Category Archives: Computers

Miscellaneous NON-Political Odds And Ends

Posted on by LtL

I’ve been an a political kick the last couple of weeks what with all the convention folderol and elephant dung-slinging that’s been going on. But there are other parts to my life . . . like being a geek. Here’s my current desktop arrangement:

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(GeekTool is showing my current iTunes song, the background is “Surreal wallpaper 2″ by ltripley, and my dock customization came from Superdock site.)

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I’m doing a lot of reading on my iPhone these days, as it has replaced my old Toshiba e755 (which gave up the ghost about a month before leaving NYC. I’ve been using two programs for this. Stanza and eReader.


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(Stanza)

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(eReader)

Now, I know that some people can’t imagine reading books on a screen, much less a small screen like an iPhone, but I have gotten used to it and while I will probably buy the actual physical book of Anathem, for my “light” reading, the screen has become almost transparent to me and I can easily find myself engrossed in the book itself. eReader is a commercial site, although they will allow you to upload content to your bookshelf on their site and then sync that with your iPhone, while Stanza works with a desktop program to convert a large number of file types and then do a wireless sync over a wi-fi network. Stanza is the more flexible of the two, especially if you have a library of ebooks in different formats, but if you want to do right by authors and pay for your ebooks–although with the recognition that drm is involved–eReader has a large selection and their iPhone reader is top notch.

Both programs are free.

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500 Words for 50 Days Update:

I’m 20 days into this challenge and I have missed my 500 mark twice: once I didn’t quite make 500 words and the other time I didn’t write anything. That was a day after major insomnia and I hadn’t slept until after 6 am and the whole day moved like thick molasses for me. The good news is that I’m regularly exceeding my word count.

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This is my new homepage for my browser.

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The Clogs are one of my new, most favorite bands (along with the Rachel’s).


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Oh, and I’m moving back to Rhode Island in a couple of weeks.

Steampunk Porn

Posted on by LtL

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This is one of the more gorgeous examples of steampunk mods I’ve come across. I adore my Macbook Pro, but stuff like this is beautiful on a whole other level. If I were to go into graduate school, analytic, pretentious intellectual mode, I would write about how steampunk taps into people’s desire to have a more tactile experience with the world around them as we have become a culture so tightly bound within a visual screen culture (perhaps why the tactile swipe and hands on features of the iPhone appeal?), as well as being a reaction against the plastic, throw-away culture we’ve become. Craftsmanship on this level offers value beyond use value and steadfastly proves the value of the unique. Where most items, in the age of duplication, have lost their “aura,” Steampunk culture and mods like this insist on a singular and material nature this says, “Look at me, I am ART motherfucker!”

But maybe I should just say that these are beautiful and very cool and very, very dandy . . . jim-dandy even!

Link (via TUAW)