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Nice Place to Play

I'm a sucker for DSLR videos with the great depth of field changes, and never mind that people are playing disc golf in this video - these old Finnish forests look like great, awesome places to just BE, to walk around, to breathe the air.

Fixing up an Old Mustang

The Real Thing from Union HZ on Vimeo.

My Blog is 10

My blog is now ten years old. It all started with my first post, which was "I Hate Perl" on this day in 2002.

Why did I write that? Because at the time the blog was a MoveableType blog, which was written in Perl.

Happy Blogiversary ((No, I won't be using that word again if I can help it.)).

CrashPlan or BackBlaze?

CrashPlan is more customizable (and has whole-house coverage) and BackBlaze is a better Mac OS X client.

John Siracusa recommends them both equally.

I have three computers (currently) that I'd like to back up off-site:

  • My Mac Pro with a lot of stuff (four internal hard drives attached, though only two are non-backup drives)
  • My MacBook Air with some different things on it.
  • My wife's MacBook with all of her stuff on it.

This site has a comparison chart: http://www.onlinebackupdeals.com/backblaze/backblaze-vs-crashplan/ .

Two year plans and features are:
BackBlaze: $285, 3 computers, unlimited storage.
CrashPlan: $199, 2-10 computers, unlimited storage.

BackBlaze tries to cater to the Mac crowd (and has the better client), but then again their "Mac Love" section on their blog hasn't been updated since October 5… of last year. And their best rate (the two-year rate) is $3.96 per computer, but I have three computers.

There's both a lot to be said for simplicity and native clients (BackBlaze) AND customization (CrashPlan).

Does anyone have any coupon codes or special offers? I missed the dealio I just heard about on HyperCritical #95 where you could get a year for $2.40 or something.

I'm going to choose one of these and get this set up by Christmas.

Beaver State DG Video

I like the camera angles in this one:

Pixelmator’s Two Biggest Annoyances

I like Pixelmator. I like it a lot. For cropping and some other quick tasks, it rocks.

But it is lousy at two things I do fairly frequently.

  1. Letting you know what your foreground and background colors are for fills with the keyboard shortcut.
  2. White balance.

That is all. Carry on.

Steve Jobs on Life

BBEdit 10.5

I'm almost certain there's a way to do it, but I tried quickly to select a few columns and type the same thing into several rows of text at once, and couldn't do it.

But there's no way I'm giving up BBEdit. It's worked beautifully for me for well over a decade. And I was late to BBEdit. Now it's up to version 10.5 with some nice improvements.

P.S. Okay, I wasn't late to BBEdit. I think I started using it in 1997. So 15 years now, out of the 20 years it's been around.

80% of Revenue from Products 60 Days Old

Think about it. We changed the vast majority of our iPhone in a day. We didn't kind of β€” you know, change a little bit here or there. iPad, we changed the entire lineup in a day. The most successful product in consumer electronics history, and we change it all in a day and go with an iPad mini and a fourth- generation iPad. Who else is doing this? 80 percent of our revenues are from products that didn't exist 60 days ago. Is there any other company that would do that?
- Tim Cook, CEO, Apple

Source

North East Township Meeting Disc Golf Proposal

Earlier this evening myself, Mike Mirth, Brandon Smith, and Jay went to the North East Township monthly meeting to propose that we be allowed to put baskets and tee markers in for a nine-hole disc golf course at the North East Township Conservation Park (a.k.a. 20 Mile Creek Park).

The meeting went well, and I think some of the supervisors and committee members were surprised to hear how many state parks and other very conservation-oriented parks and regions around the country (and even within Pennsylvania) had installed disc golf courses.

I look forward to answering any questions the committee and supervisors may have.

Update: We made the front page of the paper. πŸ™‚

How a Sewing Machine Works

Trippy.

Sewing Machine
Sewing Machine

And yes, I'm posting this under "Technology." πŸ™‚

What I Miss in iTunes 11

iTunes DJ, previously Party Shuffle.

iTunes 11 is smart enough to know that a podcast is not music, but I now have NO WAY of adding podcasts to my random stream of music - you cannot add podcasts to the "Up Next" list.

I could create a playlist, but manually managing a playlist for podcasts strikes me as stupid when the functionality already existed and worked quite nicely before.

P.S. It turns out that even if you have a playlist and start playback of a podcast from there, it will not play the next podcast (or any other) in that playlist. It just stops playing when it reaches the end of the current podcast. D'oh. πŸ™

Hypercritical, Build and Analyze to End

Dan announced on his blog that both Hypercritical and Build and Analyze would end in a month or so. He recommends that users interested in those shows (I listened to John's and only rarely Marco's) begin listening to The Incomparable and The Crossover (which seems to have begun specifically to address the loss of the first two shows).

I'm curious given The Talk Show's demise on 5by5 ((I still haven't listened to a second of the show on its new host, but the loss of Hypercritical in particular may push me to finally do so)) if perhaps Dan simply isn't making Marco and John enough money for them to want to continue. Perhaps that's why John Gruber left too.

I get how exhausting doing a podcast can do, and at times how annoying it can be, but if you make even a thousand bucks an episode as Marco or John Siracusa, I think that money is tough to say no to for a few hours of work.

Apple’s Profits in Perspective

This piece linked to here says:

  • From October 2011 through September 2012, the combined net profit of Microsoft, Google, eBay, Yahoo, Facebook and Amazon was $34.4 billion. Apple alone made $7 billion more.
  • In the same period, Dell, Asus, Intel, Acer, IBM, Lenovo and HP, i.e. virtually the entire PC industry, made $19.3 billion or less than half of Apple’s profit.

Uhm.

Launch Services Clutter

Multiple Pixelmators SmallWhy does this happen?

As you can see, I'm trying to open an image via the contextual menu. I'd like to open it in Pixelmator, but instead of one choice, I'm given a choice of five.

This makes no sense.

I have one hard disk (the main one) with a copy of Pixelmator. That hard disk is backed up twice to connected drives - once to a Time Machine drive, and again nightly to another drive via SuperDuper for a bootable backup (and quicker recoveries than is available via Time Machine).

Though it keeps removing itself from the Spotlight exclusion list, I keep adding the latter drive to it, and both of the backup drives are excluded from Time Machine (one for obvious reasons - it IS the TM backup drive).

So, short of clearing the entire launch services cache and restarting, why does this keep happening? I don't want to launch a version of Pixelmator off another drive.