LibraryThing Screensaver (for Mac OS X)

Are you a LibraryThing user? First off, if not, why not? It’s a great way to keep track of your library. If you’re on LT, or if you sign up, add Prairie and me to your contacts!

Now, for those of you that are LT members (and Mac OS X users), they’ve just released a new toy: the LibraryThing Mac Screensaver. It’s actually just a specialized RSS feed that grabs random book covers from your library which you can put into Mac OS X’s RSS feed screensaver. Here’s a little YouTube video showing the screensaver and how to set it up:

Basically, just add this URL (with your username, of course) to OS X’s “Mobile Me and RSS” screensaver, and you’re off and running: http://www.librarything.com/labs-screensaver.php?userid=USERNAME When I set it up for the first time, it took a few moments for the RSS feed to start generating images, so don’t worry if you get a “No Pictures Found” error at first. Just wait a moment or two and try it again, it should kick in fairly soon. This is now my screensaver of choice. Slick!

Links for January 29th through January 30th

Sometime between January 29th and January 30th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Do Humanlike Machines Deserve Human Rights?: "This question is starting to get debated by robot designers and toymakers. With advanced robotics becoming cheaper and more commonplace, the challenge isn't how we learn to accept robots–but whether we should care when they're mistreated. And if we start caring about robot ethics, might we then go one insane step further and grant them rights?"
  • On the Flickr support in iPhoto ‘09: From Fraser Speirs, author of the excellent Flickr Export plugin for iPhoto and Aperture: "I acquired my copy of iLife ‘09 yesterday and decided to dive deep on how Apple have implemented Flickr integration in iPhoto ‘09. Here are the results of my investigation. Be aware as you read that this is the result of a morning’s click-around investigation and not months of serious use. I will do my best to give an honest assessment of what is in iPhoto ‘09, and you’ve already read my full disclosure in the previous paragraph."
  • Google School: Find Images by Exact Dimensions, Make Wallpaper Search a Breeze: "Weblog Design Live uncovers the undocumented search operator (that's also new to us) and demonstrates how to use it. Just use the imagesize operator followed by the WidthXHeight in pixels." For instance, imagesize:320×480 goth finds iPhone/iPod Touch wallpaper ready 'goth' images (for a potentially odd interpretation of 'goth', that is).
  • White House Unbuttons Formal Dress Code: "The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat. 'He's from Hawaii, O.K.?' said Mr. Obama's senior adviser, David Axelrod, who occupies the small but strategically located office next door to his boss. 'He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there.'"
  • Create Your Own Original Star Trek Story: The original Star Trek only managed to make 80 episodes before running out of Dilithium. Not enough! So we mixed up the show's most frequent plot twists, to create a foolproof Trek story generator.

Links for January 26th through January 27th

Sometime between January 26th and January 27th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Gods and Monsters Is 99 Cents Jan. 27th, 2009 Thru Feb. 03rd, 2009 at iTunes US: For those of you with broadband connections and Apple's iTunes, Gods and Monsters is only a 99 cent rental this week. It's an excellent drama, with Sir Ian McKellan and Brendan Frasier (in one of his few non-action, actually acting roles), looking at the relationship between original Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein director James Whale and his gardener. Definitely worth the rent!
  • Obama Tells Arabic Network US Is ‘Not Your Enemy’: "President Barack Obama chose an Arabic satellite TV network for his first formal television interview as president, part of a concerted effort to repair relations with the Muslim world that were damaged under the previous administration. Obama cited his Muslim background and relatives, practically a taboo issue during the U.S. presidential campaign, and said in the interview, which aired Tuesday, that one of his main tasks was to communicate to Muslims 'that the Americans are not your enemy.' The interview on the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya news channel aired as Obama's new envoy to the region, former Sen. George J. Mitchell, arrived in Egypt on Tuesday for a visit that will also take him to Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. 'What I told [Mitchell] is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating,' Obama told the interviewer."
  • 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read: Science Fiction & Fantasy: "It is sometimes assumed that science fiction, fantasy and horror must mean spaceships, elves and vampires – and indeed, you'll find Iain M Banks, Tolkien and Bram Stoker on our list of mind-expanding reads. Yet these three genres have a tradition as venerable as the novel itself. Fiction works through metamorphosis: in every era authors explore the concerns of their times by mapping them on to invented worlds, whether they be political dystopias, fabulous kingdoms or supernatural dimensions. Every truly original writer must, by definition, create a new world. Here is a whole galaxy of worlds to explore."
  • Layers | Screen Forensics: "Capture your displays as a Photoshop layered image. Don't waste time capturing each window separately, importing them in your favorite PSD editor, naming the layers, positioning the images, etc. Do it with Layers in no time! Press the capture hotkey or customize your capture in the inspector. You'll obtain a full fledged PSD file with one layer per window, including menu and desktop icons, dock and menubar. " I've been quite happily using Snapz Pro X for my screenshots for years, but this looks like a very tempting competitor. Looking forward to giving it a try!
  • Pope Outrages Jews Over Holocaust Denier: "Jewish officials in Israel and abroad are outraged that Pope Benedict XVI has decided to lift the excommunication of a British bishop who denies that Jews were killed in Nazi gas chambers. The church's decision to lift the excommunication comes a few days after a Swedish television aired an interview with Williamson in which the 68-year-old claimed the Nazis did not use gas chambers. 'I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against — is hugely against — 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler,' he said in the interview, which appeared on various Web sites since its broadcast. 'I believe there were no gas chambers,' he added."

Links for January 21st through January 26th

Sometime between January 21st and January 26th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Improved Del.Icio.Us Posting Bookmarklet (With Gruber’s Title Case Goodness): "For a while, I used the del.icio.us Complete Firefox extension, but it's one of those few abandonware extensions that didn't make the trip to Firefox 3. So I switched back to my bookmarklet, as it can do everything the extension does and more — and with keyconfig and a handy reference, it can be triggered by a keystroke just as the extension was, so I'm all good."
  • Time Machine backups on network shares in Leopard: A guide to setting up Time Machine backups over a network without springing for Apple's Time Capsule device.
  • Obama signs order to close Guantanamo in a year: President Barack Obama began overhauling U.S. treatment of terror suspects Thursday, signing orders to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, shut down secret overseas CIA prisons, review military war crimes trials and ban the harshest interrogation methods.
  • The Obameter: Tracking Barack Obama’s Campaign Promises: PolitiFact has compiled about 500 promises that Barack Obama made during the campaign and is tracking their progress on our Obameter. We rate their status as No Action, In the Works or Stalled. Once we find action is completed, we rate them Promise Kept, Compromise or Promise Broken. (So far: 6 kept, 1 stalled, 14 in progress)
  • US Democracy Server: Patch Day: * Leadership: Will now scale properly to national crises. Intelligence was not being properly applied. * A bug has been fixed that allowed the President to ignore the effects of debuffs applied by the Legislative classes. * Drain Treasury: There appears to be a bug that allowed loot to be transferred from the treasury to anyone on the President’s friends list, or in the President’s party. We are investigating. * Messages to and from the President will now be correctly saved to the chat log. * Messages originating from the President were being misclassified as originating from The American People. * A rendering error that frequently caused the President to appear wrapped in the American Flag texture has been addressed.

Happy 25th Birthday Macintosh!

Twenty-five years ago today, Steve Jobs introduced the original Macintosh: “The computer for the rest of us.”

It’s funny to see just how much hasn’t changed in the past 25 years — especially Jobs’ consummate showmanship and flair — and how much has. That little machine that started it all is certainly a far cry from what’s being offered today, but it’s very easy to see how much today’s Mac still owes to the original, in everything from the interface to the advertising (I was really amused at how similar the two ads at the very end of the above clip are to many of today’s ads from Apple).

So happy birthday, Macintosh! And here’s to another 25 years to come!

Links for January 12th through January 14th

Sometime between January 12th and January 14th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Report Finds Online Threats to Children Overblown: The Internet may not be such a dangerous place for children after all. A task force created by 49 state attorneys general to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem. […] The panel, the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, was charged with examining the extent of the threats children face on social networks like MySpace and Facebook, amid widespread fears that adults were using these popular Web sites to deceive and prey on children. But the report concluded that the problem of bullying among children, both online and offline, poses a far more serious challenge than the sexual solicitation of minors by adults. […] “Social networks are very much like real-world communities that are comprised mostly of good people who are there for the right reasons.”
  • Found Footage: Good grief, NCIS, do you take us for fools?: Apparently the "Mac SE" that McGee pulled out of a box on NCIS last night (which I "squee'd" about here) wasn't an SE, but a Classic, and geekier MacGeeks than me are up in arms about the flub. Meh. Perhaps I should have noticed, as my first Mac was a Classic, but…I just can't get too upset about the goof. It's a TV show. Actors get lines and props…it's not their fault if they don't go together.
  • Runnin’ With The Songsmith: The leaked David Lee Roth vocals for "Runnin' With the Devil" run through Microsoft's new Songsmith software. Hilariously awful.
  • “The Recently Deflowered Girl” (1965) – Illustrated by Edward Gorey: I knew that Shel Silverstein published different works aimed for “kid” and “adult” audiences, but I had no idea that Edward Gorey did the same – at least not until I saw The Recently Deflowered Girl. It’s a 1965 parody of etiquette books that seems quaint now, but must’ve seemed racy back in those days when Playboy was where you got not just the pictures of nude women, but good advice on stereos and cocktails.
  • Hardware that supports iPhoto ’09’s geotagging – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW): If shot with the right hardware, iPhoto recognizes where a given photo was taken, and places it on a Google map. If the photos in an event span several locations, it notices that, also. The built-in maps are very attractive and handy, as you can search your entire library by geographic location. As I watched all of this, one thought was echoing in my mind. I don't have single piece of hardware that can do this.
  • Rock Paper Scissors Spock Lizard: Scissors cuts Paper covers Rock crushes Lizard poisons Spock smashes Scissors decapitates Lizard eats Paper disproves Spock vaporizes Rock crushes Scissors.

Links for January 9th through January 11th

Sometime between January 9th and January 11th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Anchorage Wedding – Stephanie & Royce: On Saturday I photographed another cool couple in freezing temperatures! about 10 to 20 below was the norm across Anchorage. Stephanie & Royce were married at Central Lutheran Church followed by a reception at the Bayshore Clubhouse.
  • Seattle P-I put up for sale: The Seattle P-I is being put up for sale, and if after 60 days it has not sold, it will either be turned into a Web-only publication with a greatly reduced staff or discontinued entirely. "One thing is clear: at the end of the sale process, we do not see ourselves publishing in print," said Steven Swartz, president of the Hearst Corp.'s newspaper division.
  • Knitting for Psychos: I think the title pretty much sums it up.
  • Computer geeks learn to flirt: Even the most quirky of computer nerds can learn to flirt with finesse thanks to a new "flirting course" being offered to budding IT engineers at Potsdam University south of Berlin. The 440 students enrolled in the master's degree course will learn how to write flirtatious text messages and emails, impress people at parties and cope with rejection. Philip von Senftleben, an author and radio presenter who will teach the course, summed up his job as teaching how to "get someone else's heart beating fast while yours stays calm."
  • UPDATE: MACWORLD THREATENED BY DEATH RAY: Steve Jobs took time from constructing an android body that will let his consciousness live forever to issue a statement: “Apple does not approve of this application.  Death ray technology and open source software are dangerous when released to the general public and are not in keeping with our corporate policy.”

Links for December 28th through January 8th

Sometime between December 28th and January 8th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • freezebubbles: It's very cold tonight, so we played with bubbles. If you blow them upwards enough they have time to freeze on the way down.
  • xkcd: Converting to Metric: The key to converting to metric is establishing new reference points. When you hear "26° C," instead of thinking "that's 70° F," you should think, "that's warmer than a house but cool for swimming." Here are some helpful tables of reference points…
  • Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service: Seattle: Green River near Auburn: Hydrologic info for the Green River. Currently in the 'caution' zone at its single checkpoint, but seems to have crested already and is expected to drop from here on out.
  • UiRemote: The Universal Infrared Remote for iPhone: With the help of this small accessory, you will be able to use your iPhone to control your TV, DVD, Cable box, Projectors, Digital Photo Frames, AC, Fans, & Backyard evil robots, whereever you go. Not only does it send out the remote control signals, you can easily teach it to learn any button on any standard Remote, or even a sequence of button clicks as a macro. (This looks nice — hopefully they make it compatible with the iPod Touch as well!)
  • 25 Years of Mac: From Boxy Beige to Silver Sleek: Here's what's amazing about the Mac as it turns 25, a number that in computer years is just about a googolplex: It can look forward. The Mac's original competition—the green-phosphorus-screened stuff made by RadioShack, DEC, and then-big kahuna IBM—now inhabit landfills, both physically and psychically. Yet the Macintosh is not only thriving, it's doing better than at any time in its history. Mac market share has quietly crept into double digits. That's up from barely 3 percent in 1997, just before the prodigal CEO returned to the fold after a 12-year exile. Any way you cut it, the Mac is on the rise while Windows is waning. Roll over, Methusela—the Macintosh is still peaking.
  • 6 New Web Technologies of 2008 You Need to Use Now: Every year, we see scores of innovations trickle onto the web — everything from new browser features to cool web apps to entire programming languages. Some of these concepts just make us smile, then we move on. Some completely blow our minds with their utility and ingenuity — and become must-haves. For this list, we've compiled the most truly life-altering nuggets of brilliance to hit center stage in 2008: the ideas, products and enhancements to the web experience so huge that they make us wonder how we got along without them.
  • NCIS: The Official TV Soundtrack: Okay, maybe it's a little cheezy as a TV show tie-in, but NCIS is my personal favorite of the current crop of crime dramas…and the entire second disc of the soundtrack set is music from Abby's Lab: Collide, Ministry, Seether, Skold vs. KMFDM, Nitzer Ebb, Android Lust, and more. Sweet!
  • Weak cellphone law puts drivers off the hook: When lawmakers addressed the issue, they amassed sufficient votes only for a law that made talking on a handheld cellphone a secondary offense. If it were a primary offense, an officer could stop a violator on the spot for using a cellphone. But in our state, officers can stop an offender only for another reason, such as a busted taillight, weaving or following too close. During the stop, they can write an additional ticket for cellphone misbehavior. Of several states with cellphone bans, including California, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York, only Washington opted to make it secondary offense.
  • Whose Streets?: In both instances the the streets have been immediately appropriated for the purpose of joy—not commerce or commuting—and the Seattle police, who normally exist to protect commerce and commuting, have gotten it exactly right. They've ceded the streets to the celebrants and made it their duty to protect them and their temporary takeover of space that isn't theirs. On election night, I saw police keeping cars away from the street party in the above video. On Saturday night—or, really, at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning—I saw a lone police car parked so that it blocked traffic from descending the hill favored by the East Denny Way sledders, some of whom are pictured above.
  • Chart Porn: The Unofficial Theory Of Sci-Fi Connectivity: We've concentrated on three types of crossovers between series: Direct Crossover, where characters from one series or another have actually met in a story; Easter Egg, where elements of one series have appeared in another (often as geeky in-jokes), and Brand Crossover, where market forces have brought two disparate things together for no good reason (See Transformers/Star Wars).

Jazzy Genius

While there’s been some grousing about the accuracy of iTunes 8’s new Genius feature, I’m getting a kick out of playing with it. Sure, it’s not always spot-on (though Apple says that will change over time as their database grows and the matching AI improves), but that lends a certain entertainment value to the playlists it generates. When it works, though, it’s slick.

Here’s a playlist my iPod just put together (pulling only from songs that happened to be loaded at the time), seeding off of Tony Bennett’s take on “Steppin’ Out With My Baby”:

  1. Tony Bennett, “Steppin’ Out With My Baby”
  2. Frank Sinatra, “Nice ‘n’ Easy”
  3. Bobby Darin, “More”
  4. Johnny Mathis, “Chances Are”
  5. Dean Martin, “You Belong to Me”
  6. Fred Astaire, “The Way You Look Tonight”
  7. The Andrews Sisters, “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”
  8. Marilyn Monroe, “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend”
  9. Billie Holiday, “All of Me”
  10. Perry Como, “Magic Moments”
  11. Louis Armstrong, “West End Blues”
  12. Louis Jordan, “Let the Good Times Roll”
  13. Benny Goodman, “Swingtime in the Rockies”
  14. Frank Sinatra, “Witchcraft”
  15. The Glenn Miller Orchestra, “At Last”
  16. Bobby Darin, “Hello, Dolly!”
  17. Billie Holiday, “Spreadin’ Rhythm Around (Remix)”
  18. Tony Bennett, “(I Left My Heart In) San Francisco”
  19. Dean Martin, “That’s Amore”
  20. Louis Armstrong, “Ain’t Misbehavin'”
  21. Duke Ellington, “Take the A-Train”
  22. Judy Garland, “The Man That Got Away”
  23. The Andrews Sisters, “Rum and Coca-Cola”
  24. Billie Holiday, “God Bless the Child”
  25. Frank Sinatra, “You Make Me Feel So Young”

Not bad at all, I’d say.

(I also love that I just happened to have the songs on my iPod to build that kind of playlist. It’s semi-randomly loaded, so there’s often no real telling what might be on there at any given time. Hmmm…it may be about time to do another “here’s how I organize my music” post….)