I came across a really interesting post by Chris Lewis, titled Let me see your papers, let me see your source, and what started as a reply on his blog, turned into a story I felt was worth a blog post of its own. Here goes:
Message to iPhone devs: pixels are not space
One of the most significant improvements of the recently introduced iPhone 4 over its predecessors is the so called Retina Display. Apple has significantly bumped up the resolution of their pocket-sized cash cow from 320×480 to 960×640 pixels. In all fairness, the two year old screen of the iPhone 3G was starting to look coarse in comparison to the competition, but with a dot pitch of 326 ppi, that new screen is sharp. More pixels doesn’t mean more space though.
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Outliers
Quite a while ago, I heard of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success*. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time; to me, the title suggested that this would probably be some kind of self-help book of the kind that has supposedly already “changed the lives of millions”. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
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A new micheljansen.org
Almost five years ago, I decided it was time to create myself a place to vent my thoughts. I installed Wordpress on my home server and started writing; “Michel’s Exhaust” was born. Quickly after that I registered my own domain “micheljansen.org” and moved my site off-campus. I still used a vanilla Wordpress install, with a free theme called Rin. It was clean, it was beautiful, but eventually everything gets old. It was time for something new.
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Augmented Reality against Aggression
Augmented Reality is a term these days most often associated with people running around perceiving the world through the screens of their mobile phones. That’s not the case in this Dutch campaign against aggression towards public workers though.
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Twente Milieu Afval-iCalender
Forgot to put out the trash again? Twente Milieu collects recycled paper, plastic and biomass once a month, which often leaves the less organised among us with heaps of stuff piling up. To scratch my own itch, I’ve made a simple afval iCalender webapp that scrapes the website of Twente Milieu and turns it into an iCalendar feed to subscribe your iCal, Google Calendar and mobile phones to.
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Making your Mac wake up quietly
If you’re like me, you’re always sweating when you take your MacBook from your bag during a lecture and open it up: “Did I mute the sound before I put it to sleep?”. I’m not really good at predicting when I’ll be using my Mac again, so I tend to forget.
However, the world doesn’t stop when you put your Mac to sleep. With each minute that passes, the probability of new email having arrived or iCal events being due increases. These things all have their own notifications and those more often than not involve sound. Nice when you’re not paying attention; not so nice when you don’t want everyone else’s attention pointed towards you after your MacBook loudly announces to everyone that the class you’re in was due five minutes ago.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could be sure that your Mac always awakes quietly? It’s actually not that hard to do ‘unix style’. All you need is a tool called SleepWatcher, written by Bernhard Baehr and one line of script.
Shh! under the covers.. (cc) warmsunnydays
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Meer over Backchannel etiquette
Een tijdje geleden schreef ik een post naar aanleiding van onvriendelijke tweets op het Mobile Monday backchannel. Vandaag las ik ineen blog post van Danah Boyd dat dit nog altijd een actuele kwestie is. De post van Danah is extra interessant, omdat ze schrijft vanuit haar eigen pijnlijke ervaring als spreker op de Web2.0 Expo, die nog maar eens onderstreept dat er behoefte is aan meer fatsoen onder het Twitterend publiek van conferenties en presentaties.
Danah Boyd at Web2.0 Expo
Safari’s ridiculously easy bookmark shortcuts
I’ve always been an avid user of delicious for my bookmarks. I love the way I can just type away on tags, without having to worry about cataloguing my bookmarks in hierarchical folders. Moreover, my bookmarks are stored online, so as long as there are no Ma.gnolia-like debacles, I can access them from wherever I want. This alone makes me prefer Delicious over any browser’s built-in solution.
Adding the bookmarks, however, has always been somewhat of a hassle. Delicious offers bookmarklets, small snippets of JavaScript you save as bookmark to access them, which when added to the bookmarks bar of your browser, act like “buttons” you can press to bookmark the current page. However, I always hated having to pick up my mouse to click on the bookmarklet, so I ended up trying all kinds of Delicious applications for my Mac, such as DeliciousSafari and Pukka. Some of these apps are pretty expensive for just adding bookmarks, but what’s worse is they tend to be stuffed with unnecessary features to justify the price. All I really wanted was a keyboard shortcut to bookmark a page to delicious. As it turns out, Safari can already do that just fine on its own.
Anything you put in the bookmarks bar, you can access with cmd + the place of the bookmark in the bar (from the left). This means ⌘1 opens the first bookmark, ⌘2 the second and so on. Combine this with bookmarklets and you have keyboard shortcuts for things like adding a delicious bookmark without any third party apps. As you can see, I also use this for other services that provide bookmarklets, such as Evernote.
Redmine Refresh Repository API Plugin
For a project I’m running Redmine, an open source project management webapp, with nice Subversion integration as one of its prime features. It’s a really cool app, which does a good job of showing project activity. Unfortunately it suffers from the minor annoyance that it does not automatically refresh commits when something changes on the repository end. You have to do that manually, or you don’t see the commits. As a heavy user of the Activity feed, I felt this should be fixed.
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