Saturday, September 11, 2004

trees trees. (Testing out the new camera, walking around the yard.) By (johndan). [johndan's Photos] 8:45:18 PM

Branch Over the Lake Branch Over the Lake. More of the Lake House. By (johndan). [johndan's Photos] 8:43:04 PM

Evolution of a Sunset 9 Evolution of a Sunset 9. By (o2ma). [o2ma's Photos] 8:37:30 PM

Mascots 8:30:42 PM

'Thank you very much' Kissing the King. She was supposed to be smiling for the camera when Cianna turned and planted a smooch on Elvis! I could almost hear the lyrics to Your Time Hasn't Come Yet Baby (pop-up ads, but the audio is worth it).... [curiousLee] 6:26:17 PM

Statistics on Music Download Sites Statistics on Music Download sites. Who says that people won't pay for content! Below is a quote from a New York Times article outlining the use of music dowload sites. The article also contains information on movies, sports and talk radio feeds as well. With Rhapsody (www.rhapsody.com), consumers pay $9.95 a month to stream or download as much music as they want from a catalog of more than 55,000 albums. Customers also receive a broad range of other content, including music videos and band information with their subscription. To keep the tunes and burn them onto a CD, however, costs a 79 cents a song. The Rhapsody software gives customers an easy and quick way to search for songs by artist, song and album name. It also presents a sample of a given artist's popular songs, related artists and an option for saving playlists for later use. Like RealNetworks, Napster (www.napster.com) also sells a music subscription service, with more than 700,000 songs available for $9.95 a month. (As with Real's services, Napster lets subscribers listen to as much music as they want, but they never actually own the tunes; when the subscription lapses, the music is deleted from their computer unless it has been purchased separately.) Microsoft's MSN Music site (beta.music.msn.com) plans a link to Napster's service, while putting up single-song downloads of its own for 99 cents. Apple, the clear online music leader with over 125 million songs sold, offers only permanent downloads, not streaming, through its iTunes Music Store (www.apple.com/itunes/store). Thus far for streaming, RealNetworks has been the subscription leader with more than 550,000 customers. Source URL : http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/09/technology/circuits/09basi.html?ex=1252468800&;en=5310336a07bc7d1c&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt Powered By Qumana [Qumana Blog] 5:57:04 PM

Evolution of a Sunset 8 Evolution of a Sunset 8. By (o2ma). [o2ma's Photos] 4:25:49 PM

Evolution of a Sunset 7 Evolution of a Sunset 7. By (o2ma). [o2ma's Photos] 4:22:54 PM

From Film to Corporate Design: Saul Bass He was a Giant. From film to corporate design: Saul Bass. And a nice article with lots of pictures at the Design Museum London. [The Cartoonist] 2:05:05 PM

Apps Them apps, hot 'n spicy. Jonas and Joi blogged their favorite applications. I'm but a meek sheep, I bleat, then follow. So, without further ado, here's my hitlist, sorted alphabetically. BBEdit Best text editor, hands down. It does all my editing, apart from my blogging. I code my HTML, my Perl, and my PHP in BBEdit. Text manipulation and the like, all in BBEdit. Version 8.0 also fixes the only gripe I had with it: Proper handling of encoding. Carbon Copy Cloner The cheapest option in making backups. I use it frequently to back up my hard disk to an external FireWire drive. CCC not just copies over files, it can synchronize the two disks, and make the external disk bootable. ClipboardSharing A really simple and unobtrusive menu bar addition to give you the power to access previous clipboard contents and to transfer the current clipboard to other Macs on the network. Indispensible. CocoASpell My replacement of Apple's own internal spellchecker. It's more intelligent and it can also filter HTML and URLs. Docoa Browser A great utility to quickly look up Apple's Cocoa frameworks documentation. I'm actually still using version 0.3 as I don't care much for AutoDoc and AutoGraf, plus the new metal look of 1.0 is ugly. DragThing This is my favorite application launcher. It gives me quick access to frequently used applications and it handles drag and drop very well. Here's what it looks like on my desktop: I have set the window to be completely transparent, even the tabs, so that it seems merged with my desktop. DropDMG This simple utility makes my disk images. It's very configurable yet easy to use. ecto Duh... Fugu My choice for a graphical frontend to sFTP, one which knows how to handle ssh keys. GeekTool It's a preference pane to show system logs, unix commands output, or images on the desktop. I got it to log the system console, run my email retrieval script, and to show world time. Indispensable. GraphicConverter The best graphic utility hands down. I use it to convert between formats and to apply batch processes like scaling and renaming. It's actually more powerful than I need it to be. iComic This is a desktop client for browsing all your favorite online comics. I wrote a bunch of plugins for this to get my own favorites in the list. JEDict I'm in Japan so I need quick access to a Japenese dictionary every time I bump into a word or kanji I don't know about, and believe me, that happens a lot. This app uses publicly available dictionaries and wraps them in a brilliant UI. It even has a drawing field in which you can draw a kanji and then let the app analyze what it is. You will need to draw the kanji in the correct stroke order, but if you know your basic kanji, this is not hard. LoadInDock A simple Dock application that shows the current CPU. Simple, but it gives a great quick glance on how much processing is being down now. Here's how it looks in my Dock: Monolingual MacOSX apps can come with a wide variety of language files, from Slovakian to Swahili. I only want English and Japanese, so I use this app to get rid of the unneeded language files and save myself quite a bit of diskspace. MT-Newswatcher I sometimes read up on Usenet news, in particular, alt.humor.best-of-usenet, nl.sport.voetbal, and the various NBA and programming newsgroups. I wouldn't want to do that with anything else but this app. NetNewsWire I've been using this app since it was first released and am so used to it that I wouldn't know how else to read my RSS and Atom feeds. Version 2 got everything I need and nothing more. Proteus iChat is cool, but apart from being able to chat with iSight it doesn't offer much. Proteus lets me chat with people who use MSN or Yahoo and has a nice customizable interface to boot. The only downside is that it doesn't handle file transfer, but perhaps that's a blessing in disguise. RBrowserLite For all my FTP needs (apart from sFTP) I rely on this app a lot. I'm sure there are plenty of alternatives, but this one does what I want and it does it well. SuperCal What is this doing here, you ask? Well, by default Apple's monitor settings suck. The colors are either too bland, too bright, or just suck. SuperCal lets me adjust colors, brightness, contrast, and whiteness the way I want them to be using sophisticated control panels. A must have, especially for graphics designers. TinkerTool & TinkerTool System If you know me, then you know that I love to tweak my OS. If something can help me do that easier, then it's in my bag. TinkerTool and its professional alter-ego, TinkerTool System, do just that. X-Chat Aqua I hang out regularly at #joiito, and since it's IRC, I want a plain ASCII text interface, quick connecting, and easy access to the more l33t commands. Of course, I also use the standard MacOSX apps like iCal, iDVD, iMovie, iTunes (with Kung-Tunes!), Mail.app, Safari, Stickies, Terminal.app, XCode, and sometimes even OfficeX, but let's not talk about that now. [chaotic intransient prose bursts] 11:18:37 AM

A Bond that is Both Natural and Imperceptible Man is related to everything that he knows. And everything is both cause and effect, working and worked upon, mediate and immediate, all things mutually dependent. A bond that is both natural and imperceptible binds together things the most distant and things the most different. - Blaise Pascal, 1658 7:53:06 AM

Opera Software, TV Access Opera Software Gears Up for TV Access. Opera Software has announced a new version of its screen rendering technology that makes viewing Web pages on a normal TV as sharp. Opera said its TV Rendering, or TVR, program adjusts any Web page for a perfect display on any TV screen (usually lower resolution than PC monitors) of any size. The software is aimed for use by manufacturers, not consumers. Opera's project partner, Equator Technologies, which supplies system-on-a-chip processors for networked video entertainment and communications, is ready to deliver to TVR with their StarFish, Tetra and Dolphin hardware platforms. [unmediated] 6:59:02 AM