Dumbtastic

The Gospel According to Prince

Prince spreads the Good News in the New Yorker:

When asked about his perspective on social issues—gay marriage, abortion—Prince tapped his Bible and said, “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, ‘Enough.’ ”

Prince, Jehovah Witness

Blog Client Blues

I spent part of the weekend playing around with three OS X blog clients: Ecto, MarsEdit, and Blogo. None are insanely great.

I want a blog client because I'm lazy; dealing with an online interface is never as easy as a well made desktop application. My criteria for a good blog client are:

• Format text, links, and images without having to write html, but still have the option for trickier scenarios.
• Drag or paste images into a post, crop and format it (think iphoto), and upload it with a button press. If the image is a tiff, it would be nice to have it converted into something less exotic (OS X's clipboard captures images as tiffs).
• Provide the kind of shortcuts that a browser interface can't offer (e.g., pasting a link over a highlighted word and converting the word to a link).

Ecto technically does all of this (minus the tiff bit), but uploads images to flickr and then links to them there. Google seems to want people to use Picsia for blogger images and I'm not clear on why ecto doesn't do this. Ecto's solution is inelegant and clogs flickr with junk. Also, ecto posts had messed up line breaks, but this may be a limitation of blogger's external API.

I want to love MarsEdit because of the simple, well-designed UI, but the editor is strictly html. It's media manager uploads blogger images to Picsia, and integrates with flickr, but pictures need to be cropped externally.

And then there is Blogo. Hopes were high at the start. The UI is thoughtful, and the editor seems very capable, if a little non-standard. But the thing crashed when I hit publish, trashing the post. Bye bye blogo.

I realize the clients are designed to work with many blogging platforms and can't be all things to all users. But it's not as if blogger is exotic and the missing features are corner cases. None of them just work.

For now I'm sticking with the web interface.

Corkboard!

I've been looking for a utility that would save everything copied into clipboard instead of constantly overwriting the last item copied or cut. I played with iClip a few years ago and didn't think it was worth the money, but tried it again and again decided it's not wort the money ($29).

Then I found Corkboard, a little $12.99 app that, like iClip, saves clipboard items in a maybe-overly-cute list:


It further allows you to pull items out of the list and stick them on a board that looks like cork if cork were translucent. The board is superimposed over the screen like Dashboard. Double clicking an item stuck to the board sets it as the first item in the clipboard (i.e. the item paste would insert).


I'm not explaining it very well but if you care you should download the demo. For me, the crux is I can command-c URLs and images that I may want to a blog about, then before writing the post, pull anything I want to use onto the board and paste it in as I need it.

The app has some rough spots. The clipboard works fine for images, but text is hard to read. And getting to the board, double clicking an item, getting back to an editor, and pasting is too many steps. Having items available on the normal display, instead of the Dashboardy overlay, would help a lot.

The demo doesn't enable the clipboard history feature, which hides an important piece of functionality, and app only runs on leopard 10.5.5 or later.

Fix for Firefox Dumping Files to the Desktop on OS X

I love firefox 3 or, more specifically, I love its add-ons, AdBlock Plus, Sage Too, foxmarks, and a few other. IMO the browser itself isn't as clean as Safari and has a few annoyances. Number one on this list is that it dumps any file opened with a third party application on the desktop. This includes PDFs and anything that is uncompressed or unpackaged, e.g. zip files. Downloads go to wherever they are set in preferences, but transient files end up on the desktop.

For some reason this really bugged me. Yesterday I decided to find a fix for the problem, unfortunately googling anything including firefox, desktop, downloads, file, directory, and desktop finds a bazillion pages that are all fairly useless. After too long I began going through bugs on the mozilla site and came up with bug 312292 with lots of mac people complaining and a few mozilla people pleading with them to use the vote system and posting etiquette guidelines. The the bug has been open for three years, so I can understand why the guidelines may not have been consulted.

Anyway, the easiest way to fix it is, strangely, download camino and set its download directory to the place you want temporary files to end up. This works because firefox and camino use a now-deprecated safari setting as the place to expand temp files, which is dumb. The bug has all the details if you care.

New Desktop Icons!

I just received my shiny (literally) new MacBook Pro and changed my desktop volume icons to match the glossy black screen with a cool little utility called LiteIcon and great looking set of icons.

Fix for MarsEdit Image Upload Troubles with Blogger

I'm trying out MarsEdit and had some trouble uploading an image through the media manager. On my initial attempt I received the error message:

...the server reported an error. No such user.

It turns out one needs to create a Picasa account before images can be uploaded via MarsEdit Logging in to pisca with my google id fixed it.

Update

I've also been trying out ecto and sadly it cannot upload to picasa at all, instead ecto uses flickr in a hacky way to get images into bloger posts.

Pic of the Day

via here via here.

Art Show

If you live in or around Seattle, come check out my (wildly and diversely talented) friend Curtis Bathurst's' paintings at Gallery 070 through November 29th. The details:

Gallery 070
Thursday — Saturday
11am — 6pm

17633 Vashon Highway SW
Vashon Island,
Washington 98070
(Central Downtown Vashon)

I meant to post this before the opening but I forgot to hit publish, which makes me a douchebag.

How to Let Everyone know You Have Been Labeled a Douchebag

A guy named Michael Minelli is suing Simon & Schuster for publishing a book, Hot Chicks with Douchebags, which labels him a douchebag. He seem not to be the artist that owns the name on google and who crafted not by everybody:



From the book:

"[His] popped-collar, spikey-haired presence was so far beyond regular douche, so far beyond uberdouche, he could spontaneously create a new element on the periodic tables--Douche Nine."

Well the book is obviously hilarious, but Douche Nine? Maybe Douchanite (assuming Mr. Minelli is a douchebag, which has not been established). Also nine of the periodic table is taken by fluorine, unless 9 is the atomic weight, in which case it would be the only stable isotope of beryllium. This entry is obviously hilarious, too.

Oddly, the author has also been sued by three of the so called hot chicks, two pictured below:


The women claim to have been force into therapy by their inclusion the book alleging their hotness.

Creepy Dog

Messing with Illustrator

My friend Ben, who is much better at this sort of thing than I am, says it looks like 80's mall art and I (reluctantly) have to agree.