Jeremey's Weblog

Evangelizing Twitter, Pretty Much Exactly

This pretty much exactly sums up my experience telling people about Twitter

Technorati Tags:
twitter

My First Video on Flickr

Technorati Tags:
flickr, video

Flickr Video!

VERY cool!

Technorati Tags:
flickr, video

Twitter

I really like Twitter. It's social networking at the right speed. Faster and far more versatile than Facebook, but slower and much more cosmopolitan than IM.

Twitter is especially cool for people like me who telecommute most or all of the time. I don't have an office community I'm a part of on any regular basis. Twitter provides some of the same social experiences but in a much broader social context.

For non-Twitterers, go watch this 2-minute video on what it's about: Twitter in Plain English

If you use Twitter on a Mac, I love Twitterific

Technorati Tags:
twitter, social networking

NetNewsWire

Well I've ditched endo in favor of NetNewsWire. With 3.0 it has a clean, simple interface and I've found that most things go unread in endo because of its design. As I subscribe to more and more feeds, the aggregated approach is losing its appeal, and I split my time between aggregated group views, all latest news, and individual subscriptions, which is where NNW beats the pants off endo.

The News from Lake Obiwan

I haven't really posted much lately, I think because I've had too many things to say, rather than not enough. I don't like to post unless I can do a topic justice. Oh well. So instead, here are my current musings across a wide range of topics, sure to do no justice to anything. You're just jealous.

Browsers

I tried Firefox for a week or two. Really, I tried. I really like Greasemonkey, at least in concept. I really like Adblock. I really like good "web 2.0" behavior. I just don't really like using Firefox. It's cumbersome and slow, compared to Safari. It feels rough and unfinished. The download dialog is atrocious. It's still using Carbon UI elements, which look... well, atrocious. The "what do I do with this thing I downloaded for you?" dialog is the worst. It's just clunky and poorly integrated. Sigh. None of the other Firefox-based browsers are worth mentioning, they are either buggy or featureless. Safari it is (and Safari does color profiles... it drives me nuts that Firefox doesn't).

Coffee

We saw Black Gold, the movie. Go see this movie right now if you possibly can. If you drink coffee. It's really good and really important. Basically, coffee farmers get screwed massively. We can help this by buying at least fair trade coffees (Fair Trade Certified), but even better, buy from roasters who give a crap and buy direct from farmers, building relationships and so on. Intelligentsia is a good one, but there are a bunch. Counter Culture Coffee is another. You get much better beans that way, too.

Photography

I'm really burned out on "nature photography" these days. I'm tired of the cacophony of glowing comments about someone's latest flower pics on Flickr. Let me be blunt: almost anyone can walk up to a flower and not screw up the photo, ok? Cameras these days are pretty smart and flower pics from a point and shoot kicked up a little in iPhoto or Photoshop look amazing. So get over it! What challenge was there in taking a snapshot of a beautiful flower? Showing up at the right time of day (maybe)? That constitutes art?

Not for me. I'm so bored with snapshots, even good ones made with expensive equipment. Even my photo of North Window is boring me... I worked hard to get to the spot where I could take that shot, but beyond that, all I had to do was not screw it up. How hard is that?

I really like creating a photograph. Creating the light, scultping it, etc. For example, my recent portrait stuff... (see my photo blog) none of that light was there until I put it there. That to me is creativity.

That's not to say that all nature photographs are uncreative, far from it. But what most people pass off as "nature photography" is more like "I don't know how to take pictures of anything else photography", myself included. But that's changing, for me.

Odyssey

We got a new Honda Odyssey and the Honda Musiclink kit for iPod integration... woohoo! I vowed never to buy another car without iPod integration, so I kept my word (whew). This one isn't ideal, but it's leaps better than before. The iPod plugs into a dock cable (say, in your glove box) and you get steering wheel control over the current playlist. No playlist switching or song text displayed, though. It sounds fantastic, too. What irks me is they could have done the text thing and just didn't. And they could've used disc switching buttons for playlist navigation, or something. Maybe the tune knob. Anyway... it's good. Goodbye hated FM adapter.

Technorati Tags: blogging, coffee, macosx, photography

Photoblog

I've created a photoblog here: http://getjlb.blogspot.com/

I'll keep posting photos here, but I'll use the photoblog to discuss the shots in detail. I really like the default Blogger template for that sort of thing. I modified a few things (colors mostly). The new Blogger stuff works really well with Flickr and I like the look.

Now I just need to take more photos. :)

Life with endo

Aaahhhh... how sweet it is. Managing RSS feeds was becoming difficult in Safari, requiring far too much of my time to keep track of even a fairly small number of feeds. The difficulty also forced me to be very picky about what I read... maybe not a bad idea anyway, but I wanted a more efficient way to keep up (and more importantly, to ignore or skip).

So I looked at NewsFire, NetNewsWire, Vienna and endo, and settled on endo (NNW is a bit clunky, NewsFire is fine but not as efficient, Vienna is open source but not as pretty and again, not as efficient for me). My RSS life has improved dramatically. endo has a nice Inbox, good display options, and lots of per-feed options, but most of all it's pretty and it's very efficient to use. And very fast. Safari's external RSS reader support works well with it, clicking the RSS icon subscribes you in endo, and brings up that feed's options. You can do nothing, or adjust options as needed. Thus it's really efficient to subscribe to feeds and I'm not discouraged from doing so because it's efficient to keep up with what I care about.

It also makes a very convenient way to track Flickr groups that I care about. Screenshot below (click for full size).

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogging clients, endo, macosx, software

ecto Intel build

There's an Intel build of ecto 2.x. And there was much rejoicing.

TUAW Stoops to New Low

In the interest of wasting more bits writing about wasting bits... the Unofficial Apple Weblog has stooped to a new low, IMO, with this post about a small UI nit in iTunes 7. I normally don't make much noise about inane blogging, we all have our moments, but sometimes a post is just over the top. Do we really need to assume corporate world domination intentions because Apple removed a button to hide its mini-store? There it is in the menu, you can still hide it... which I do... I'm glad there's no button! Why would I want a button on my screen that I'll click exactly once in all of history?

But that's missing the point... why is this news? Why would anyone blog about it on a major Apple rumor site? Oh... maybe they're hard up for readers and they needed some more digg-able headlines. Nice. Unsubscribing now.