January 15, 2008 – 9:31 pm
There are many places where you can listen to recorded books. When considering a potential listening location, a common concern is distraction: the world around you making it hard to follow the world in the book. Last weekend I discovered a complimentary combination: my physical environment augmented the reality of the book.
I listened to the [...]
December 19, 2007 – 9:48 pm
I had an idea for a New Year’s Resolution. This idea came while I was eating one of my favorite Ben & Jerry’s ice creams, Phish Food. It had been half a year since my last B&J fix (a longer-than-customary interval for me, also being a product of Vermont) and I found it less satisfying [...]
December 6, 2007 – 2:15 am
I’ve been nibbling through Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Gödel, Escher, Bach. In Chapter XVII he mentions the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) who had a talent for extremely fast mathematical analysis. This class of mind (including so-called idiot savants) he called lightning calculators. In this passage he discusses the unlikelihood that such minds have [...]
October 28, 2007 – 1:17 pm
OS X Leopard has a fantastic new feature called automated backups. They called it Time Machine and gave it an imaginative cosmic interface but it’s nothing more than a backup service at heart.
Setting up Time Machine was delightfully easy: I started Time Machine and it asked for a location to store backups. I plugged a [...]
October 27, 2007 – 6:42 pm
I can’t make a web clip of a page that requires a login cookie and I can’t submit a form in a web clip. That means I can’t web clip my blog stats (all I see is an inert login form) and I can’t web clip the post publishing form. Now I have to think [...]