Is it a wobsite or a blag?

[Thanks to Carter.]

hangar said...
Given that these are licensed as CC-BY-NC don't you think you ought to provide some indication of who the original author was (even though it's probably obvious to pretty much everybody in either circle of the Venn diagram)?

Good point. I just got them in the email, I didn't know where they came from, thanks for informing me. I'm not familiar with the author, who is he?
MB informs it's Randall Munroe at xkcd.com.

The café writer

Twenty years ago I read an article about writing in cafés. This was well before I could afford a portable computer, but I liked the idea immediately, a lot. And I've liked it since, you'll notice how many posts I've devoted finding the perfect equipment for this sort of thing.

During 2001 I also had a very good place for it. It was a very friendly and cozy little cafe, where you quickly got to be friendly with the staff and even the owners who also worked there, and who I really liked. And there was also a small bunch of locals for who it was a hang-out, and I liked those guys too. I guess it was to me like bars are to many people, except with air and light, and no smell of beer.

Their food was even not bad at all. I would go there with my iBook (the first compact one, in white plastic, remember that? Lovely machine), get lunch and coffee, and hang out and read on the laptop, write, and chat.

That's the good life for me. Sadly hangouts like that don't happen often, it's a delicate balance between a place which has business enough to survive, but not so much that it's hectic and you don't get to know anybody. Even though I've lived many places in my adult life, and had many, many lunch hangouts, I've only found a couple of places which were of this nature. Maybe it's worse, maybe a place has to be too busy to have this atmosphere, to survive more than a couple of years.

MD offer

I've made a holiday offer just for two days on Domai (note: nudity).

ePub files

Tip:
If you drag en ePub file into the iTunes library window, and "books" is synced to the iPad, the book will automatically turn up in Apple's iBooks app, an app I like.

This can be used with those ebooks you can buy in epub format, for example from O'Reilly. And it can be used with those files that calibre collects from news sites, magazine sites, etc. They work perfectly in iBooks and look great.
(I'm told by the founder of calibre that they are working on a way to automatize this process.)

Note: "ePub" is a book/text file format, like MP3 is a music file format, or JPG is a picture file format. It is considered by many to be the Standard format for ebooks, and Apple chose it for iBooks, but irritatingly Sony and Amazon chose other formats for their ebook readers (the Sony Reader and the Kindle). This was spoken about today in a large book publishers' conference as one of the main things holding back the ebook publishing industry.

50 Popular Classic ebooks (updated)

An iPad app for $2: 50 Popular Classics (iTunes link.) That's a good price. Good titles too.

Sure, since the books are out of copyright, you can surely find them on the web for free. But I think it's more than worth two bucks to get them nicely formatted in a professional reading app for the iPad.

It's a decent app. You can't change text/background colors yet, it seems, or font, but you can change text size easily and in tidy steps, and it has auto-scroll, which can be varied steplessly in speed, although it's a bit jerky unless it's very slow. It also has bookmarks features and Search.
And they make it clear they are eager to add new books and to improve the app, so this is one I believe in.

(Hey! in the new advanced compositor, Blogger actually does place a graphic where the cursor is! I've been asking for that, and for a simpler upload process, which is there now also.)

------------------

I'm sure that the iPad is different thing to different people. For some it's a bigger gameboy. For some it's a movie viewer. And it's great at those things. But for me, both before I bought it, and after, it's 98% an ebook reader. That's what I wanted it for, and it's what I end up doing with it all the time, no matter how many other things I try. 

I actually article reading include in that; because when you use Instapaper or similar, it no longer feels like reading on a "web article", thank god (no ads or loud and confusing layout to distract you), it feels like reading a short ebook. An excellent reading experience.

Update:
Bruce said...
Project Gutenberg: The ultimate source of free on-line books, various formats, including several different e-book reader formats, or just plain ascii. Highly Recommended.

Ganesha games said...
And if you like epubs, feedbooks.com is highly recommended.

Note: "ePub" is a book/text file format, like MP3 is a music file format, or JPG is a picture file format. It is considered by many to be the Standard format for ebooks, and Apple chose it for iBooks, but irritatingly Sony and Amazon chose other formats for their ebook readers (the Sony Reader and the Kindle). This was spoken about today in a large book publishers' conference as one of the main things holding back the ebook publishing industry. 

HTML mail

One thing can't be debated, if one likes HTML mail, Apple Mail is outstanding, whereas Eudora totally sucked.

I needed to test something, so I just grabbed some text from a web page, just dragged my cursor over it loosely. It seems I selected two panels in a table in a web forum. And when I pasted it into Mail, it looked exactly like the that part of the web page. The table panels, the formatting, the buttens, everything. And it was the same on the receiving end, at least if Mail is receiving it (I don't know about other apps). I'm not sure what I'll use it for, but I still think that's quite a performance.

Screenshot: my email message and the web page:

Mem day

Man, things sure are quiet when the US celebrates Memorial Day, aren't they.

Fonts in emails

My change of email app is going well. Of course there has been quite a few head-scratcher moments, but far from the disastrous mess I had feared, it seems I'll be better off in many ways.

I'm suddenly tired of the same old fonts in email. I've always used Georgia or Verdana because they're designed for screen reading and are great for it.
But now I'm tired of it looking like a book. Does anybody know a font with more personality, but still quite readable?

----
Oooh, good tip from my Take Control book: Mail will change the size of the text in a message, just like a browser, simply with command-plus or -minus. That's weally weally useful, since some messages, particularly some posted from web discussion lists, often have durn tiny text for some reason.

Gide

"The wise man is astonished by everything."
 -- André Gide

Eudora Mailbox Cleaner (updated)

I've been using Eudora email app since Steve Jobs wore short pants. Many high-volume mail users have, due to Eudora's flexibility and good search abilities. But unfortunately the app is not longer supported or updated. And my copy started corrupting mailboxes more and more often, so I was forced to find a new mail home.

I was dreading it, because I have over ten years of mail stored, and dozens of filter, many mail boxes, hundreds of addresses and nicknames, a half-dozen email addresses at various places, keyboard shortcuts, macros, blah-blah-blah... You see what I mean?

Fortunately when googling for it, the first page I found was about Eudora Mailbox Cleaner. It made the bulk of the work a matter of just dragging the Eudora folder on top of the EMC icon.
It did take a long time (hours) due to my hundreds of thousands of archived messages, but I just lay back and watched 30Rock.

Afterwards I had to get used to a new app (I had chosen Apple Mail over Mozilla Thunderbird because I didn't like the interface of the latter, and because for once it would be nice to actually be using the app that Apple assumes you're using, so you get the benefits they build into the system for it.), and I had to reestablish my accounts, which for some reason are not transferred (and were not meant to), but both things where not so bad as I may have feared.

And delightfully, it now seems I have virtually everything I needed, filters, nicks, addresses, boxes, etc etc. And I can work almost like I am used to, perhaps even with a few improvements (which I surely will find more of).

Apple "Mail" (what's with the over-generic product names, folks?) does have a weakness though. If I want to search for a specific person, that's easy. Or a specific subject. But in Mail I can't search for both at once, so it's much harder to nail down on a specific mail you need to find. I hope they improve that.

Update:
Hi Eolake,
I had a bunch of Eudora files left over from about 10 years ago, and I have had it in the back of my mind for a long time to find some way to recover them. Last year, a friend who had emailed me a copy of a novel he wrote in 1998 asked me if I still had it. He had lost or misplaced his last copies when he was forced to move quickly and put a whole bunch of stuff in storage where he hasn't been able to sort it. Well, I couldn't read the Eudora files to find out. Until this afternoon, when I downloaded EMC and ran it and watched it just work. I found the novel and emailed it back to him. He was quite pleased.

So, thanks from two of us for solving my problem for me. I doubt I would have even worked on this for the next couple of years without your recommendation. (I did send the guy a donation with my thanks.)
Pat
----
Thanks also to those helping with the Search issue. (Further, I have bought and I'm studying Take Control of Apple Mail in Snow Leopard.)

BTW, does anybody know how to get Mail to open the next message automatically when you delete one which is open? Update: silly me, I just made a macro for it, took me thirty seconds.

Iron Baby

[Thanks to Pascal]

This is a hoot. Video.

Running on water

[Thanks to Joe]

Running on water, video.
Must be fake. Unless you can bend the laws of physics with your mind, it can't be done.
I think they have a long constructed path just under the water. It's quite clever of them to have everybody eventually sink down, it surely will make it more believable for many.