Category: Links

Some additional reading January 7th from 11:13 to 13:39:

• Hardware that supports iPhoto ’09’s geotagging – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) – ” was most impressed by the geotagging. If shot with the right hardware, iPhoto recognizes where a given photo was taken, and places it on a Google map. If the photos in an event span several locations, it notices that, also. The built-in maps are very attractive and handy, as you can search your entire library by geographic location.”

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• macosxhints.com – 10.5: How to abort a stuck Time Machine backup – “Once you’ve opened up Terminal (in Applications » Utilities), you can use the killall command to kill the process backupd, which is the Time Machine process. However, the process backupd is owned by root, so you need to run killall with root permissions via sudo: sudo killall backupd Type in you password when prompted, and Time Machine will instantly stop. This is handy if Time Machine is broken and not working. “

Some additional reading January 6th from 09:08 to 18:26:

• Digg This, Huffington Post: What’s $200 Million Now Worth? – Advertising Age – The Media Guy – “Because, unlike Salon, which (naively, old-fashionedly) pays for its content, HuffPo has an ethically questionable content-generation scheme: It doesn’t pay most of its bloggers at all. Worse, it sometimes even lifts content wholesale from other sites that do pay for their own content, as the Chicago Reader’s Whet Moser noted in a few outraged blog posts that briefly made a ripple last month on Jim Romenesko’s media site as well as on Gawker (“Arianna Huffington’s Scuzzy Copying Pisses Off Chicagoans”). In other words, the Huffington Post is sort of the Napster-circa-2000 of content sites in that its business model, more or else, is: Only suckas pay for content, baby! And that’s gotta be worth something, right?”

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• Thomas Tempelmann – Applications – Find Any File – “This is a free program for Mac OS 10.4 and later that lets you search for files on your disks, primarily on HFS formatted ones.

  Contrary to Spotlight, it does not use a database but instead uses the file system driver’s fast search operations.

  This lets you search for file properties such as name, dates, size, etc., but not for file content (use Spotlight for that)!

  Find Any File can find files that Spotlight doesn’t, e.g. those inside bundles and packages and in inside folders that are excluded from Spotlight search (i.e. system files).

  And Find Any File is fast. Not always as fast as Spotlight, but faster than other, similar file search tools you might find for the Mac.”

• Jobs’ Health Message Makes Little Sense, Experts Say | Wired Science from Wired.com – “The third thread is the “straightforward” remedy for his “nutritional problem.” According to Lustig, that conflicts with the rest of Jobs’ statement. “Endocrine problems are not nutritional, and vice versa,” he said. “Hyperthyroidism can cause weight loss. Endocrine deficiency could cause weight loss. But they don’t rob your body of proteins, and the remedies aren’t nutritional.” Neither would nutrition suffice to treat cancer.”

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• If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats: Annals of Crime #56 – “Pittsburgh — With her door key for a weapon, Mrs. Hilda Hess of Pittsburgh strikes the fighting pose with which she whaled the tar out of a young thug who snatched her purse. Mrs. Hess, a former barmaid, chased the robber for several blocks, cornered him in an alley and gave him a going over until he returned her property. He then took to his heels. When he had vanished, Mrs. Hess looked in the purse and found that the sixty-some dollars she had in it had gone with the wind. (1947)”
• Hunting Reverses Natural Section by Killing Off Biggest Animals Altering Evolution : Ecoscraps – “Image: swanksalot on Flickr under a Creative Commons License”

Some additional reading January 4th from 20:28 to 21:12:

• Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – “The Beastie Boys sampled the lyric “I’m going back to New York City I do believe I’ve had enough” for their song, Finger Lickin Good. Bob Dylan requested $2000 for use of the sample, but Mike D managed to barter him down to $700.”

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• Amtrak Police Harassment Of Duane Kerzic For Photography In Pennsylvania Station New York On December 21, 2008 – “Always remember that making photographs is not a terrorist activity. No one was ever harmed by the action of taking a photo, no buildings were ever destroyed by taking photos. There were no photos found in the property of the 9-11 attackers, no photos found in the London Underground attackers, no photos with any of the suicide bombers, no photos for the attackers of the USS Cole, no photos by Timothy McVeigh, Unabomber no photos, 1st WTC attackers no photos, no photos in the Madrid Train attacker”

Some additional reading January 3rd from 21:44 to 23:01:

• detritus.: mrs. o – “But Mrs. O, a blog dedicated to what Michelle Obama’s wearing, makes my heart sing.I don’t know why it makes me so happy, but I’m not going to fight it.”

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• Mac Gmail Notifier Broken? · cavemonkey50.com – There’s been a rash of password thievery, and attempted phishing, so am changing my most important passwords. Gmail required an extra step: namely, deleting my keychain first, or else the Google Notifier only led me to a “Page you requested is invalid” error. Deleting keychain fixed me right up…

A few interesting links for January 1st through January 3rd:

• Doing the Hokey Cokey ‘could be hate crime’ – Telegraph – I always called the Hokey Pokey though “according to the Catholic Church and some Scottish politicians, singing the popular tune that begins with the words “You put your right hand in, your right hand out,” may constitute an act of religious hatred. A spokesman for the leader of the church in Scotland said the song had disturbing origins. Critics claim that Puritans composed the song in the 18th century in an attempt to mock the actions and language of priests leading the Latin mass.”

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• Check out Obama as a restaurant critic :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: 44: Barack Obama – “The popular WTTW-Channel 11 show “Check, Please!” has finally found its hook in a “lost” episode that was taped in August 2001, but never aired after the restaurant review show premiered in October of that year. Obama was just an Illinois state senator when he consented to serve as one of three layman restaurant critics who appeared with then-host Amanda Puck to discuss their favorite restaurant and critique one another’s choices.

  Obama offered up a Hyde Park eatery called Dixie Kitchen”

Some additional reading January 1st from 11:31 to 17:31:

• Calendar Recycling – “John Walkenbach has a good idea. Don’t buy a new one. Recycle an old one:If you think about it, only 14 different calendars exist. January 1 can occur on any of seven days — but some years are leap years and have an additional day… you can use any of the following calendars for a 2009 calendar: 1903, 1914, 1925, 1931, 1942, 1953, 1959, 1970, 1981, 1987, or 1998. By the way, if you start saving calendars in 2009, you will have a complete set of 14 different calendars in 2036.”

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• ThePoliticalCat: TROUBLEMAKERS – “Since no one really knows anything about God,

  those who think they do are just
  troublemakers.

  — Rabia from Basra”

Some additional reading December 31st from 12:58 to 18:02:

• The Parting Glass: Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash – "Cuchulainn was a powerful leader in Irish mythology (click the link for more details). He is the central figure in the "Ulster Cycle" of poems which is roughly the Irish equivalent of the Arthurian legends in England. One of the poems in the cycle is "Serglige Con Culaind & Oenét Emire," or "The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn" "
• Flickr: Discussing Photographer's rights tutorial in Photography is not a crime – "I can't fathom a way of tying trespassing to taking a picture. You might have a camera in your hand, but the act of trespassing is you physically being on the property. You could be taking pictures, or picking boogers, it doesn't matter, it's the physical act of being on the property, regardless of what you're doing.

  Oh, and in most US states, the one asking you to leave must be the property owner, or a authorized representative thereof. And yes, a hired security guard at a mall is considered an authorized representative"

Some additional reading December 28th from 17:15 to 18:23:

• Hullabaloo – Long Run Fantasy – Condi Rice and Laura Bush are insisting that the administration will be vindicated by history for all the wonderful work it has done around the world. Rice, especially, is intent upon making the case that if the world gets better some time in the future, Bush will be given the credit for it. (This isn’t the first time she and Bush have made this stupid comment.)This definition of success would mean that you have to reevaluate Tojo since Japan has since become a prosperous, first world country. After all, if it weren’t for him, the world wouldn’t be where it is today. Hell, where would Western Europe be if it weren’t for that bad man in the mustache — or Eastern Europe if it hadn’t been for Stalin? Hey, even Caligula can be seen to be a hero if you believe that the world is better off today than it was during Roman times.

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• U.S. Health Care Costs Part VI: At What Price Physician Autonomy? – Economix Blog – NYTimes.com – “The wonder is that neither Congress, nor the medical profession, nor private health insurers has so far felt obligated to come to grips with these enormous variations in health spending nor even to evince any curiosity about them.According to the Dartmouth researchers, if physicians with relatively higher cost preferred practice styles could be induced to embrace the preferred practice styles of their equally effective but lower-cost colleagues, overall per-capita Medicare spending probably could be reduced by at least 30 percent without harming patients, and similarly for commercially insured younger Americans. How can a nation that routinely wails over its high cost of health care ignore such important research?”

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• Matthew Yglesias » Physician, Heal Thyself (or at least do it more cheaply) – “including the striking fact that “on average, American patients receive the recommended treatment for their condition only slightly more than 50 percent of the time.” Yikes.
• Repower America – “By making buildings and homes more efficient, ramping up renewable energy generation, constructing a unified national smart grid, and transitioning to clean and affordable plug-in cars, we can address our country’s economic and national security challenges—all while making huge strides to solve the climate crisis.

  Please join with Al Gore and more than two million others calling on our leaders to Repower America with 100% clean electricity within 10 years.”

• Three-dimensional chess – Watching our cats jockey for position. They’d probably excel at Tri-D Chess
  “The original Star Trek prop was assembled using boards from 3-D Checkers and 3-D Tic Tac Toe games available in stores at the time (also visible being played in the original series episodes) and adding futuristic chess pieces. Rules for the game were never invented within the series; in fact, the boards are sometimes not even aligned consistently from one shot to the next within a single episode. The Tri-D chessboard set was made popular by its inclusion in The Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual by Franz Joseph, who invented starting positions for the playing pieces and short additional rules. The complete Standard Rules of this game were originally developed in 1976 by Andrew Bartmess (with approval from Joseph), and he has subsequently expanded and fine-tuned them.”

A few interesting links for December 26th through December 27th:

• Titanium Software – OnyX – "OnyX allows you to verify the Startup Disk and the structure of its System files, run miscellaneous tasks of system maintenance, configure some hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock, Dashboard, Exposé, Safari, Login window and some of Apple's own applications, it deletes caches, removes a certain number of files and folders that may become cumbersome and more.

  It automatically checks updates, verifies the status of the startup disk and the structure of system files at launch, defines with precision the actions, and modifies the appearance of OnyX, increases the window transparency, chooses its own icon and toolbar icons among those available in the Preferences…"

• Thomas Hawk – “had a great time tonight shooting industrial stuff near Long Beach with David Sommars. Unfortunately we ended up being hassled while shooting three times. Including having the Long Beach Harbor police run background checks on us and telling us that we were not allowed to shoot from a perfectly…

A few interesting links for December 19th through December 26th:

• Bugs & Fixes: Delete files to prevent crashes in OS X 10.5.6 | Mac 911 | Macworld – “deletion of the “dynamic loader shared cache” in the /var/db/dyld directory. A corrupt cache here turns out to be one cause of a blue screen crash. “
• The War on Christmas: The Early Years – “During the Reformation, some Puritans condemned Christmas celebration as “trappings of popery” and the “rags of the Beast.” The Roman Catholic Church responded by promoting the festival in a more religiously oriented form. Following the Parliamentarian victory over King Charles I during the English Civil War, England’s Puritan rulers banned Christmas, in 1647. Pro-Christmas rioting broke out in several cities, and for weeks Canterbury was controlled by the rioters, who decorated doorways with holly and shouted royalist slogans. The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 ended the ban, but many clergymen still disapproved of Christmas celebration.”

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• Is Condo Board sabotaging Marina City Landmarking? – “As we’ve written before, one of the world’s finest buildings, Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City, is burdened with one of the worst condo boards, one that has repeatedly expressed contempt for the First Amendment, not to mention basic human intelligence, and deployed its lawyer, former progressive legislator Ellis Levin, to harass anyone who doesn’t buy into their delusions of grandeur.”
• Bundled Up Beautifully | Mrs. O – “On December 5, the temperature in Chicago topped out at 18 degrees. So it is no wonder that this glimpse of Mrs. O that day revealed her sporting a casual but winter-ready look. The occasion was a lunch with two friends and she didn’t have far to go as she left the restaurant Blackbird in the West Loop (located around the corner from Maria Pinto’s boutique) and walked to the car driven by the Secret Service. ”

  Re: my photo of Ms. O at Blackbird that caused a minor kerfluffle

• Matthew Yglesias » The New Moderate – “Third Way is a neat organization — I used to work across the hall from them. And they do a lot of clever messaging stuff that a lot of candidates find very useful. But their domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit. There are a variety of issues that they have nothing whatsoever to say on, and what policy ideas they do have are laughable in comparison to the scale of the problems they allegedly address. “
• BULLS: Sam Smith: Bulls fans want a trade for Christmas… but not yet – Smith must be talking about John McCain here, because even Smith doesn’t think he’s smarter than Obama:
  “Even for NBA GM’s. Look, most aren’t that much smarter than you. Did you watch the presidential debates? Tell me you didn’t sit there going, “Hey, I’m smarter than that guy!””
• JonathanRosenbaum.com – THE STRANGER’S RETURN (1933) – Why isn’t this film on DVD? Criterion Collection?

  “What a pleasurable experience it is to pass directly from a slew of end-of-the-year screeners, most of which I can’t watch to the end, to a 1933 King Vidor opus that still isn’t commercially available on DVD”

• In the meadow, we can pan a snowman – Roger Ebert’s Journal – Ah Mr. Ebert, you have a way with words. From a entire column built upon one-liners cribbed from previous columns:

  “I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny. — Response to Vincent Gallo’s hex to give me colon cancer”

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• Black and White Fine-Tuning in Photoshop CS3 | Layers Magazine – From the print version:
  “A black-and-white photograph is all about the subtle matrix of tonal values that give shape and form to the image. Knowing how to precisely apply modifications to light and shadow is key to fine-tuning a black-and-white photo. In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at some ways to shape and enhance the tonality of a black-and-white image with some quick and simple techniques.”

Some additional reading December 18th from 12:22 to 19:25:

• Butter Holds the Secret to Cookies That Sing – NYTimes.com – Huh. I don’t bake all that often, but good to keep in mind: “The most common mistakes made by home bakers, professionals say, have to do with the care and handling of one ingredient: butter. Creaming butter correctly, keeping butter doughs cold, and starting with fresh, good-tasting butter are vital details that professionals take for granted, and home bakers often miss. …For mixing and creaming, butter should be about 65 degrees: cold to the touch but warm enough to spread. Just three degrees warmer, at 68 degrees, it begins to melt.”
• Bundle up out there – “Annual deaths from extreme cold: 680 Annual deaths from marijuana overdose: 0 Something must be done about this. My God, they let children play in it! And lots of people even own their own freezers. Somebody oughta write a law.”
• 2008 in photographs (part 2 of 3) – The Big Picture – Boston.com – more awesome photojournalism of 2008

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• The year 2008 in photographs (part 1 of 3) – The Big Picture – Boston.com – takes a while to load, so be patient
• Chicago Reader Blogs: Grand Theft Huffpo – “The Huffington Post’s local “aggregation” wing1 2 straight stole our entire Bon Iver Critic’s Choice–they didn’t ask permission (“read the whole article”? that is the whole article, dumbass). Here’s a screen shot (or click the thumbnail), since we’re obviously about to ask them to take it down.”

A few interesting links for December 17th through December 18th:

• Greater Chicago Red Cross News: Hey Drivers, This is Only the First Snow. Get Ready. – Photo by swanskalot.
• Goldman Sachs cuts taxes to one percent by moving profits offshore – Nicely done. “Say you got a ten billion dollar loan to shore up your finances, and you paid your employees $10.9 billion, and you raked in $2.3 billion for the year.

  What would you say you owed in taxes? One percent?

  That’s what you’d pay if you were Goldman Sachs, Inc. The high-flying brokerage — and former home of Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson — has announced it’s paying just $14 million in taxes this year.

  Last year, their tax bill was $6 billion, or 34.1 percent. That represents a year-over-year drop of 33.1 percent.”

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• http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/12/apple_pulls_out_of_mac_expo_bi.html – Having never been to a Macworld Expo, since I don’t do well in crowds, I could really give a shit whether or not Apple Inc goes. Some do. John Welch isn’t one: “But really, why is this a surprise? Let me be perfectly clear here:

  Apple Inc. HATES unmanaged random customer contact.
  If anyone thinks the powers that be at Apple have ever liked the idea that just anyone could walk up to them for 4-5 days and ask inconvenient, (read: “any”) questions of their employees, y’all are smoking crack. Apple does not like that. At all. Without Macworld Conference & Expo, here are the all the avenues that average customers can directly contact Apple: The physical Apple Stores, the online Apple Store, a small handful of public email addresses which all involve the word “feedback”, mailing lists, and the AppleCare support line.”

Some additional reading December 16th from 10:13 to 17:49:

• Office Xmas Party: 1925 | Shorpy Photo Archive – So the office party hasn't really changed much, has it? Creepy dudes, slutty girls (and boys), inebriated bosses, yadda yadda. A hoot, in other words.
• Shoes for Christmas – This morning, the Rude Pundit decided to honor the efforts of Muntader al-Zaidi, the Iraqi shoe-tosser, by taking out a raggedy old pair of sneakers, putting them in a Priority Mail shipping box, helpfully provided by the United States Post Office, and shipping them to President George W. Bush at the White House. He included a note that read, "This is a farewell kiss from the American people, you dog."

  Since throwing objects at the president is generally considered a crime, the Rude Pundit figures sending shoes to Bush is a small, good thing, a gesture of contempt that has context. Sweet Christ, at this point, there should be giant sacks of shoes heading to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC, 20500, like letters to Santa.