What isn’t Apple, audiobooks, or alcohol is probably cats.
Personally tested, compared to other options, and now recommended products and services.
You are being asked to do something and make a difference.
You are asked to do the following:
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.
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!
Rochelle noticed activity (pastry boxes and such) at Cafe du Soleil yesterday, when walking past on her way to Muni. So today I went by around 11am, to see if they might be opening. I saw fresh baguettes in bags, but no people, and the doors were not open.
But after lunch, our contractor went by to have a look, and voila!, the doors are open, and there is bustling activity. I went in, and had a nice chat with one of the owners, and got a beautiful pecan bun.
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”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2005/05/11/FDGC2CKG841.DTL.
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 (2nd snippet):
If a month goes by and Pascal Rigo doesn’t buy something or open a new cafe, I feel like I’m missing something. Well, he’s back at it. Eight months after opening Rigolo, he has bought Movida Lounge at 200 Fillmore St. (at Waller Street) in San Francisco, and will turn it into Le Cafe di Soleil.
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.
Note: These instructions have been superseded by a new version available in the Aldo on Audiobooks section of this site. Please use that version instead of this page.
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. But Rochelle has more time to listen while commuting and at work; she blows through our two books a month.
She recently started going to the library to get audio books there, on CD. The San Francisco Public Library has quite a lot of them, and you can reserve them online. The only downside with the CDs is they cannot be played (directly) on an iPod. Enter the second half of Apple’s one-two combination, iTunes, which makes importing CDs relatively easy, and keeping them organized, syncing them with an iPod, and making custom playlists extremely easy.
The only problem is, it’s optimized for music CDs. It’s taken quite a bit of trial and error — mostly error — to come up with a recipe that works well, and produces audiobook files that are reasonable in size and quality, and as easy to use on our iPods as the books from Audible.com. I’m going to save you some time, and share the recipe.
“Michael Tsai”:http://mjtsai.com/blog/2005/05/02/eudora-cocoa/ brought to my attention that “QUALCOMM is rewriting Eudora”:http://www.eudora.com/techsupport/kb/2654hq.html 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.
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”:http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars, 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.
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”:http://c-command.com/spamsieve/, by far “the best anti-spam email tool I’ve used”:/blog/410, was “updated to version 2.3”:http://mjtsai.com/blog/2005/04/25/spamsieve-23/ 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”:http://daringfireball.net/linked/2005/april#mon-25-spamsieve 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.
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 improvements of a couple of tenths of a percent. 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”:http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/04/07/google_maps_/index.php, written with the new “Google Maps”:http://maps.google.com/ feature, showing satellite photos of the map area, allowing you to zoom in and out using the same controls as the street map version.
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, which shows satellite photos of the map area, and allows you to zoom in and out using the same controls as the street map version.
I’ve been a subscriber to the “Sigalert service”:http://www.sigalert.com/ 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.
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.
Rochelle and I are, shall we say, fond of cocktails. We’ve been known to drink a few, and even make a few for friends and guests. And, we’re always on the lookout for new ones, especially things that are easy to make and serve. This year’s find: Trader Joe’s Organic Strawberry Lemonade.
Rochelle and I are, shall we say, fond of cocktails. We’ve been known to drink a few, and even make a few for friends and guests. And, we’re always on the lookout for new ones, especially things that are easy to make and serve.
The mixer for 2005 is definitely Trader Joe’s Organic Strawberry Lemonade, $3.99, located in the refrigerated juice section in Trader Joe’s. It’s great by itself, but it begs to be mixed with your distilled spirit of choice.
I purchased “Saft”:http://haoli.dnsalias.com/Saft/, a plug-in for the Safari web browser on Mac OS X, a while back, after using the demo version for a couple days. I’ve found a number of features well worth the $12 purchase price. The latest release adds yet another terrific feature.
I purchased Saft, a plug-in for the Safari web browser on Mac OS X, a while back, after using the demo version for a couple days. The two features I used immediately and loved were: