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Trippy.

And yes, I'm posting this under "Technology." 🙂

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. 🙁

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.

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.

Why 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.

For some reason, perhaps I started sitting at my desk at a different angle or something, but lately I've hit the caps lock key accidentally several times when I didn't mean to (when I meant to hit the shift key).

So, finally, I disabled it.

I'm a few days late on that, but I wanted to read and then link to this story about Larry Hagman from Mark Evanier.

I will admit to watching the new Dallas, mostly in the background while I did work, and to having been a little too young to really get into it when I was a kid. I did watch, though, and I'm virtually certain I chose to play the trumpet because it sounded so great in the Dallas theme song.

A bit cleaner too…

And it only took me seven hours! 🙂

Primarily, this will let me use the computer with the windows open because it won't have so much glare.

The full article is here and worth a read.

I remember spending hours making some levels in some first-person shooter games. This looks more fun. 🙂

A funny tale of how one enterprising geek got a license plate that read  . 🙂

I'm just bookmarking this one for later… The Magical Tech Behind Paper For iPad's Color-Mixing Perfection

I wrote quickly about this before, but Mark Jaquith has another take on how to fix the electoral college.

In short, he finds it obnoxious (as I do) that many states and worse the biggest population centers and entire regions are overlooked because they're not swing states, and people know how that state will vote.

California and New York go Democrat. Philadelphia controls Pennsylvania. Texas has tended to go Republican lately. And so politicians campaign in Cleveland, or Charlotte, or wherever people live in West Virginia and Florida.

I like the idea of a six-year term.

I like the idea of instant runoff voting.

I even like the idea of baseline standards.

BTW, don't miss the comments. They're good as well.

Typically, a browser knows best what to do on its own, so stop fixing font smoothing.

CounterNotions has a solid article on Siri.

Really worth the time to read, even if you have to do it in chunks.

I think that for my birthday (March 23, so plenty of notice! :D) I'd like to get a QuadCopter to pair with my GoPro HERO3. Oh the things I can imagine doing with this combination…

Is there some place with this stuff pre-built? Or some place that details the basic options? Maybe even has stuff that doesn't cost a mortgage payment?! 😀

Hmmm. $1799 on Black Friday, normally $2399. I'm not listing that to buy it (Carey), just to remind myself the good ones are pretty expensive and thus this birthday wish will likely go unfulfilled. 😛

P.S. The more I look into all of this, the more I've talked myself out of it. And by typing that, now, I think I'm just about done.