Category: General Tech

Two weeks ago, I wrote about my desire to build a custom desk for my home office. Here’s what my dad and I have built so far.

The top is a solid-core birch door, 6 feet wide and 2 feet and 8 inches deep. It stands 31 inches tall, with legs built using pine. The top will have a quarter-inch thick sheet of glass on it, held in place by poplar trim. We are putting three holes in the back panel and the work surface (including through the glass) for cables to run, and installing a piece of gutter underneath (just inside the back panel) to keep excess cables from hitting the floor.

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Ian Hines:

With the recent Tumblr downtime incident fresh in everyone’s minds a lot of folks have, understandably, been considering moving from Tumblr to WordPress. I’ve made that journey twice and I can tell you that it is possible to move your site from Tumblr to WordPress without any significant front-end changes.

This exhaustive, end-to-end guide is simply brilliant.

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Steve Wozniak, via CNN:

All of a sudden, we’ve lost a lot of control. We can’t turn off our internet; we can’t turn off our smartphones; we can’t turn off our computers. You used to ask a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it’s not God.

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OS X Daily has the answer.

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Tumblr:

While you might feel like you’ve gotten used to seeing errors on Tumblr recently, know that this is absolutely unacceptable to our team, and unacceptable for a platform determined to be the best place in the world for your creative expression.

[…]

We can’t apologize enough, nor can we thank you enough for putting up with these growing pains. We know how impossibly frustrating it is to see your work offline. But please always know that we truly care about your work as much as you do, and we have an incredibly capable team working incredibly hard to take good care of it.

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Ian Hines:

I’m not on Facebook. I used to be, but it stopped adding value. So I quit. And I don’t regret it at all.

I also don’t have cable for my TV. I have a TV, a big one, but I don’t have “TV” the way that most people think of it—cable, with programming and live sports, etc. Why don’t I have cable? For the same reason I don’t have Facebook: it stopped adding value. Or, at least, value sufficient to justify its cost.

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Paul Thurrott:

After 12 years of manually updating my site like a 1990’s throwback, we’ve finally moved the SuperSite for Windows to a modern content management system (CMS). I’m excited by this for obvious reasons, but the real work is still ahead.

[…]

The aging technological infrastructure of this site has always been an issue for me, forcing me to deal with weird issues and manually write HTML code when I’d be better served just writing. This switch will relieve those problems and dramatically so, allowing me to focus on what really matters here. In fact, this is the first article for the site for which I didn’t have to create a custom, hand-coded HTML page. I can see the future already.

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Here’s Woz in an interview with the San Jose Mercury News:

I didn’t design this computer to make a lot of money and start a company. I wanted to accelerate the world advancement in the social revolution. The Apple-1 would be a new way to communicate. A new way for the individual to exercise power.

CNET has posted some videos of the Geek God Steve Wozniak giving a tour at the Computer History Museum.

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Lev Grossman for Time Magazine, on media and the Internet:

So what ever happened to the pirate apocalypse of yesteryear? In the U.S., piracy hasn’t turned out to be quite as bad for content producers as everybody thought. A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office released last April labored mightily to establish a strong link between piracy and lost sales, but the results were inconclusive.

[…]

Which brings us to another important reason the media apocalypse never happened: Steve Jobs. On April 28, 2003, the very day TIME published a grand excursus on the explosive growth of file sharing, Apple unveiled the iTunes Music Store. At the time, it was difficult to see why iTunes would succeed where Snocap, among many others, had failed. Because, again, how do you compete with free?

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Any data that is just on one hard drive is temporary.

I am pretty religious about my backups. At home, my wife and I have a 24-inch iMac that stays backed up to our Time Capsule. To accommodate our ever-growing media library and my collection of Apple take-apart guides and software installers, two years ago, I added a Guardian Maximus box to the iMac. I have a set of 1 TB hard drives that stay mirrored, thanks to the box’s built-in hardware-based RAID–1 system. Connected via FireWire 800, this rig is fast and redundant — just the way I like my drives.

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Reeder for Mac — a desktop version of the poplar iOS Google Reader app — is here, in beta form at least.

The app looks like its mobile counterpart, complete with a services menu and big buttons. It is quick, stable and easy on the eyes, which is wonderful.  However, I’m not certain that Mac apps should be look so much like iOS apps. I guess the Mac App Store and OS X Lion will probably prove me wrong here. Until then, go check it out.

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