: I would never have been able to get a shot as good as this on the old phone. I have my Canon PowerShot G10, and will always prefer that when it comes to taking 'serious' photos, but sometimes you need to grab an image quickly with the camera you have to hand, and the iPhone 4 now produces really nice images in that role, rather than consolation prizes that make you wish you had your 'proper' camera with you. I haven't tried out video recording yet, but expect a flood of mind-numbingly boring cat videos from me any time now...

Speeeed

If you have previously owned a 3G or an original iPhone, the step up in speed is incredible. I didn't feel that the 3G was slow exactly, but the iPhone 4 makes it seem like a tortoise. Jumping between apps, browsing the web and moving around in email all happens so instantly that you forget you're doing all this on a phone. The whole UI is much more responsive, and therefore feels more immersive, as people who have tried the iPad have also noted. The faster processor and increased RAM speeds up synching over the air for those apps with that feature, and even synching with iTunes seems to happen much faster.

Overall

I have loved my iPhone to bits. I had owned several PIMs (a very outdated tech niche now) and smartphones, but the iPhone was the first that I actually ended up using all the time, for many different purposes, and the first to actually make syncing data with my computer effortless. If you can't sync contacts, calendar entries, email and bookmarks effortlessly², you don't do it, and so you end up not using the device because you're not confident that you've got the latest data. They are expensive devices, but I definitely feel that I get value for money out of them because they replace so many other devices, and open up opportunities for activities on the move that would not have been possible previously. When I bought the 3G, I wasn't certain that it was going to end up being worth the investment, but after living with it for a couple of years, spending money on the new version — and having the pleasure of introducing Mr. Bsag to my much loved 3G — was a very easy decision to make.

¹ I can now read all the letters on the 'index' of the address book depicted in the Contacts icon. ↑

² I use Mobile.me to sync all this stuff over the air, and wish that Apple would include a free account for Mobile.me with each iPhone and provide an easy way for third party developers to sync their data over the air. ↑

Pomodoros and Tinderbox Daybook revisited

I've been using Tinderbox for a while as a daybook and also as a kind of task timer to help me track what I spend my time on at work (purely for my own interest and education rather than for billing purposes, as many people do). However since I wrote those articles, I've altered the file a bit, and also discovered the Pomodoro Technique, which I'm finding really helpful, so I thought I'd write a bit about how I use the two together.

First, you probably need a bit of background about the problem I was trying to solve. Like many people, I find it very hard to concentrate on long, open-ended tasks which require a lot of focus. Writing grants and papers, reading and making notes on long articles and marking huge stacks of exam papers all require intense concentration, and it's very easy for your attention to get hijacked by checking email, feeds and the black hole that is Looking Stuff Up On The Web. Eventually, your mind ends up flitting like a butterfly between tasks, accomplishing nothing. At the same time sitting down and actually starting with an empty editing window to write something is intimidating. It's so easy to procrastinate and do some other (less urgent or important) task to delay the inevitable moment when you have to actually fill the window up with potentially Nobel Prize winning science¹. Second, I can be quite bad at estimating how long a task will take, particularly the kinds of tasks I mentioned above. That makes it harder to schedule my work, and leaves me a bit demoralised.

The Pomodoro Technique is a simple set of rules devised by Francesco Cirillo in the early 1990s to address the same problems. You can read about the technique on the site, but it comes down to these simple things:

1. You decide what to work on
2. You set a timer for 25 minutes (the 'Pomodoro', from the tomato-shaped kitchen timer Francesco used)
3. You work intensely while the timer is ticking, noting down any interruptions to your train of thought
4. When the timer rings, you stop, even if you haven't finished the task
5. You take a 5 minute break and do something else that doesn't require focus
6. You start the cycle again, continuing the task or starting a new one as appropriate.
7. Every 4 Pomodoros, you take a longer 15 minute break.

The idea is that Pomodoros are atomic units of work: you can't divide them into smaller units. If you get irretrievably distracted during one, you have to abandon it and start again². In the rest periods it's THE LAW that you do something restful and relaxing, so you have permission to release your butterfly brain to flutter about where it likes, but only for a limited time. Likewise, the limited, 25 minute period of focus is not intimidating, and it becomes like a game to try to race the ticking clock and finish whatever you're doing. I thought that stopping dead after 25 minutes would break my concentration, but actually I find that starting another Pomodoro after a break is exciting and I'm raring to pick things up again.

Since the Pomodoro plus break is always 30 minutes, you can estimate how many Pomodoros you can fit in the day around appointments, meetings and so forth, and then work out how many Pomodoros each task will take and slot them in accordingly. If you record how many it actually takes, you can use the discrepancy to get better at estimating your workload over time. I've found that I'm quite accurate on some things, and underestimate by as much as 100% on others: understanding and compensating for this has been very useful.

Once I realised how useful this technique was to me, it made sense to work the process of recording and estimation into my Tinderbox daybook, so I adjusted the structure a bit. I now have a top level container called 'To do today', which sets the prototype of notes within it to 'pomodoro'. This sets the colour to red and sets some key attributes to record estimated and actual Pomodoros, number of interruptions and how many times I had to reset. I set this up at the start of the day, picking from my todo list and trying to estimate how long each will take. I use a display expression to alter the title of the container to show how many are estimated and how many done to keep track during the day. While I'm working on each task, I keep the note open, and use it as a scratch pad to jot down any thoughts. If I get interrupted by suddenly remembering something else I need to do, or the task becomes more complex, I throw a note about this into the 'Unplanned and urgent' container, and then reassess it later.

I open a separate outline view on the To do today container, and use the new checkboxes to mark things as done as I go, which provides extra motivation. I now make a container for each day, automatically named with the date, and a display expression to record how many Pomodoros were completed that day. I also have a number of Dashboard agents which collect and display the information on my performance over the past couple of weeks. During the day, I add any notes about things that crop up to the day container, which makes it easy to check back with a search and find out when I first heard about X or Y. At the end of the day, I apply a stamp to all the completed tasks, which moves them into the day container and colours them green for added cheerfulness. Any tasks I haven't finished remain in the To do container, and I review them the next day.

This system seems to be working really well for me, and even exam marking hasn't been as painful this year as in previous years. I've got quite good at estimating how many scripts I can mark in one Pomodoro, and having the clock ticking (literally) has helped to keep me focused. Meanwhile, my love and admiration for Tinderbox deepens. Its real strength is that all the data I had in my previous daybook incarnation is still there, and still accessible: all I've done is to use agents and containers and so forth to view it in ways that I never would have foreseen when I set it up.

¹ Ha! I wish... ↑

² So you can imagine that when a colleague or a student knocks on your door 5 minutes before the end of a Pomodoro, stabby thoughts ensue. ↑

Arch Linux and XMonad

Warning: Geekery ahead!

I've been meaning to write for a long time about the EeePC 1000HE I got last August and Arch Linux. When I got the netbook, I installed Arch, and used Awesome as a window manager. It worked well, but then — in a fit of curiosity and tweakery — I decided to try out Jolicloud. Jolicloud is a nice distribution, specially designed for netbooks, and every single feature on the EeePC worked perfectly out of the box. However, I missed the elegance of Arch Linux, and more importantly, the long battery life. I may have had something misconfigured, but with Jolicloud, my battery life was around 4.5 to 5 hours, whereas with Arch Linux and Awesome, I was getting 8 hours with WiFi switched on and more than 9 hours with it off. I'm going to be using the netbook in the field in Brazil this year, where power outlets are sparse and power cuts frequent, so I recently wiped the drive and reinstalled Arch Linux.

Arch is a very clean and elegant distribution, where you basically get only the barest of essentials by default, and then build your system up the way you want. Consequently, it's not ideal for beginners, but it is a great way to learn about maintaining and configuring a system, and it's brilliant for netbooks, where you want to minimise resource use. Although it is not a beginner's distribution, I have to say that the wiki and forums are the best around, and I've always found the answer to my questions there. I think it's telling that when I've been Googling for answers to some non-Arch related Linux questions, results from the Arch Linux wiki or forum have always featured prominently, and have always been useful.

Anyway, I had obviously learned a bit the first time round, because this installation and configuration session went much more smoothly, and I've managed to get the things I had issues with last time (like hibernation and font configuration) properly sorted out. I've also started using XMonad as a window manager. Like Awesome, it's a tiling window manager, meaning that it automatically organises placement of your windows for you, and allows you to use just the keyboard to navigate and manage them. I liked Awesome, but for some reason, I had a hard time modifying the configuration to my liking, without totally breaking things. I thought that XMonad would be even harder, because the configuration file is in Haskell — a language I don't know. Haskell turned out to be easier to understand than I thought, and because you can set up your configuration to override some of the default settings (rather than having to write a full, replacement configuration), the file can be quite concise and easy to write and maintain. I've got a couple of very thin status bars as you can see in the screenshot above (and here) which take up very little vertical space, and there is no window chrome which all means that you maximise the screen space for content — important on such a small screen.

I think that I've got things set up the way I like now. I've got very few applications with GUIs (just Chromium, gVim, Inkspace, Gimp, evince, OpenOffice (for emergencies) and TeXMaker), but I have some nice command line applications. I'm using mc for file management, feh for image viewing (and setting the desktop background), R for statistics and graphs, irssi for occasional IRC use, scrot for screenshots and twidge for Twittering. I've also managed to set up Dropbox as a daemon, with the dropbox.py script to check status and other things, so that I don't need a panel or dock.

I find this barebones system oddly bracing and refreshing. On the Mac, I love the way that everything Just Works, and the fact that the applications are so beautifully designed (aesthetically and functionally). Arch Linux is almost the opposite of that (with the exception of the functional part): things work very well, but only if you configure them yourself, and the command line applications I have chosen, while beautiful in their own way, are completely different from their Mac counterparts. There is occasionally a bit of mental crashing of gears going from one to the other, but more often it is a refreshing switch, like having a cool shower. The stripped down system suits my little netbook (nicknamed 'Archie' of course) very well.

Google Chrome and gleeBox

I change browsers much more often than I buy new clothes. Whenever a new browser emerges or an older one adds new features, I tend to try it out for a while, but often end up gravitating back to Apple's Safari again. While Safari is far from perfect, the integration with the rest of the system and its stability and speed tends to pull me back to it again. However, I tried out Google's Chrome a month or so ago, and I haven't yet moved back.

Chrome is very fast and so far fairly stable, and it seems to strike a nice balance between being extensible but visually fairly uncluttered. So far the extensions I have installed have proved such a benefit that they have outweighed the disadvantages of less integration with the system.

One extension that I absolutely love and miss a lot when I occasionally open Safari is gleeBox. The best way to describe it is that it's like LaunchBar or Quicksilver for the browser. If you haven't used either of those utilities, it's a command box that you summon by using a one key shortcut ('g' by default). You can then start typing to select any link on the page and launch that link by pressing enter, or you can do a search (using Google or Bing), or you can launch a named bookmark or bookmarklet. That's all tremendously useful, and means that you can navigate sites and open bookmarks without using the mouse, but you can also add various jQuery selectors so that you can select only headings with a particular class, or links with a certain ID. There are lots of examples on gleeBox's TipJar, but one of my favourites is this one to select links to go to the next page, just by entering ?n in the command box.

gleeBox is also available as a Firefox addon, so it's definitely worth having a look at if you use either Chrome or Firefox and prefer using the keyboard.

Easter roundup

I've had a pretty busy few weeks: just before Easter I was Chairing and helping to organise a two day symposium. In a classic bit of unfortunate timing, my 40th birthday was the day before it started, so I was much too preoccupied and stressed to do any celebrating (or drowning of sorrows). As a result, I was determined to take the full week after Easter off, to relax properly and actually celebrate my birthday in my own quiet way.

I've had a lovely week, with a great mixture of lazing around and various walks and visits to National Trust places. We also visited Ikea, and managed a record-setting hat trick of full circuits of their retail structure (Showroom, Marketplace, checkout) before we actually managed to find and/or remember every item we came to get. We managed to leave without filing for divorce, but it was a slightly close run thing. Anyway, that provided the raw material for our new bedside shelves, which I put up myself and am quite proud of. Since then I've also run the cables for the lamps through conduit attached to the wall, so it looks a bit more professional.

When friends and family enquired about ideas for birthday gifts, I asked for money, because I wanted to put it towards a Logitech Squeezebox system for our bedroom. Now that we have all our music centralised on the Mac mini in the living room, it makes sense to be able to listen to it anywhere in the house. I'm not very keen on the new models which have colour touch screens, as I really like the old vacuum fluorescent displays, and think they look much more elegant. If I want to see album art, I can always use iPeng on the iPhone to do that. I'm very fond of the discontinued Squeezebox Classic, having used its predecessor, SliMP3 for many years. We still use that attached to the stereo in the living room, but because it does not have a wireless receiver, we can't use it elsewhere in the house. I had originally planned to pick up a Squeezebox Classic and add a pair of powered speakers. But in the end, I went for a Squeezebox Boom for the bedroom, and I'm very happy with my choice.

{Read more...}

In which I go a bit barmy over a washing machine

I hate consumer appliances which are made from poor-quality, non-serviceable parts, and which last only a year or two before ending up at the Council tip because they cannot be repaired economically. So I faced the task of buying a new washing machine with a heavy heart. The old one was left in our house by the previous owners, and had never washed, rinsed¹ or spun well since we first encountered it. Then, a couple of weeks ago, the motor went and the drum would no longer turn. It would have cost more to repair than replace, even supposing we could have got the parts: we had to get a new machine.

I had heard that the quality of consumer washing machines had declined sharply in recent years, driven by the big warehouse sellers (Dixons, Comet et al.) pushing cheaper and cheaper machines. That impression was confirmed by a bit of research on the internet. It seems that the majority of machines have parts that are only rated for the equivalent of 18 months to 2 or 3 years of normal use, and when they inevitably pack up, you're faced with a repair bill that can be more than half the cost of entirely replacing the machine.

After a lot of searching, it seemed that if I wanted a machine that would last a decent length of time and would be repairable, I had only a couple of choices: I could buy a Miele, or a brand I hadn't heard of before, ISE. Both were much more expensive than the 'bargain' washers, but they were guaranteed for a good length of time, had quality components, and were energy efficient. However, the problem with Miele (as with many other brands) is that they operate a rather closed system of repairs. Washing machine engineers have to buy a special laptop interface from Miele just to diagnose faults (which is expensive), and spares are also pretty costly.

ISE is a company with a completely different ethos. They make machines with components tested (and guaranteed) for very long life (about 22 years of use, with one wash per day), they distribute only through local, independent repairers (who also undertake any repairs under guarantee), and the spares are easy to get hold of and sold to repairers with no mark-up. That was all very appealing to me, and while the purchase price was going to be rather painful, the fact that I knew we would have no repair bills to pay for 10 years, come what may, meant that it would probably work out cheaper than having to buy or repair a succession of cheaper machines.

We've had our ISE10 for a bit over a week now (so it is a baby in terms of its projected life), but I'm really happy with my decision. I've never got particularly excited over washing machines before, but this is a serious bit of engineering, and I love it to bits. It's incredibly solid and heavy, with a clever design. The drum is housed inside an independently-suspended housing sitting on four shock absorbers inside the outer steel casing. This means that when it is agitating the wash or spinning, the outer case barely moves or vibrates. Our old machine used to leap and buck around as if it was possessed while spinning, and a couple of times we'd feared for our worktop. This one sits there like a rock. The machine is also a very quiet as it has a brushless motor. The loudest part is actually when the water is gushing into the drum. At other times it purrs away so quietly that if you're in another room, you wonder if you've actually remembered to switch it on. It also washes superbly, and our clothes are cleaner than they've been for ages.

It's the kind of machine that inspires confidence that it will just quietly get on with its job, and I have found myself giving it an affectionate little pat when I pass by it. In the end, you get what you pay for, and I'd prefer to spend a bit more money and get something that will do its job for a long time, and be easy to repair when bits wear out. Our Dualit toaster will be 10 years old this September, and is still toasting bread every day like a champ. With any luck, I will still be giving the ISE10 a little pat when Mr. Bsag and I are celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary.

¹ I have — on occasion — found myself literally foaming at the knee while cycling in the rain, because the machine did not rinse out the washing powder properly. ↑

Well-connected applications

In a brief exchange with Steve Hodgson (@BestofTimes) on Twitter, I recommended TextSoap — a brilliant utility for munging and cleaning up text in a multitude of different ways. It's not a very glamorous application, and it seems pricey until you actually use it intensively. I've had it a while now, and on most days I use it once or twice, but it really pays its keep when I have big tasks that require a lot of text manipulation.

Yesterday I had to copy a lot of information from PDF files and emails and enter it into forms on a website, many (many) times over. Copying from PDFs resulted in odd problems with the text like line breaks instead of spaces between words, orphaned hyphenation and so forth. Since the forms required strictly ASCII text, I also had to convert curly quotes to straight quotes and accented characters to LaTeX format accents.

That would all have been a huge chore, but for TextSoap. It has a variety of built-in 'cleaners' (for example, straighten or smarten quotes), but you can also build your own cleaning components using regular expressions, and you can chain together the existing cleaners to form custom workflows. So cleaning the text was only a case of a making a few clicks.

However, TextSoap doesn't really do anything you couldn't do with a text editor and good knowledge of regular expressions and scripting languages (it has a 'convert to Markdown' cleaner, for example), albeit that it packages those functions up in a user-friendly way. The real beauty and utility lies in how easy TextSoap makes it to access those functions. You can use the Services menu (which has incidentally become a lot more powerful with Snow Leopard), which also means that you can assign global keyboard shortcuts to your most-used cleaners. You can use the contextual menu or even Automator workflows, and there are specific plugins for text editors like BBEdit. So whichever application you are in (provided it supports Services and/or Applescript), you have easy access to the cleaners.

That — it seems to me — is one of the most powerful things about Mac OS X as a platform, and the thing I miss most when I use other platforms. There is standardisation of a lot of important features¹, and a lot of different technologies that allow you to connect your applications together in useful ways that save time and effort.

¹ For example, I love Linux dearly, but it drives me absolutely crazy that there's no standard keyboard shortcut to quit an application. ↑

On the ball

Last week, our beloved, elderly Dyson vacuum cleaner finally packed up. We've had it about 12 years, so it has done well, but has been getting gradually more decrepit. We had the power supply replaced a couple of years ago, but the problem this time was a burnt-out motor. It could be fixed, but with such an old unit, it wasn't really cost effective.

We're lucky to have an excellent, independently owned vacuum shop fairly near us (Midland Vac), which has a great range of Dyson units, so we visited at the weekend to try to decide on a model. After a lot of indecision, literal weighing up, and pushing units speculatively around the shop floor like a Freddie Mercury tribute act¹, we settled on the Dyson DC24. It's one of the models which uses a ball rather than wheels, and it's really tiny. Compared to our old clunker, it feels incredibly light, which makes you much more inclined to lug it upstairs to do the vacuuming.

We worried slightly that it might be too small, but as soon as we tried it out — and saw the proper colour and texture of our carpet for the first time in ages — we realised that it's a very capable machine. They have improved the cyclone mechanism a lot in the years since our old model was made, and even though the new one has a smaller motor, it develops much greater suction. It's also great fun. The ball makes it very manoeuvrable, and you can sweep and glide around the furniture, making "neeyoww" noises like a racing motorbike going into a corner. Well, you can if you like — the noises are optional.

I think people either love Dyson products, or they think they are overpriced and over-engineered. I'm in the former camp, and I also like the fact that they are readily repairable, and tend to last a long time. I also get unreasonably excited whenever I find an Airblade in a bathroom. No matter how many times I use one, I still think that it's tantamount to magic.

¹ No mini skirts or pink earrings, though. ↑

Mac mini and EyeTV

Since we got rid of our VCR, several years ago now, we've been using EyeTV on our iMac to record TV and radio, streaming the resulting recordings to our living room TV using a discontinued Elgato product called EyeHome. This worked well for a long time, though if there happened to be significant wireless network activity while we were watching, we'd get a stuttering picture. The rest of the time it was great, as we don't watch much live TV, and we could also easily edit out the adverts and reduce the length of films scheduled in 2 hour slots by as much as 25 minutes.

This neat setup recently fell apart when our EyeHome developed a fault with the video card, and also started to randomly drop the audio while streaming some recordings. Since Elgato doesn't make the product anymore, I had to decide whether to get a streaming box from another manufacturer, or to try something else. I also wanted to take the opportunity to move all our music to a dedicated machine, and solve the network streaming problem. I thought it would also be good to be able to record TV on a box in the living room itself, as our iMac is in the office/spare room. Overnight guests Chez Bsag have often been surprised and delighted to be woken at 2am by the (very bright) iMac screen turning on when EyeTV starts to record some late night film on Channel 4. We tried to remember to clear the scheduled recordings when we had guests, but it didn't always work out like that.

The Mac mini was a fairly obvious choice and others, like Jon Hicks, have written in detail about setting the mini up as a media centre. I was tempted for a while by the AppleTV, but I'd still have to record TV using EyeTV then export the recordings to the AppleTV, which seemed like a bit of a pain. The other advantage of the mini is that I could run Squeezebox Server on it to pipe music to my venerable old SliMP3 player.

{Read more...}

A huge 8K of RAM

I've been so busy at work the past few weeks that all I've been fit for at the end of a long day is flopping in front of the TV. One programme that I really enjoyed (for the nostalgia factor as much as anything else), was Micro Men, a drama about the rather strained relationship between Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry as they competed to produce the most popular home computer in the 1980s.

Some of the detail was fictional (as they stated at the start of the programme), but they did apparently consult with both men, so I guess that the end result was something that they could both agree on as being mostly true. I had no idea that Sinclair had such a temper, but various interviews I've seen with people who knew him at the time suggest that he did blow his top fairly spectacularly on occasion.

We had a Sinclair Spectrum at home ("the full 8 colours!"), and I vividly remember pecking out long, tedious programmes gleaned from magazines and manuals on its rubbery, imprecise keyboard. I also remember the woefully unreliable method of loading stored programmes from a portable cassette recorder. If ever a piece of technology encouraged the superstitious belief that you needed to do a special dance or sacrifice a chicken before it worked, the Sinclair Spectrum was it. Despite all that, we loved it, and my brother and I spent hours fiddling about with it and (inevitably) playing games with rudimentary graphics.

I also used Chris Curry's products during my PhD (which immediately makes me feel ancient). I wrote a programme on a BBC Micro to control a bit of apparatus, and used a later Acorn RiskPC to run a more sophisticated set up, using a little-known programming language called Arachnid.

One thing I'd forgotten was how incredibly diverse the British home computer ecosystem was at that time. It was a kind of early technological Cambrian Explosion, with a massive radiation of weird and wonderful forms of computers before the inevitable mass extinctions occurred. As with the space rocket industry, there was a time when the UK (briefly) led the world in computer literacy and usage, before it all went pear-shaped. A glorious — if frustrating — time when 8 colours seemed impossibly dazzling, and 8K of RAM was more memory than anyone could need.

QuicKeys

I've had a bit of an on-and-off relationship with QuicKeys, but it has certainly been a long one. When I have stopped using it for periods, it has usually been because I have adopted other ways for accomplishing the kinds of tasks it deals with, and it seemed like overkill to have a separate application running to deal with those things. However, with version 4, QuicKeys has become even more powerful, versatile and easy to use, and I am using it in earnest again.

For those of you who haven't encountered QuicKeys, it could be described as a macro utility for your whole system. You can create 'shortcuts' from a series of steps which automate actions that you would otherwise perform manually. There are a very wide range of possible actions in steps, from executing applescripts or shell scripts, to selecting from menus, manipulating windows, typing text or dozens of other things. You have quite a lot of control over the timing of these events and whether you need to wait for a particular window before moving on, which helps a lot in making the shortcuts reliable.

Once you have constructed your shortcut, you can trigger it in many different ways, from the obvious hotkey or mouse click to running if it is a certain date and/or time, if a certain volume has just mounted, or if an event occurs in another application. What makes this even more powerful is that all of the shortcuts can be limited to certain scopes (i.e. active applications). In practice, this means that you can reuse triggers in multiple applications without worrying that the wrong thing will happen. So you can — for example — launch a particular web page when you press F1 in Safari, and check for new email when you press F1 in Mail.

There are now also abbreviations (text replacements which happen automatically when you type a trigger) which replaces the need for TextExpander or similar utilities. In fact, the scopes make it very easy for me to type two dashes and a space and have them replaced with the HTML entity for an em dash in MarsEdit, and a unicode em dash in a rich text editor (which I've already done a couple of times in writing this article!).

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Alpine

A few weeks ago, I got an EeePC 1000HE netbook for work. I needed a dedicated, cheap machine to run some Linux-only stuff on, and I thought it would be nice to have a lightweight portable to take on trips. I'll write more about the EeePC later, but I wanted to mention my new-found love affair with the console email client, Alpine. I installed the ArchLinux distribution with the Awesome window manager, both of which are very lightweight and speedy, and I wanted an email client to match.

Over the years, I must have used a pretty large number of email clients. From Eudora, Mailsmith, a brief and regrettable affair with Microsoft Entourage (about which we will never speak again) to settling for a number of years on Apple's Mail, it actually all started with Alpine's predecessor: Pine. Back in those far-off days, I used Pine by connecting to the University's VAX machine, and I hated it. To be fair, it has come a long way since then, and I have learned to love the command line. After a few days of playing with Alpine on the EeePC, I decided that I wanted to switch to it on my Macs too.

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New photoblog

I've been irritated for a while by the setup I had for my photoblog, Wings Open Wide. It looked nice enough, but I had to upload my photos manually, title them, describe them and set the location and so on. That was annoying when I was also uploading to Flickr, and thus duplicating effort, so I started to post fewer photos to my photoblog. I could have just swtiched to Flickr and directed people over there, but it feels a bit impersonal. Flickr is great for the social aspects, but it doesn't feel like my space. I also upload more stuff to Flickr than I want to display as my photographic portfolio.

I considered a variety of different approaches, which varied in complexity and functionality, before stumbling on Flogr. It's a fairly simple but rich PHP photoblog, which pulls your Flickr photos into a gallery that you can style to your liking. By default, it gets all of your photostream, but you can also restrict it to certain tags or photosets. I've set it up to pull in photos with the tag 'photoblog' which makes it easy for me to be selective. Optionally, you can cache the photos and information in a MySQL database, speeding up display somewhat. If you click the 'Details and Comments' link, you can see — well — details and comments, and you can click the comment link to go to Flickr to leave a comment. There's also a nice Lightbox view for the recent photos, allowing you to navigate between them, or view them full size by clicking the title at the bottom left.

I like it a lot, so I've set it up here. I didn't want to break any existing links, so I've left a link to the archived Wings Open Wide on the new page. I might do a bit more restyling of the page, but I'm pretty happy with it as it is. One thing I haven't quite sorted out yet is the display of thumbnails on this blog. I've used the Flickr badge, so it shows the right images, but links directly to Flickr rather than Wings Open Wide. That's not a big issue, but I might see if I can fix it at some point.

Fever

I've used RSS feeds to keep up with the blogs and other websites I wanted to read for a long time. I used to use NetNewsWire, which was (and still is) a great bit of software, but when Google Reader came out, I switched to that. I liked the quick keyboard shortcuts to navigate around, and the fact that using an online reader meant that I could read feeds on any browser and not have to deal with items that I'd already read elsewhere.

However, recently I've been finding that I'm overwhelmed with information, particularly if I've been too busy to check Google Reader for a few days. I subscribe to a few high volume feeds for the occasional useful item that they throw up, but that means an awful lot of stuff I'm not interested in to wade through. That's why I was intrigued by Fever, a new feed reader by Shaun Inman, who also designed the lovely web site analytics program, Mint.

There must be hundreds of feed readers out there, but Fever distinguishes itself in two ways. First it is a self-hosted service, meaning that you have to install it on a web host. This would be a problem for those without a web host, but it does mean that it is available on any computer you choose to access it from and also under your direct control, unlike Google Reader. Second, it offers a way to pick out interesting items from your feed, without overwhelming you with information. To do this, you assign your high volume, high noise feeds to a special 'Sparks' group. Any items that share links or topics in common with your other 'Kindling' feeds will promote those topics to the 'Hot' list. This shows you feeds grouped by topics, so you can skim them or read the individual feeds as you wish. It's a great way to keep up with the things everyone is talking about, without being submerged by your unread feeds count. Other people's Delicious feeds are perfect for Sparks, and you can add feeds to the group with impunity knowing that it's going to make your Hot list more interesting, rather than bogging you down.

It's always a bit of a gamble paying for something ($30 in this case) without being able to try it out, but the screencast was reassuring and showed most of the fetaures. It's really easy to install (unusual for a self-hosted service) and importing my feeds and groups from Google Reader was quick and accurate. The UI, as you can see in the screenshot above, is very clean and rather pretty. There are Google Reader-like keyboard shortcuts for most things, and it's easy to move around the feeds. There's also quite a lot of customisability at the level of groups or individual feeds, and by default, feeds with no unread items are hidden, making it easy to see what you've got. Shawn Blanc has some good tips for using Fever efficiently, and he's right that it works very nicely as a standalone Fluid app. But it's also good as a tab in Safari, particularly if you use this tip to make Safari open links with the target="_blank" attribute in a new tab, not a new window.

Fever also has a truly lovely iPhone interface — one of the best I've seen — for reading feeds on the iPhone. Of course, because it's getting data directly from your Fever installation on the server, there's no syncing issue, but that also means no offline reading, which iPhone apps like Byline offer, and which can be useful at times. If you have long articles to scroll through, the interface on the iPhone can be a little bit longwinded, so a few more navigational aids would be a benefit, I think, but other than that, it's really slick.

Fever is only at Version 1.0, but is already a very competent and useful web application, which distinguishes itself well from the competition. The only thing I really miss from Google Reader is some way to share articles I come across. It would be nice to have a command to post items to popular services like Delicious or Twitter, or to share items publicly. I'd also love a command to save an article to Instapaper, particularly on the iPhone, where you'd like to save long articles to read at your leisure. Alternatively, if there was an API available of some kind, people could find ways to pipe their saved articles to other services. I'm sure that these kinds of improvements will come with time. Shaun has done a great job, and it's obvious that he's thought quite deeply about what a good feed reader needs.

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