The DannyStewart.com Forums, a piece of DannyStewart.com history, have been dusted off and restored from my personal archive. Originally restored purely for nostalgia purposes, I’ve decided to leave them up for the time being and re-enable new user registrations. I’m not going to put a link on the main page because I’m not yet certain of its future.
All the old posts and user accounts are still there, so if you were a member previously, you can log in to your old account. If you’re interested in joining for the first time, please be aware that the forums are primarily focused on Doctor Who, and consider yourself warned that it is not heavily moderated and some of us are jerks.
On Friday, The Talk Show suddenly disappeared from its home on 5by5 and started over (from episode #1) on Mule Radio Syndicate. There was no warning, and Dan Benjamin at 5by5 has been completely silent since this happened. If you’re interested in more backstory, Jonathan Poritsky has done a great job summarizing.
I listened to the Talk Show every week. I initially came for Gruber, but I grew to love Dan. The Talk Show was my gateway drug to 5by5’s other amazing podcasts. But the sense I get from this is that Dan Benjamin was pretty much blindsided by it. Gruber’s only public statements on this have been that he is excited to relaunch on Mule. There isn’t even so much as a mention or a thank you for Dan or 5by5. The closest we’ve gotten has been this snarky tweet.
I’m not going to harp on this because it’s not worth it. Frankly, I couldn’t care less about John Gruber’s business decisions. Whatever the motivation behind this change, Gruber is free to do whatever he wants here. But I think the respectful thing would have been to go through Dan and announce this to the public together. Instead, Dan looks like a victim here, and it didn’t have to play out like that.
I don’t care what Gruber does. But I do care how he does it. Maybe if he hadn’t gone the shock-and-awe route with this transition, I’d have followed him over to Mule. But as it stands today, at least until I hear something from Dan, I’m done with the Talk Show. I’ll be just fine with Marco, Merlin, Jim, Horace, and John Siracusa.
I woke up this morning to a pleasant surprise—my Restoration of the Daleks soundtrack album, which I recently submitted to be published on iTunes, is now available.
Once upon a time seeing this in public would have been the coolest thing ever. Now it’s just a sad reminder of how the new series has poisoned public perception of Doctor Who, leading people to associate the name with something that isn’t it. It’s a sad world we live in where you can’t even get excited about seeing a TARDIS in public anymore. But this isn’t the TARDIS. It’s just something that happens to look the same.
Just what I’ve always wanted. Unfortunately it saves as .md instead of .txt, but oh well.
UPDATE: Thanks to Nick Wynja for pointing out that you can edit the BBLMPreferredFilenameExtension key to “txt” in the Info.plist file for Markdown.bblm to have Markdown files save as .txt. Thanks again, Nick!
Oh, go fuck yourself, Google. This is just as bad as companies forcing me to “like” something on Facebook before I can view whatever it is they want me to “like.” Just let me thumbs up something, without forcing me to “upgrade” to G+, you dickheads.
Without a doubt, it’s my least favorite form of communication. There are lots of things to hate about it. I hate how people can interrupt you at any time and expect a conversation. I hate the rigidity of blocking off time for such a conversation, especially unexpectedly.
I grew up in the digital age. If you send me an email, I will get it immediately, and I will respond as soon as I am reasonably able. If you have a question, that is the absolute best way to get an answer from me.
The problem is, some of the people I deal with don’t, won’t, or can’t understand this. To them, the phone is the automatic choice for a certain kind of communication. As a result, I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I’ve decided what I’m going to do.
First, I’m going to change my phone number. I’m ditching the number I’ve had for almost a decade, and switching to something new. I will give this number to as few people as I possibly can. To begin with, that’s going to be immediate family, and maybe one or two trusted friends. There are a few people that I don’t mind receiving calls from. They don’t feel like an interruption or a burden, and if I can’t answer, I can’t answer.
There are others who I don’t want to have my phone number, but need to occasionally interact with me by phone. For these people, I’ve signed up with a new Google account (I destroyed my previous Google account, and the new one contains as little personally identifiable information as possible) for the express purpose of using Google Voice.
This gives me a secondary phone number I can give out to people without compromising my main number. My intention with this number is to disable forwarding to my phone, so that people are forced to leave me a message, which is then transcribed and delivered to me via email. Voilà—everything via email, just as I want it. (Disliking and distrusting Google as I do, I don’t want all my calls going through Google Voice, which is why I will still be sharing my regular phone number with those few trusted people, as stated above.)
For close friends and family, they will also have my Apple ID, and I’m happy to continue communicating with them via iMessage and FaceTime (my preferred methods of communication for the people closest to me). An additional advantage of the Apple ID being tied to a domain I own is that I can change the address any time I like as a sort of “security barrier” to prevent people from guessing my Apple ID.
This eliminates my weakest link in mobile communication, which (ironically) is the plain old-fashioned phone call. Queued, digital communication is so much less of an imposition.
First of all, Apple isn’t rejecting Dropbox-powered apps outright. They’re rejecting them because they allow the user to create a Dropbox account and/or pay for a Dropbox subscription through Safari. However, that may be splitting hairs, as it may theoretically just be a means to an end to discourage the use of Dropbox in apps versus iCloud.
Either way, though, that’s stupid, shortsighted, and unacceptable. Get it together, guys.
I would like to avoid making these mistakes. But how do you avoid mistakes you make by default? Ideally you transform your life so it has other defaults. But it may not be possible to do that completely. As long as these mistakes happen by default, you probably have to be reminded not to make them. So I inverted the 5 regrets, yielding a list of 5 commands which I then put at the top of the file I use as a todo list.
Macworld Lab found that a 27-inch 3.4GHz Core i7 iMac with an SSD is faster than a BTO 3.33GHz Xeon Westmere six-core Mac Pro, and if a new Ivy Bridge iMac is released before a new Mac Pro, the performance gap between the iMac and the Mac Pro will only widen. Perhaps that’s Apple’s plan all along.
I’m waiting for a new iMac myself, but things are looking more and more grim for the poor Mac Pro. Though somehow I still can’t imagine Apple killing them off. Here’s hoping I’m not proven wrong, especially for those who need it.
I agree with Dave that Ben laid it on a little thick. I know that’s kind of Ben’s deal on his site, and I respect that, but name calling is kinda lame. The guys at Realmac are all super, and I’ve enjoyed getting to know a couple of them since meeting at Macworld.
Okay, fine, they’re not dicks. But more to the point, I don’t like gamification being the clear focus of an app’s developers as the app moves forward. To me that means that the app isn’t worth your time, because the developers are more interested in spending their time adding gimmicks than in making their app better.
I used to use Camera+, then switched to Camera Awesome for a brief while before ultimately switching back to the iPhone’s native Camera app. The thing I don’t like about Camera Awesome is that it feels like a giant ad for SmugMug. I’d rather pay a couple bucks and not feel like I’m being shoehorned over to SmugMug.
My other concern is that sometimes it proves difficult to just take a picture. I remember soon after switching to Camera Awesome as my go-to camera app, I needed to take a picture of something quickly, and I wasted precious seconds figuring out how to turn off the various effects I’d turned on the last time I used the app. That right there was what pushed me back to the stock Camera app.
This is pretty cool though:
In a clever touch, Camera Awesome’s icon for the pre-record mode is a stylized version of the flux capacitor from Back to the Future.
Great resource on when to use the em-dash, en-dash, and hyphen. I had previously never been sure of where to use an en-dash, so I’d always used a hyphen there. Now I know.
To Steve Jobs, Simplicity was a religion. He built a company based on its principles, in which the complexities of traditional business were simply not tolerated. Simplicity was also his most powerful weapon—a means of humbling category leaders once thought to be invincible.
With all this chatter online lately about mechanical keyboards, I decided it was time to go out and get one for myself. I happened to already have an Apple Extended Keyboard II in my closet, but regrettably it’s in rather terrible shape. Some of the keys are clicky while others are mushy, and the whole keyboard is almost schoolbus yellow at this point.
I had a choice between the Das Keyboard and the Matias Tactile Pro 3. Everyone says the Das types like a dream, but that it’s big, bulky, and ugly. With that in mind, I decided to take the safer course and opt for the Tactile Pro.
It arrived yesterday, and I’ve been using it since last night. Here are some observations.
First, it’s loud. Disarmingly so. It takes a little while to get used to, but once you do, it’s kind of nice. As Shawn Blanc says above, “A mechanical keyboard engages all the senses but smell and taste.” When you’re sitting at your desk just trying to type something out, it becomes an almost soothing accompaniment.
Second, it looks nice. This is important to me. Just because I never look at my keyboard while I’m typing doesn’t mean I want a big, bulky eyesore on my desk.
The biggest problem I have with the Das Keyboard is that the typeface they use on the letters is ugly. I spent some time looking at pictures of the keyboard last night and I figured out why. The Windows version of the keyboard uses Bank Gothic as the typeface for its letters. I like Bank Gothic. The problem is that they made a stylistic choice to use lowercase letters on the Mac variant of the keyboard instead of uppercase letters like on the Windows version. Bank Gothic has no lowercase letters in its typeface, so they had to switch to a different font for the letters. (If you look closely, you’ll notice that keys without letters on them, such as the number row at the top, are identical to the Windows keys and still in Bank Gothic.) I don’t like that new font anywhere near as much. I think they should have stuck to Bank Gothic and stuck to uppercase letters. If Das were to release a new version of their Mac keyboard either with keys matching their Windows keyboard, or with no key labels at all (like their Ultimate keyboard), I would probably buy one of those. (I am considering buying their Silent model for work. I like my coworkers.)
It’s been a long time since I’ve had a wired keyboard at my desk, so the additional convenience of having two USB ports more readily available to me is also appreciated.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that the key layout is reminiscent of the Apple keyboard design previous to the current slim aluminum keyboards, so I’m having to adjust to a different function key layout. The volume keys are all the way on the right above the number pad. In order to replicate (and expand upon) the functionality of my old keyboard, I’m using Keyboard Maestro to configure F1 and F2 as brightness keys (with a special Control-Command-F1/F2 combo to jump straight to minimum or maximum brightness).
The bottom line is that the keyboard is very satisfying to type on. It encourages a natural flow to whatever you’re doing, whether it’s writing, scrolling through a document, or even gaming. I played a little bit of Fallout: New Vegas using the Tactile Pro last night and found myself noticing the sound but not bothered by it in the slightest.
I’m very satisfied with the purchase so far. In fact, I think this post is significantly longer than it would have been if I’d written it on my old keyboard, and that’s among the highest praise I can think to bestow.
