The Holy Bible is now available as an RSS feed. [Scripting News]
Year: 2004
Who's working on Personal Information Management?.
Who’s working on Personal Information Management?. These are two very valuable overview documents. Many thanks to Piers Young for pointing to them, and to Richard Boardman (Imperial College London) for writing them!
And thank you Seb for passing it along.
Rational ignorance
Lago
Academic life is ruining the internet for me. An example: Today I read Joi Ito s wandering entry on money, economics, and physics, and the first thing I thought of doing was to post a bibliography of all of the reading that should have been done before that post was made. And then I realized that posting such a bibliography is the equivalent of shouting at the television. It doesn t matter what I say about it. The TV (and the internet) can t really hear me.
Lago reacts to an interesting point that I in fact pondered yesterday before posting my thoughts from my lunch with Seth. Is it better for me to post my superficial musings with Seth in the one hour that I had before I needed to move on to the next thing, or do I scribble them in my notebook and write a more rigorous treatment with references. I decided, as Cory often says, that my blog is my notebook and that even though many of my thoughts were half-baked, it was better to write early/write often than to back burner the thoughts and probably never get around to posting them.
[…snip…]
I don’t want to ignite a academic vs non-academic flame-war here. I’m just trying to point out, as Lago does, that we are all making decisions about how much to study in order for us to make the right decisions. I don’t have the time or the ability to do “all of the reading that should have been done before that post was made.” Having said that, I would encourage people to post “a bibliography of all of the reading” since I am interested and so are many other people.
By Joichi Ito joi_nospam_@nospam_ito.com. [Joi Ito’s Web]
Interesting ruminations from Joi Ito on how to strike a balance between getting something out the door and thinking some more about it.
I feel that I tend to err in the other direction of sitting on things too long instead of putting something out there, although the experience of weblogging over the past two years has helped immensely in moving toward Joi’s position. It’s something I find myself thinking about explicitly far more than I used to.
Wild Eastern Standard Tribe remixes
Wild Eastern Standard Tribe remixes. Trevor Smith has whipped up two amazing remixes of Eastern Standard Tribe, my new novel. The first is a “speed-reader,” based on the research of Xerox PARC researcher Rich Gold, which flashes the book, one word at a time, up on the screen, at a high rate of speed. It is astonishingly readable, and makes you feel like you’ve found a back-door to your brain’s comprehension nodes. The second is a “PurpleSlurped” version of the book, in which every paragraph is given its own link, so that one can easily refer to a specific passage of the text. Link (Thanks, Trevor!) [Boing Boing Blog]
Cory has put his newest book out there for all of us to play with. My old eyes will be reading the dead trees version I suspect, but I still appreciate having both the bits and the atoms available.
Pun du jour
Pun du jour….. I found myself sitting early this morning chatting with my friends from the B.C., affectionately know as the Breakfast Club. I had gotten in the habit of working out every morning, and then around 8 A.M. would drift by a… [buzzmodo]
Buzz provides the best summary of the Janet Jackson incident I’ve seen. Thanks for brightening up my morning.
Capster: run a program at startup
Capster: run a program at startup.
Here’s a cool tool. Capster lets you run a program at startup, but only when the Caps Lock key is on. One of the things I’ve always wanted in Windows is a Startup Manager like the Mac OS offered (in Classic Mac OS 9 and earlier). This 5K program is a partial solution.
For example, I run ZoneAlarm when I’m connected at home or out and about but don’t really need it when I’m connected at work. All I do is press Caps Lock when I boot up at home and ZoneAlarm launches.
Nice
Another useful friction remover from Marc.
A fix for text-only links
How many times have you seen a URL that wasn’t coded properly to be a clickable link? You have to highlight the text, copy, go to the address bar of your browser, paste, and hit Enter (or click “Go”). I just came across a neat script called BrowseTo (via Daily Rotation) that fixes this small but annoying problem.
Install BrowseTo and you can now highlight a text-only link, right click and choose Browse to… to open a new window containing that page. You can even use it to highlight a clickable link and open a new window if you use HotMail or other frames-based web sites that make opening a link in a new window difficult (or impossible).
BrowseTo requires Windows 98 and Internet Explorer 5.0 or newer.
The author has definitely got a sense of humor. You’ve got to read some of his copy. And, he must be a jazz fan (his site name is straightnochaser.com).
Here’s a useful little tool that solves a problem I run into multiple times a day.
Innovation Weblog
One of my favourite weblogs on creativity and innovation – Innovation Weblog – now has an RSS Feed here. Way to go Chuck !
Another nice find from Dina. Subscribed.
ActiveWords wordbase for OneNote
ActiveWords wordbase for OneNote.
Fred Zimmerman has created a OneNote ActiveWords wordbase file for ActiveWords Plus. This came about from a conversation Buzz Bruggeman of ActiveWords and I were having that we sucked Fred into.
The wordbase offers a number of really helpful AW shortcuts including:
- “onsn” — ActiveWord to launch OneNote SideNote
- “onsnip” — ActiveWord to snip selected text from any app and paste it into OneNote — courtesy Buzz Bruggeman and Dennis Kennedy
- “onaudio” — ActiveWord to turn on OneNote audio recording in current page
Nice work Fred! You just made one of my favorite apps even better!
Buzz walked me through some of this the other day. I expect I’ll be installing OneNote shortly. For all the productivity I already get out of ActiveWords, I’m always amazed by the tricks that Buzz gets it to do. He chips away at little irritations in the way that Windows can be an invisible drag on productivity and over time turns an out of the box laptop into a highly personalized and tuned information appliance.
Blogging to Radio UserLand from FeedDemon
Blogging to Radio UserLand from FeedDemon.
Chris Brody shared the following tip in our newsgroups about posting to Radio UserLand from FeedDemon:
RadioExpress allows you to post content from any web page to your blog:
http://www.newsisfree.com/blog/archives/000430.htmlOnce installed and configured as you want, add the following command line to
FeedDemon’s blog publishing tools:
http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/radioExpress?t=$ITEM_DESCRIPTION$&u=$ITE
M_LINK$&n=$ITEM_TITLE$Note that I don’t use Radio UserLand, so I haven’t tried this myself.
I have tried this and it does work. I do want to go in and tweak the RadioExpress bookmarklet a bit, but this does make it possible to use FeedDemon with Radio.