Safari Reader

[Thanks to Marco.org.]

Safari 5, just released, has a "Reader" feature similar to the "Readability App" I like so much (almost as much as Instapaper, which sends articles to my iPad in effect, in readable format), it removes ads and other BS, and of course there's already war over it.

"It’s not the reader’s responsibility to subject themselves to your shitty advertising. It is your responsibility to make your blog a good reading experience, by not employing shitty pageview-grabbing pagination, by not littering it with Google Adsense, by not plastering hundreds of sharing icons everywhere."

Glasses

Why do some people (is this mostly women?) apparently think that wearing glasses will or would make them less attractive? I just don't get it. To me it's like saying... that you're less intelligent when it rains, or that you get less sunburned on days with an R in them. Huh.
(Obviously the glasses should go with your looks but that's true of anything you wear.)

Update:
Bron says:
"Men don't make passes at women who wear glasses", from Gentlemen prefer Blondes, I think.
The Big Sleep, Humphrey Bogart, has a scene with a women in glasses; she removes them, and almost as a "wolf" whistle, he says"well, hello!"
Hangover from the 40s, 50s. Fashion. Like dyeing gray hair.

Indeed. Actually, a thing occur to me: glasses today are much more "nicer" than just a couple of decades ago. My current glasses are a bit stronger than my first pair, but they are compact and discreet, and they weigh just eleven grams! I think that's a marvel of engineering. My first pair weighed at least three times that. Sure, I paid a bit extra for titanium frames and thin lenses, but despite that they were also cheaper than my first set twenty years ago, and that's even before considering inflation.

What I meant to say was that traditionally glasses were bulkier and perhaps not pretty, and often did indeed hide your face a bit, so that makes the phenomenon a bit easier to understand.

No pixels

Jeff Carlson, my good pal, tweeted from the bus:

"There's a man reading words on a large, folded sheet of flimsy paper on this bus. He seems content with the lack of pixels. I'm suspicious."

Jeff added to me on email:

"This is on the same bus where I had an iPad, I saw a Kindle, and there was a guy with a full Windows laptop open for the purpose of listening to music on his headphones."

AT&T going doooown (updated)

Got my very first iPhone ordered this morning (iPhone4 went for sale today). I may have the first order in the UK. (I called, and their ordering system was not up yet. Then while doing my email, I updated the Apple UK Store page in the background, and ordered as soon as it came online again (for some reason, probably PR, Apple Store sites always go offline before a big product launch. It's so fake).


Glenn Fleishman tweets from the US:
AT&T fail, no surprise. "Down for maintenance." Got in. Selected phone, click upgrade, and an error. Why can't they get this right?
Posted 23 minutes ago
 

"We're AT&T, the company that still uses Web technology from 1994 for the rich, tasty smell of failure."
Posted 6 minutes ago 

Failure notice at AT&T says system error, and only call them for "non iPhone related upgrades"
Posted 5 minutes ago 

Update: 

This is funny. Geek Guru Gruber re-tweeted this one, sent to him: 

"Hey man, enjoy your Wi-Fi only video calls and shitty network. Hahahaha. Faggot."

Update: 

NYT article on the matter.

Mac sub-menu tip

Here's a tip I found out myself a couple years ago. It works on Mac OS X, it might on Windows too, I dunno.

If you right-click (or control-click) to get a pop-up menu on some item, for example a file, and one of the sub-menus have *many* options, for example a big folder, it may take several seconds to open, even on a fast machine, which slows you down if you did not actually want that sub-menu, but just wanted to go past it.

The trick is to not pull the cursor *through* the menu, but in a curve *around* it, so the cursor does not touch the menu items until lower on the list where you wanted to go. The menu items you don't touch, don't open a sub-menu.

Navy Alphabet (updated)

I've decided to try to learn the whole "navy alphabet". It's useful when ordering things over the phone. Especially my email address, since nobody has heard "Eolake" before. Echo-Oscar-Lima-Alpha-Kilo-Echo.
(For some things I have an outstanding memory, like music, films, books, old conversations, etc. But I'm not great at memorizing. I think even just that short string is not so easy to memorize. Not instant anyway.)

• Alpha
• Bravo
• Charlie
• Delta
• Echo
• Foxtrot
• Golf
• Hotel
• India
• Juliet
• Kilo
• Lima
• Mike
• November
• Oscar
• Papa
• Quebec
• Romeo
• Sierra
• Tango
• Uniform
• Victor
• Whiskey
• X-Ray
• Yankee
• Zulu

---

Update: seems I was wrong about what it's called. It seems Radio Operators Alphabet is better.

Update:
DDD wrote:
More than you want to know here, including the old Royal Navy: Edward-Orange-London-Apples-King-Edward. The pronunciation specifications show how communication can be very accurate despite the most appalling conditions (static, sirens, thunder, crashing waves, background noise, mortar fire, rockets gunfire, bombs, etc.)

iPad speakers

I usually plug the iPad on the bookholder by my bed into the Soundsticks II system I have there, for great sound. But I just now noticed that I'd been watching video on the pad for a couple of hours this evening without noticing I hadn't done that. I guess that means the iPad's own speaker is good enough for daily use.

---
It strikes me that if one is sick or laid out for a while, an iPad and a bookholder device is a perfect system. In one device one can have thousands of books and articles, dozens of games, and hundreds of videos.
And if one also has an external keyboard one can even easily blog and chat and email too. As well as be productive, if writing is a thing one does seriously too.

And of course it seems like a good bet that the next pad will come with FaceTime too, the video-phone system in iPhone 4.

I really hope they can make this thing a lot lighter. But in recent years Apple seems to have been stuck on glass and metal. Which feels great, but is heavy. The Kindle is plastic, guys. And you could make much prettier plastic objects than Amazon can. Blease blease. A 300-gram iPad.

Stobblehouse Writing Workshop (updated again)

I announce: the first  
Stobblehouse Blogger-comment-Limit Writing Workshop.

Myself and commenters each come up with one to three sets of two elements for a short-short story. 
And then you pick one set another has come up with, and you write a short-short story under 4000 characters (roughly 600 words), which is Blogger's comment limit. (The site says 4096 characters, but it seems to count them differently than my text editor. Whatever.)

Don't announce which one you're doing, it might even be more fun if more people are doing the same ones.
I'll participate myself, that's actually the reason for making this workshop, the fun of doing that.

My sets:

• Strawberries and an alien
• A love affair and poison
• An escape and a long sleep

And now you add yours!
---
Update: from Gil:

• A mobile home and a crown prince.
• Golf clubs and hand grenades.
• A journey and a revelation.

... Aaaaaand, the first story is in, from Michael. And it's so good.

update: Two stories now.
We need a few more idea sets, please!

Update:
MB's sets:

• Automation and a broken vial.
• A comeback and a derelict ship.
• A diamond and 33 cats. 

Typewriter-to-keyboard

[Thanks to Glenn]

Turn an old typewriter into a USB keyboard. Plug it into a PC or Mac or even an iPad.





Friggin cool idea. Maybe I'll do it with my old Remington, the really big one, seen here with my house plant.

My twitter home, signup drive

NOTICE:
If I get more than a thousand new Twitter followers in the rest of June 2010, ten randomly selected people will get a complimentary iPad Two prototype!
Go here now and sign up. 

[Addendum: This is not true.There are perhaps a couple of iPad Two prototypes in existence, but Apple will be guarding them with barbed wire and gun turrets. This was a joke. Or satire. Or just an attempt at making the occasional recruitment drive vaguely interesting. Take your pick. The first three to pick correctly win an iPhone Five prototype.]

AmyJane

... Is the wife of that Gruber guy. I don't use Twitter much, but she is funny.
Examples of her tweets:

• The couple behind me has been discussing whether a wooden picnic table is animal, vegetable, or mineral. Unsurprisingly, it's getting ugly.
• She thinks it's a mineral but he's pretty sure it's vegetable, since you could eat it.
• She's never heard of the animal/vegetable/mineral classification system. He concedes it might be something only his family uses.

-

John Gruber & Merlin Mann's Blogging Panel

John Gruber & Merlin Mann's Blogging Panel, audio discussion.
Interesting talk about doing "your own sh*t" and doing it well, online. And very funny.

If you ever want to entertain yourself, just go to Twitter and Search, and write @comcast, and read the stuff people write to Comcast."

No kidding. The first one I saw said: "Dear @comcast. There's soccer on at 230. Better get your shit together by then. Love, me."

Don't blog about Star Wars. Blog about Jawas. Better, blog about one specific Jawa who's on the screen for one minute. Become the go-to guy for that Jawa.

Here is Mann's info page you get to after writing to him. Very funny.
And here is a recent blog entry. Good advice.  I certainly couldn't have predicted anything about where I am today. For one thing, I could not have predicted the Web.
So... follow your intuition, it's your Higher Self (which knows everything and you or I know almost nothing), and don't worry so much about controlling things.