Aldoblog

You are being asked to do something and make a difference.

A while back I took advantage of a special running at Dell, to get one of these 20.1” flat panel LCD displays. It arrived a week later, and I’ve been using it as a second monitor off my laptop since then. The quality of the display is terrific. I dunno about doing color-calibrated print work, but as just extra screen space (which I’ve found I absolutely need to do web development productively), it’s spectacular, and makes the built-in screen on my laptop seem dingy by comparison.

With luck, and a signature from the city, Cafe du Soleil will open tomorrow. I could not be more excited!

GraceAnn Walden is probably our favorite of the SF Chronicle‘s current food writers, and her weekly column keeps up on the comings and goings of San Francisco restaurants, restaurateurs, and chefs. This week’s column had news that literally brought tears to my eyes: Pascal Rigo is opening a place right around the corner from our house.

Rochelle and I have fallen in love with listening to books on our iPods. We’ve signed up for two books a month through Audible.com, and for me, that pace is actually pretty good. Rochelle goes through them faster, though, and recently started going to the SF Public Library to get more books to listen to. Importing them onto an iPod is not terribly intuitive. This post describes what I think is a fairly optimal process, using only iTunes to do the importing.

Michael Tsai brought to my attention that QUALCOMM is rewriting Eudora to update it to the latest Mac OS X technologies, etc. While it is exciting to know that Eudora for Mac OS is still supported by QUALCOMM, and even being modernized, I hope that QUALCOMM is appropriately cautious about making gratuitous UI changes. It may not be pretty, but the interface is highly usable.

John Siracusa has written his usual tour de force review of a major Mac OS X release, this time for Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”. For the technical Mac OS X user, and OS geeks in general, it does not get any better than Siracusa’s reviews.

SpamSieve, by far the best anti-spam email tool I’ve used, was updated to version 2.3 yesterday. The biggest change listed was increased accuracy, due to improvements in the tokenizers and parsers. John Gruber reported that the beta versions were running at 99.9% accuracy for him, which is several tenths of a percent above where I’d peaked.

When you get more than one thousand spams a week, you live for a couple of tenths of a percent improvements. I of course upgraded immediately.

A couple of days ago I saw an eloquent “4,000 word” essay (4 photos) about the impact of clear cutting, written with the new Google Maps feature, showing satellite photos of the map area, allowing you to zoom in and out using the same controls as the street map version.

I’ve been a subscriber to the Sigalert service for a while. It’s a real-time traffic monitoring service that aggregates information from the sensors embedded in highways and major thoroughfares and CHP and CalTrans information about incidents like accidents, and combines it with mapping and routing functions, to give you a very complete picture of just how ugly traffic in your region is.