Crazy how things come together. Birdhouse user and cell phone haiku proprietor Dylan Tweney is an editor for Wired Magazine. He’s also a dad and a contributor to Wired’s Geekdad blog. Wired recently started collaborating with PBS on an interesting TV show called Wired Science. Recent J-School graduate Sasa Woodruff just spent a season as a researcher for Wired Science, helping to select and assemble pieces for the series. Sasa was also Miles’ babysitter last year (being a J-School dad means access to an endless supply of interesting babysitters!).

Thanks to the Geekdad connection, Dylan recently did a segment for Wired Science on building a hovercraft in the comfort of your own living room, with his daughter Clara as helper and co-star. Which means Miles recently got to watch his once-or-twice playmate building a UFO on HDTV.

The connections go still deeper, but I’ll leave it at that. Except to say, “My hovercraft is full of eels“.

Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brow writes a really good blog for NPR: Monitor Mix. And it’s not all music. Loved this quote in I Am Cellphone, Hear Me Roar:

A friend of mine uses the term iHole to refer to people who parade their Apple products around. I don’t have anything to add to that sentence.

Over the past year, we’ve mostly filled a large rolling plastic trash bin with earthquake supplies. First-aid kit, blankets, lots of water, hand-crank radio, emergency rations, etc. The wheels on the bin are so we can drag it along with us if our area is evacuated (we live pretty close to a major fault, on soil subject to liquefaction). We’ve got a few more things to add, but are mostly ready.

Recently a friend of ours asked whether we had a gun in our kit. A gun? A friend of his who lived through post-Katrina said that after a couple of weeks of no public services, people who had supplies but no guns were sorry they didn’t.

As you can guess, guns aren’t my bag. What happens when someone with a gun approaches and asks for our water? Am I supposed to have a gunfight with them? I’m more inclined to give them the damn water and drink from the reservoir left over in our home’s water heater. But it’s hard to imagine what actually living through that kind of Mad Max world would actually be like, and how my thinking might change in that kind of situation.

What about you? Is your disaster kit ready? And does it include firearms?

Bulletin board readers are accustomed to using icons/avatars to represent their identities in online discussions. But because blogs are scattered to the wind across a bazillion servers, this capability is not generally available on weblogs. What is consistent across your participation in multiple blogs is your email address (even though it’s never displayed publicly, it’s usually required for comment posting). Gravatar leverages this consistency by letting you create a (free) account with them. Your avatar then appears automatically when you participate on any Gravatar-enabled blog.

All a blog owner has to do is add a few lines of code to their templates (or install a plugin), and the right avatars show up in the discussion automatically.

Auttomatic (the hippy/corporate entity behind WordPress) has acquired Gravatar, giving the the service the juice it needed to keep performance up. I’ve enabled Gravatar on Birdhouse — set yourself up a free Gravatar account and watch all of your historical posts on this site grow a magic tumor avatar.

Aside: WordPress now powers almost 1% of the web. Don’t tell me it’s just a blogging tool.

After the initial glow of playing with social networking again wore off, I (predictably) reverted to ignoring Facebook. Except that every time someone friends me or begs me to add the app for their pet cause, I get an email ping reminding me that Facebook exists and that I, apparently, have unmet social obligations. Which reminds me that I really need to update my profile so I don’t look like an abandoner. 99% of my Facebook activity over the past month has been relegated to obligatory updating of my “Is” status.

Scot is contemplating Joomla.
Scot is digging the new William Parker disc.
Scot is no longer contemplating Joomla.

and so on. Not much, but it keeps my crackers from getting too stale. In so doing, I’ve been flummoxed that the “is” part is required. If I want my profile to say “Scot digs the new William Parker,” it comes out as “Scot is digs the new William Parker.” Lame. But Machinist says Facebook has dropped the “is” requirement, and that the verb is now free-form. Thank god for small miracles. But did the “is” play an important linguistic/artistic role?

What Flaubert meant was that it is precisely an artform’s constraints — and not the lack of constraints — that juice people’s creativity; the Facebook “is,” no differently from Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, forces people to look for interesting ways to say things.

Nevertheless, the new API lets the user control “is,” not the API. But hold the phone… that’s all lovely, but apparently not yet in play.

Scot is wonders when Van Morrison jumped the shark.

Standing by…

As kids, my brother and I heard plenty of stories about how people dug 30-year-old comics worth thousands of bucks out of their garages, and entertained fantasies that one day our own comics would be worth a mint. Throughout the 70s and early 80s, we dutifully bagged our X-Men, Fantastic Four, Richie Rich, Epic, Mad Magazines and Howard the Ducks, then stashed them in cardboard boxes to “mellow” for a few decades.

A year ago, I finally excavated the collection from mom’s basement and moved them into our own garage, planning to finally see what they were worth. Today, actually got around to hauling them down to an actual comics shop. Though we had a few gems worth upwards of $20, the bulk was of the collection was barely countable, and represented nothing but a PiTa to the store owner, who would have to put a ton of effort into re-bagging, organizing, cataloging, and pricing, only to sit on most of it for god knows how long. And that Howard the Duck #1 I prized so much fetches only $3.75 today. Likewise for all those Mad Magazines — even though some go back to the mid-60s, the market remains glutted.

Was it worth hanging onto them at all? Hardly seems like it. But there’s another factor at work here - there just aren’t as many collectors around as there once were. Fewer comics are being printed, for shrinking audiences. Young kids don’t hop off their bikes on their way home from paper routes to pick up the latest X-Men anymore - they might download them from the internet and read them on-screen. But for most kids, the internet itself has taken the place that comics once filled in our lives.

Being in the store was like living through an episode of the Simpsons. The employees tossed impenetrable inside jokes back and forth: “Avengers #117! We should totally give this to Zach for Christmas! [chuckle chuckle]. And I loved that they referred to comic books with no term other than “books.” In the end, Mr. Comicon offered me $100 for five boxes of “books.” I couldn’t do it. I understand the market forces at work here, but come on… Decided to craigslist the collection and let individuals come and pick it over. Crossing fingers.

One of WordPress’ little-used features is its ability to set a “drip date” - to set a post’s timestamp in the future so that it doesn’t go live on the site until that time comes around. Recently I was working on a site for a client who needed an Events section. For various reasons, I didn’t want to use any of the existing events plugins for WP - I just wanted to override the behavior for future-dated posts so that they’d go live on the site immediately, without waiting.

For the past year or so, I’ve virtually never found a case where anything I wanted to do with WP hadn’t already been solved by an existing plugin or tweak to template logic. But amazingly, I couldn’t find anything to override the default future post behavior. Posted on WP-Hackers about the problem and got a few solutions volunteered within a few hours (there’s nothing like a vibrant open source community). By far the most elegant was this one from the magical Ryan Boren (same guy who planted the semi-secret WordPress t-shirt geocache):

<?php
function setup_future_hook() {
 // Replace native future_post function with replacement
 remove_action('future_post', '_future_post_hook');
 add_action('future_post', 'publish_future_post_now');
}

function publish_future_post_now($id) {
 // Set new post's post_status to "publish" rather than "future."
 wp_publish_post($id);
}

add_action('init', 'setup_future_hook');
?>

Stick this in a php document in your plugins folder (remember not to include any whitespace after the closing php tag!), activate it, and create a post with a future timestamp. The post’s status field in wp_posts will be set to “publish” rather than “future” and it’ll go live on the site immediately.

You can also download this as a ready-to-go plugin.

Ryan’s too busy to host this trivial but super-useful plugin himself, but invited me to. I’ve submitted it to WP-Plugins and am awaiting a response - should be available there as well before long.

I’ve been getting a lot of mileage out Pixelmator - lets me do pretty much everything I’d otherwise do in Photoshop, but with almost no launch time or bloat (the new background gradient on this site was created in Pixelmator). But one thing missing from Pixelmator that I need frequently is the ability to extract the hex value from colors for use in CSS.

Hopefully that ability will be added soon, but while looking around for a solution, came across Waffle’s Hex Color Picker. There are a ton of little hex utils for the Mac, of course, but what’s cool about this one is that it modifies the Mac’s native color picker, adding another pane to deliver the hex value for the current color. Install this little gem and you get hex values available from any Mac app that supports color choosing in any way. Muy elegante.

A student happened across this blog today, and nailed me on it.

“Didn’t you tell us that light text on dark backgrounds was fatiguing to read?”

“Do as I say, not as I do” doesn’t work on 20-somethings.

I knew when I tried that Darkwater thing that it was naughty. But something about the water compelled me. And now a combination of fatigue and public humiliation has compelled me back to Cheap Thrills, with a few mods, including a wider content area. And a rare foray into the red spectrum for the bg.

Feel like my old self again.

My boss titled the subject line of the email he sent this to me in: “Why I never want to be in live TV news.”

Apple to buy 8% of AMD

Just painful to watch.

When base jumping isn’t enough… there’s always the wingsuit:

(Higher-quality version here. Lots more on YouTube).

What strikes me about the wingsuit, once I pry my heart out of my stomach, is its simplicity. With humans trying for millenia to fly like the birds, with the airplane having been with us for more than a century, it seems odd that the wingsuit is so simple, so elemental, and yet took so long to develop. “You need webs, like a bat!” Why wasn’t this invented a thousand years ago? Almost seems like it could have been made with deerskin and twine.

OK, I take it back. Wikipedia:

According to wingsuit lore, between 1930 and 1961, 72 of the 75 original birdmen died trying their wingsuits. Some of these so-called ‘birdmen’, most notably Clem Sohn and Leo Valentin, claimed to have glided for miles and inspired dozens of imitators.

In case you’re wondering, a wingsuit costs around a grand. Great photo gallery.

Part of the fun of exploring the brave new world of HDTV and Series 3 TiVo is figuring out how to get Tivo-recorded shows onto the Mac and preserved on DVD, and to go the other way around, from the Mac to the TiVo (i.e. watching BitTorrent movies in the living room). None of this is built in, exactly, or well-documented. But it’s do-able.

For the First Case, I’ve used TiVo Desktop, which only comes bundled with Toast Titanium 8 (grrr — if you’re going to bundle a network connection on a device, then software to make it work should be included free), then burned to DVD with the awesome VisualHub.

I haven’t yet mastered the art of the Second Case, going from the Mac to the TiVo. Michael Alderete, who was a communications ace at Be back in the day, has written an excellent guide covering the process soup-to-nuts. We hooked up on the topic through a post in the VisualHub forums, and I wound up throwing in a few edits to his doc.

This document describes set-up and processes for downloading videos from the Internet using BitTorrent or other mechanisms, and then transferring them to a TiVo Series 3 high-definition (HD) recorder, for playback on a high-definition TV (HDTV).

Ironically, I haven’t yet gotten the Mac –> TiVo connection working yet myself; TiVo says my “brain” (that’s this Mac’s hostname) is empty. I suspect a firewall issue. Alderete’s directions assume Tiger, not Leopard. The problem is that in Leopard you need to manually poke a firewall hole for the apps you want to be able to communicate with the rest of the world — but Tivo Transfer is a preference pane, not an app, so there’s no clear way to add it (adding the preference pane module to the list of apps hasn’t unblocked the pipes).

Will get this licked eventually. And keep burning DVDs when necessary until then.

Miles is just beginning to read in earnest. Had a classic first reading experience with him last night, working our way through the first few pages of Green Eggs and Ham (couldn’t ask for a more textbook test harness). Interesting to be reminded of how deeply we’ve internalized the arbitrariness of our language, and how profoundly the unintuitive bits strike someone just learning our non-rule rules for the first time.

Capitalizing on the words and spelling patterns he’s learned so far, M wanted to know why “do” isn’t spelled “doo,” why “edge” isn’t spelled “ej” and was pretty peeved about the seemingly random presence of silent “e” (not to mention the silent “l” in “would”).

Numbers always make sense, but languages only make sense when they feel like it.

But why???

How can you explain such a thing to a 5-year-old who barely knows what history means, let alone the migration of cultures and evolution of languages? Those are even harder to explain than the fact that the “b” in “lamb” is slightly less subtle than the “b” in “subtle.”

I do not like them in a boat, I do not like them with a goat. I do not like them, Sam I am.

So we’re ditching English around the house and doing immersion Esperanto instead. And we’re switching our keyboards to Dvorak. OK, that’s a joke, but this is serious: Miles’ school teaches only the metric system, from kindergarten on. Admirable, or not so much?

Using Leopard for a couple of weeks now - a few more scattered impressions here. Haven’t had time to explore all the nooks and crannies. I spend 95% of my time in Mail.app, TextMate, and FireFox/Safari. Haven’t even launched Time Machine - need to clear a partition on the NAS, and even then, not sure TM is the way to go - we’re pretty happy with SuperDuper for backup, and its images are bootable/restorable, which is something I wouldn’t be eager to give up.

No accident that the Ars review spends the first few pages on UI annoyances. Nice finally to have the look and feel consistent across all apps, but the semi-transparent menu bar is a UI disaster if you use a background with mottled textures, like “stones.” Knew it wouldn’t be long before some kind of hack came out to restore the opacity. Leo ColorBar to the rescue - not only gets rid of transparency, but also lets you tint the menu any color, which I’m liking:

Ditto for the Dock: I never asked for a mirror. And replacing black “running app” triangles with little glow lights? Cute, but I was tired of them in a couple of days. All gratuitous eye candy. TigerDock lets you return the Dock to something closely resembling… the Tiger Dock. Dock Delight gets your triangles back.

The one thing I thought I missed the most from BeOS days was having multiple workspaces - I used to keep email and browser on one virtual desktop, photo and video apps in another, etc. Spaces was the single Leopard feature I was looking forward to the most. Somehow, in BeOS, the workspaces concept just worked. The first thing I noticed about Leopard’s Spaces was that, unlike in BeOS, there’s no way to assign different wallpaper or background colors to different desktops - they all look the same. Important visual cue, missing. And BeOS also let you run workspaces at different resolutions, which was a great way to test web designs. Not in Leopard.

But I soon realized that somehow, in the intervening years, the perceived need for multiple workspaces had gone away. Between Expose’, the Dock, Cmd-Tab, utils like QuickSilver, and showing/hiding apps, the Mac offers so many ways to switch apps effectively while keeping the desktop clean that the need was effectively gone. After using them for a few days, I realized that all Spaces was getting me was an additional animation when switching apps. I turned Spaces off.

Guess I’m giving the impression of not liking Leopard - but that’s not true. Just getting the annoyances out of the way. Lots to say (mostly good) about changes to Mail.app, iCal, and other features… will save those for another day.

Interesting video produced by the Introduction to Cultural Anthropology class (Spring 2007) at Kansas State:

Speaks for itself. More at mediatedcultures.net.

See also: 60 Minutes‘ report on the Millenial generation - an eye opener.

Veteran’s day… us gubmint employees got the day off. Felt more poignant than usual since Amy and I have been working our way through The War… slowly. Painful and fascinating to watch, learning so much.

Hung a 70-lb. TV on a 50-lb. wall-bracket today, finally eliminating the hideous shiny plastic stand it came on and getting it 12″ farther back from the couch. For a weight like this, hitting the studs was of paramount importance, couldn’t risk missing. Unfortunately, thick lathe walls and multiple repair jobs over time* resulted in getting lots of false readings from the electronic stud finder. For a while there it seemed like chaos, and I was beggining to consider fishing for it, though I didn’t relish the thought of having to patch it up later.

Each time I got a reading for the edge of a stud, I made a mark on the wall. After a while, I had about 40 tiny Xs dotting the LR wall, and noticed a pattern starting to emerge. While no single mark was reliable, in the aggregate I was starting to see implied vertical lines on either side of a 2″ space.

This got me thinking… when placing a geocache, it’s really important to publish accurate coordinates. But marking a single waypoint is inaccurate by definition, since the satellites and the earth are constantly shifting in relation to one another. The first cache we placed, I did the “bee” dance, walking out 30′ and returning repeatedly, marking the spot again and again, then finally plunking down a waypoint in the middle of the cluster to represent the average reading. That worked OK, but later discovered there was an “average waypoint” feature built into the GPSr - set it down in one spot and let the earth move while it takes a reading every few seconds. Let it do that for 200 or so readings, hit Stop, and you get a dynamite average. Conclusion: The world needs an electronic stud finder that does automatic averaging. Just drag the finder randomly around on the wall for a few minutes and let it report well-averaged stud edges.

Aside: Got my stitches out today - hand’s doing well, but will probably have a nice Frankenstein jag in it for life. At least it’s fully mobile again.

* Have I mentioned that when doing wall repair recently (earthquake cracks), I discovered that the living room had once been painted top to bottom with gold glitter paint? I love trying to imagine what the rest of the room must have looked like at whatever point in history that might have been.

Talking with a friend tonight, and with another friend the night before, about how life has become a blur of commitments, kids’ birthdays, workload, sleeplessness. Then, almost like a perfect case-in-point, our babysitter showed up while we were in the middle of serving dinner to guests - we had arranged for a date night to get out and relax, then completely spaced it. Both of us. (The babysitter joined us for dessert and it was all good, but sheesh). We’re all ridiculously over-extended, over-committed, over-saturated, brains turning to … not quite mush, but something closely resembling it.

I sometimes feel like I can make things better, keep shreds of meaning afloat, by browsing RSS feeds in the margins, scanning a few sites for news of the weird and wonderful, blogging a bit. But ultimately, all those little tidbits amount to nothing, and life is no less blurry. In fact, it’s all just more noise, more crazy multitasking, and the extra information just contributes to the blur. We try to use software and organization techniques to bring order to the chaos, but in the end we’re just trying to tame the noise rather than making it go away.

Lately I’ve had the feeling that what I need is to just make a lot of my inputs go away, and to spend some time reading books, having conversations that last more than a minute. More than that, I find myself wanting to be gathering chicken eggs from a henhouse, shoveling goat shit… When I was a boy, we lived for a couple of years on a very small farm, and my brother and I drank nothing but goat milk - sometimes directly from the goats’ teats, warm and hairy. We raised a pig, then slaughtered and butchered it ourselves. I’ve never taken meat for granted from that point on. My parents were trying to create a real environment for us, and to some extent I think the message got through. And yet I’ve allowed my life to become disconnected from dirt. Something in me wants to make sure that Miles can suckle from goat teats too.

The more noise that gets through, the more drowned I feel, the more I find myself wanting to reconnect to something elemental and permanent and meaningful. And yet I’m so embroiled in this digital world that I can’t see my way clear to enjoying a simple Sunday without tending to everyone else’s needs… how many years has it been since I’ve read the Sunday paper, or been able to read more than one or two books a year? Looking in this particular mirror makes me feel like something is desperately wrong.

Right now I’m longing to hear the clang of goat bells outside my bedroom window, to know I’ll be heading out to gather breakfast from the chicken coop in a few hours. But I can’t see how to get there from here. How do you re-organize a life that dramatically?

Boston Globe’s Joshua Glenn:

The Complete Dream of The Rarebit Fiend is a gorgeous, exhaustive, self-published collection of Winsor McCay’s sophisticated, literally fantastic newspaper comic strip (1904-11). It’s edited by independent scholar Ulrich Merkl, available only from Merkl’s website.

Glenn’s audio slideshow for the Globe “demonstrates the influence of McCay’s imagination and sense of humor on five films in particular: the 1930 surrealist classic “L’Age d’Or,” “King Kong,” “Dumbo,” “Mary Poppins,” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” ”

This is the same Winsor McCay who was the author of Little Nemo in Slumberland - the incredible early-century comic that ran in the Sunday papers when our grandparents were young. I bought a large-format reprint of those comics for Amy a couple of years ago, and it continues to inspire (though its ridiculous size defies its being filed in any bookshelf known to man).

Remember why you’re here. Unknown surfer on monster wave in unknown location, about as close to the immensity and awe of naked existence as one can physically be.

Also awesome: “In the Brazilian state of Amapa, on the full moon closest to the March equinox,” a set of waves form twice a day that ripple up through the Amazon jungle, providing surfers the opportunity to experience the longest rides of their lives - up to half an hour long.

Aside: Photography and film used to signal to us “truth,” while obvious animation signaled fiction. But while watching surf clips on YouTube with Miles this evening, he kept asking “Daddy, is that real?” Already, he’s so accustomed to photo-realistic special effects and the blending of live film with rendered characters that he’s utterly unsure what’s real and what’s not. Trying to explain the truthiness of a show like Prehistoric Park, which is scientifically accurate in every way and yet totally fictional, I never feel sure whether he’s making the distinctions clearly in his mind or not.

For the Boston Globe, Hermenaut’s Josh Glenn got Boing-Boing’s Mark Fraunfelder to decode some of the icons that frequently appear on the world’s most popular blog. Hey, any video stream that can display the face of J.R. Bob Dobbs without going to snow is champ in my book. Hmmm… would love to hear Dawkins or Hitchens comment on the Church of the Subgenius sometime.

This week at Stuck Between Stations, Roger surveys the history of bad urban planning… with a playlist. Each dutifully dissected example of urban planning gone horribly wrong is accompanied by its own soundtrack. The video of a pair of Norwegian youths lip-sync’ing The Pretenders’ “My City Was Gone” (the same song that “unintentionally made Rush Limbaugh an animal rights activist”) is worth the price of admission alone.

By the grin on my face, you’d never guess I just got 14 sparkling new stitches in my right hand.

Headed out for Crockett Hills Regional Park with Miles on a gorgeous November morning - felt like late spring, amazing day. Halfway through the day, arrived at a cache under a giant oak … which we just couldn’t nail. Knew it was a tiny camouflaged micro, but it wasn’t about to give itself up. The clue was “Oak hymenoptera,” which of course was all Latin to me, so called Amy for a lifeline. She described a fungal growth related somehow to hornets or wasps. OK, the tree had its share of tumors and testicular outgrowths, and I searched them all while M ate cashews and an apple from his perch in the tree. But this one just wasn’t willing to be found.

A bit bummed, we moved on. Had intended to do a big loop around the park, but suddenly found ourselves at trail’s end. Realized we’d have to cross a road and hop a fence to continue our circuit - either that or hike two miles back the way we came and miss caching half the park, so went for it. Lifted Miles easily over the barbed-wire fence, then went to get myself over. OK, know this: I like adventure, and I’m not what you’d call “risk averse,” but I don’t think I do dumb things at the expense of safety. Studied the situation carefully to make sure there were no alternative crossings, then carefully got my feet into position on the top rung of the fence. Intended to sort of do a light vault over and spin down to the other side (this was only a 5-foot fence).

(more…)

Diving into Leopard over the past few days… there’s so much to discover, lurking just below the surface. Kind of overwhelmed. After getting over initial dislike of the menu bar and Dock “improvements,” it’s going to take a while to digest all the hidden or semi-hidden functional changes. Some are obvious, others, not so much.

Tonight, came across an upcoming event in Mail.app, which I wanted to add to iCal. When I went to select the relevant words, a couple lines of plain text grew a magical “more” arrow, and offered to send the event straight to iCal for me. So slick and well thought-out. This is the kind of touch that made Apple Apple. Love it.

Lots more Leopard thoughts TK.