Matt Haughey attempted to spec a bike with as many domestically-sourced components as possible. The result is beautiful, although it’s also a reminder of how dependent we are on overseas manufacture, even when cost is no obstacle; no American company makes all the components necessary for the drivetrain and that’s unlikely to change. Commuter bikes, at least, can depend on American-built baskets from Wald and bags from various companies.
Category Archive
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November 28th, 2009
November 25th, 2009
Ta-da List
A free web service from 37 Signals for you to make and manage checklists. It’s personal organization stripped of complication and methodological orthodoxy.
This site has been around for a while but it never crossed my path until namedropped by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber the other day. I’m already fond of it; I can add to-do items from whatever device (computer, phone, netbook) I’m on at the time and check them off from any other. It has a custom UI for the iPhone and possibly other mobile devices. It’s unrelated to 37 Signals’ other fine products, some of which I use, aside from the one-line ads for them in the computer browser version.
It does one thing and does it well.
November 14th, 2009
301Works
The Internet Archive corralled a bunch of URL shortening companies and has begun collecting and logging shortened URLs. Prominent in their absences are one of the most popular of the services, tinyurl.com and one that’s already suffered prominent downtime, tr.im.
Shortened URLs (translating, for example, a Google Maps location into a twelve-character URL) are a necessary evil in the era of message systems with short character limits, but among their many problems are two related to keeping web content usable.
The major problem is that if the URL shortening service fails or goes away (as tr.im temporarily did), every link on the web using that service is now disabled (or possibly maliciously diverted), even when the targeted web pages (for example, a Google Maps location) is still alive and healthy.
The minor problem is that more people are developing the bad habit of shortening all their links, even where it’s not necessary (for example, when the target URL’s already short or readable, or when embedding a link in conventional HTML), masking the identity of the target page and unintentionally destabilizing their own content.
A persistent archive of shortened URLs is a major first step (and a respectably massive effort), but its utility is limited unless there’s a means to recall from that archive as needed from anywhere, and that will be a hard problem to solve.
November 10th, 2009
MyDellMini: OS X 10.6.2
Following last week’s epic post about running Mac OS X on a Dell netbook, this link is obligatory now that the news has dropped. Rumors of problems with 10.6.2 were widespread while it was in beta but there no useful confirmation of the problem was possible until last night, when the public release shipped.
In a nutshell, Apple’s latest update to Mac OS X (10.6.2) disables support for the Atom CPU common in most netbooks, including the Dell Mini 10v used in my review. Whether it was a side effect in fixing an unrelated issue or because Apple is now actively trying to inhibit hackintoshing, the result is the same as far as the Mac hacking community is concerned: From here on out, every Apple OS update is going to have to be reviewed and possibly modified by the hackintosh community before it can be safe for installation on non-Apple hardware. For my thoughts on the matter, see the late addition to the long Mac netbook post.
November 6th, 2009
Readability
This is a bookmarklet for restyling the text on the page in a minimal single-column presentation, with superfluous content stripped out. Clever and useful, but has some problems (On Arc90′s own homepage, for example, the first context box is displayed and there’s no apparent way to view any of the other content boxes).
They’ve also released a Readability add-on for Firefox which works similarly.
October 24th, 2009
Google Wave Keyboard Shortcuts
I’d figured out a couple of these on my own, but this is a handy reference. Otherwise, the Wave interface has you moving from keyboard to mouse and back an awful lot.
Unlike GMail, which could be used to communicate with anybody with an email address, Wave’s usefulness is relevant to the number of people you want to use it with. But even with a fairly limited range of acquaintances signed up, it’s already surprisingly useful.
October 20th, 2009
What’s next after SpamWaves, WavePorn?
Google Wave already has its first reported spammer — a marketer for POM Wonderful began flinging flack at all the food bloggers they could find on Wave.
Although at least a couple people are optimistic about Google’s technical capacity to keep spam under control in Wave, it’s ultimately impossible to prevent spamming entirely in any medium without either proactive moderation or closing account creation and forbidding user interaction.
Incidentally, if you want to find me on Wave, ask.
October 19th, 2009
Why can’t we figure out what Google Wave is good for?
Google Wave is… something. What it is, exactly, few people have been able to agree on. Google’s own PR about Google Wave is a frustratingly imbalanced information overload, their publicity effort centering around an 80 minute video of the developer preview at Google I/O, earlier this year, entirely burying their slick, short product demos.
Apple can routinely, in 80 minutes, tout its sales figures, announce three revolutionary consumer products, demo them, preview yet another devastatingly witty TV commercial starring an affable PC and bemused Mac, and have a surprise musical guest run through a number or two. Even Microsoft’s execs can put on a reasonably tight show when announcing new products. So how does Google’s new product announcement compare? It’s thorough and boring. It’s unrehearsed, heavily padded by presentation failures, presenter fumbles, and an excruciatingly long introduction by one of Google’s research unit executives.
The Wave video is a fine tech conference presentation. But it’s a lousy public product demonstration, and it’s the entirety of Google’s sales pitch. Sales pitches, product sheets, whitepapers, short demonstrations of single features are all missing from Wave’s PR. In their place is a long video of people fumbling with their demo equipment. I watched it in 20 minute chunks, because if this is The Future, The Future is awkward.
October 16th, 2009
Polaroid SX-70 promotional film by Charles & Ray Eames
Compare this ten-minute film to contemporary info videos: It’s slow-moving, doesn’t pander to the viewer’s ego, lacks the usual ever-pressing urgency of new-technology promotion, and has an extended technical interlude which assumes the viewer can keep up with a detailed explanation of the optics, electronics and mechanics.
The viewer can. The Eames were great designers and geniuses at making complex things comprehendable. This is a beautiful short film about one of the most unusual and fascinating cameras ever made.