A couple of years ago (whoa now, three and a half years ago?!) I commented on using the TextMate Journal Bundle to keep a snippets log. I still use that same snippets file for some references and a handful of things that don’t quite fit in 1password.

When 2010 rolled around, I started up a new journal file to use for a little bit more writing, and quickly found that I wanted to mix content within that file — specifically, I wanted to add tasks and treat them more functionally than straight markdown list items. Henrik Nyh’s TextMate Tasks bundle handles to-do lists quite well, so I cobbled together a combination of the two bundles. A screenshot of some of these integrated journal+tasks lists is below:

Combined, I get the nice markdown-compatible writing of the journal bundle, plus its keywords, search, and folding capability, along with the nested list feature of Tasks.

Use the journal bundle’s dts and dtsp tab triggers to start new entries complete with date stamps (and clipboard contents in the case of dtsp). You can write text into any entry, and intersperse lists at any point by starting a line with - (indent with one or more spaces to create sub-lists; Tasks will love it). Toggle list items to complete with cmd-D, and cmd-E will remove expired items.

I like just being able to put lists into markdown-enabled writing, but there’s a nice Getting Things Done application here, as well: Since the folding in the journal bundle is so easy, you can make @context entries, fill them with actions, and fold them to get out-of-scope contexts out of the way. Drop the name of the scope into a keyword, and the Find in Bundle command will produce a nice list of the first entry in a given context that matches a search. It’s simple but workable for GTD, if you’re into that sort of thing.

A variation that’s even more direct GTD-style tasking is to use @context tags anywhere in your entries and then employing the “find tasks” command to display only the desired matches. Use either or both find commands to fit your style and workflow!

Note that the Tasks bundle is inspired by the very good TaskPaper app. If you’re interesting in something a bit more full-on for lists (and GTD) that also has a bunch of extensions and related projects, do check it out. (Since TaskPaper works with text, you can even load files from Tasks+Journal or Tasks right into it and maintain some (but not all) functionality. I’ve done a little bit of further tweaking to maintain that compatibility in my bundle, like change Henrik’s check-mark back to the “@done” syntax that TaskPaper users (and update the bundle’s commands accordingly), which lets me switch back and forth pretty smoothly.

The JournalTasks bundle is available at github.

The Pentax K-7, Pentax’s current flagship DSLR, is on big sale today at Amazon:

In-body shake reduction (full shake reduction on ancient lenses!), 720p movie mode, 5 frames per second, and dust, moisture and weather resistant case. This is the first time I’ve seen the camera for under about $1200, so it’s significant savings. Both body-only and kit models are available. I just might pick one up. (And so might you.)

Link: TEDTalks as of 10.26.09

A google docs spreadsheet of hundreds of TED talks

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• This link is dated Sunday February 14, 2010 with keywords ted ted talks

Link: The Future of Reading: iPad: Apple Upsets The eBook Apple-cart...

"The trouble with the Kindle is that for all its vaunted modernity, it’s really a backward-looking device. So is the eInk technology at its heart. Both are aimed at creating an experience close to paper. But that’s not the Future of Reading."

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• This link is dated Sunday February 14, 2010 with keywords amazon apple books ebooks ipad kindle

Link: Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal, Department by Department

A slick drillable treemap of the 2011 budget.

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• This link is dated Monday February 1, 2010 with keywords data treemaps visualization

A few weeks back I wrote a bit about our new supra-digital entertainment nexus station, also known as The Blu-Raya Playa. After some more time basking in its HDMI greatness, I have a few more reflections that seem, in natural blog law, to require public consideration.

First, a disclaimer: The audio portion of our “home theater,” such as it is, consists of an eight year-old Sherwood receiver that I still maintain is an extraordinarily good buy for 2002, what with its DTS and coax and optical audio inputs and 5.1 downmixing and full LRF support. It’s connected to the bookshelf speakers that I bought in 1994 to take to college, so when I say that the audio from the Serenity blu-ray is totally sweet, you should take my word for it, because I’m not one of those nutjobs who pays $800 for neutrally-balanced balsawood volume knobs.

Right, with that out of the way, the Sony N460 remains a very satisfying little piece of equipment, but I do have a few thoughts about the whole “online digital library” thing.

First, a better remote would be nice. This one’s a little lightweight in heft. Also, for a device that can stream internet music services, a RF remote would be slick — no line-of-sight requirement to make selections. In the dare-to-dream category would be a smart remote with a display to control services like last.fm or pandora from the kitchen. Oooh, iPhone app. Ooooh, iPad app, yes.

Second, every video service is walled off from the rest. Online video is organized by service, not content or category or keyword. I want to aggregate it all up into folders or buckets of some kind. I’d settle for getting this for Netflix only (though being able to roll-up rentals or purchases from Amazon on Demand, too, would be way cool). The current display is just a tile of little tiny cover displays — scrolling through brings up a larger display of title. How excellent it would be to be able to organize all those little pictures of DVD covers, into TV and sci-fi and “serious melodrama” and “re-runs of The Shield.”

Here’s why categorization matters so much: I find I’m really making a library out of the Netflix instant queue, dropping into it movies I’ve been before, movies I’ve heard about, movies I might watch someday, and even documentaries. Previously, the Netflix Instant queue was a list of things tagged, essentially, “I want to watch this.” But having all that material in a device permanently connected to the TV changes that dramatically. It’s not a queue so much as a “I love this or I think it’s cool or I remember watching it in college or I might watch this one day” list. And therefore it’s not a list; it’s a library, and that library needs organizing. And all that stuff? It needs organizing.

The digital mega-library needs organizing, one way or another. Netflix could send category information to these devices, for example, or could allow users to attach keywords; devices could do anything with this information: display tag clouds or let users navigate the categories of video they’ve dropped into the queue, or build sparklines of keyword frequencies or … well, you get it. I think Netflix must ultimately be headed for this kind of system, but its usability will depend on device-level implementation.

[ update: Boxee may present a partial solution here, as the new version claims to be able to better organize material across services. Not having tried it out for quite a while, I downloaded the current release and gave it a go. I do have to say that it’s really slick, and must faster than the prior version I had used for a while. And there is some hint of cross-service integration: Searching for Chuck for example reveals streams from NBC.com and from Hulu; but searching for Doctor Who, which is represented by half a dozen entries in my instant Netflix queue, turns up nothing, so the integration is at best still only partial. But Boxee does have the most complete overall set of services, so the upcoming Boxee box is most definitely worth watching as an alternative to dedicating a PC to the TV. ]

And the day I can get to all the stuff I’ve queued, rented, and/or bought — via keyword, or actor, or ranking, or genre — without having to back out three menus and find another service? That will be Unification Day, and it will rock. Apple TV, I’m looking at you, though if Sony could do this with some sweet firmware updates to the box we already own, well I’d seriously consider a Vaio. Cross my heart.

Link: threadsy

A social network aggregator with some potential

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• This link is dated Friday January 22, 2010 with keywords email facebook networks tools twitter

Several years ago I stumbled over the Netflix “local favorites” list and had a good time exploring it. Well, the New York Times has gone and made a really cool presentation of that data, for 2009, for a dozen U.S. cities. Check it out. Good stuff.

Link: RaopX - stream any audio to Airport Express

A free alternative to the very good Airfoil

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• This link is dated Saturday January 9, 2010 with keywords mac music os x

Link: Thinklinkr - real-time collaborative web-based outliner

with a really ell-done UI, this could be a nice addition to a toolbox

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• This link is dated Sunday January 3, 2010 with keywords organization outline outliner tools

Just after Christmas, our DirecTV receiver unceremoniously gave up the ghost. I had been looking into alternatives, and wasn’t encouraged by the lack of incentives for us to stay with DirecTV: In order to upgrade to a DVR, we’d have to pay $200 up front for the new unit (and still wouldn’t own it, as I understand), plus the additional monthly fee. By comparison, a comparable package with Dish Network was substantially less expensive, and they even offer an option to opt out of the 24-month contract — which is still cheaper than our existing DirecTV package.

But that’s not actually my point. My point is that when the first receiver broke, DirecTV promised to send us another one right away, but it would still take several days. And, quite honestly, we were bored now. So we gave ourselves a late Christmas gift: The Sony N460 Network Blu-Ray player (amazon link). Very briefly: it changes everything.

Devices like the Roku have been offered this capability for a while, of course [expanding from initially streaming Netflix, to Amazon on Demand and music via Pandora], and we’ve connected the MacBook video to the TV once in a while for Hulu or a Netflix stream. And more recently there’s a whole crop of blu-ray players that are internet-enabled, with varying service connectivity. Actually having the networked device connected directly to the TV is new to us, and the difference is stunning. I underestimated by a massive degree just how cool and convenient it is to push a button and have a library of streaming content available without screwing around with video cables. The N460 supports Netflix, Amazon Video on Demand, Youtube, and a small grundle of additional services, in addition to NPR streaming radio and slacker radio.

Netflix streaming — arguably the headline app — is excellent. Items in your instant queue are displayed in tiled icons on the screen, and it’s a serviceable presentation, though I’d prefer the coverflow-style presentation that Roku uses; the tiles are a little hard to read, and the lack of ability to organize a very large queue might eventually become a problem. Once a video is selected, the streaming starts up quickly and you just go to town (we connected the N460 directly to our Airport Extreme via ethernet cable). Browsing YouTube also works very well (and looks surprisingly good in fullscreen, too), and Amazon on Demand is simply sweet: We rented Star Trek for $3 and got Hi-Def streaming with digital sound. As Doctor Egon Spengler best put it, yes, have some. All of those singularly are super-cool, but as a package it means a new digital on-demand library. I’m still getting a handle on just how big that is for home video.

It’s big.

Oh, yeah, it plays blu-ray discs, too. That’s cool.

Link: southwestern pulled brisket | smitten kitchen

Looks great.

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• This link is dated Saturday January 2, 2010 with keywords brisket food recipes

Following in the modest two-year tradition I’ve established (see 2007 and 2008 posts), here is my 2009 photo data from my Lightroom catalog!

[ quick howto: Lightroom 1 & 2 (and 3) databases are in sqlite3 format, which means that freely-available tools can extract data from them. I use sqlite3, some shell scripting, and R (and occasionally excel) to produce summaries of that data. Why? Data offers some insight into the kinds of photos I take. Mostly, though, it’s fun. I’d be happy to expand on the actual code that goes into these plots, if there’s interest. ]

Below is a set of plots that summarize some of this year’s data. Click through to flickr to see the larger version.

What’s interesting this year? Well, crop ratios looked pretty similar to last year, so this year, for the first time (suggested in a post by Keitha, whose photos I admire tremendously, and whose Pentax lens set I envy with the fire of a million anti-glare-coated nine-aperture-bladed all-metal suns) I pulled out some information about aperture for each of the prime lenses that I shoot with. You can see these four frequency plots (for each of the Pentax DA 70mm F2.4 ltd, FA 50mm F1.4, FA 35mm F2.0 and DA 21mm F3.2 ltd lenses) in the left hand column of the image. Right off the bat you can see that I shot a lot with the FA 35mm this year (which is confirmed by the “overall lens use” plot on the right column). In fact, I took that lens along as my sole lens on a few long weekend trips to Ventura, CA, and the San Juan Islands, and really loved its performance. It does great at large apertures, but I also used it a lot for street shooting at f/8 and smaller apertures.

Runner-up in frequency this year is the FA 50mm F/1.4, which ordinarily I would say is my favorite lens (and it very much still is; it just wasn’t as convenient a focal length to take as my only lens on those vacations). Its sweet spot [where it’s sharpest but still has a nice narrow depth of field] is about F/4, which is where I primarily use it.

Neither the DA 70mm F/2.4 or the DA 21mm F/3.2 got as much use this year, but I really love some of the photos I took with those lenses. In fact, I carried these two lenses specifically for their light weight and trim size on the Flagstaff photowalk I organized in July.

How did 2009 stack up to 2008? In terms of absolute frequency, nearly identical! I kept 1308 frames last year, compared to keeping 1340 in 2008. Far fewer of those are picks, or posted to flickr — though a good number are waiting for me to come back to, to finish workup or to make a print.

And that’s it for the 2009 photo stats! I did re-work my keyword network code, so perhaps can follow up this post with a little more about keyword relationships.

If you’d like to know more about extracting and summarizing info from your own Lightroom catalog, please let me know (and check out my other lightroom-related posts)

And, as last year, I hope soon to follow up with a report on my 2009 photo goals, and to set a few for 2010.

Link: Lightroom Secrets: 10 Suggestions for 2010

A great bunch of photo tips for developing technique and getting better in 2010

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• This link is dated Thursday December 31, 2009 with keywords photography tips

There was plenty to not love about 2009, but it did have a lot of good music. Each year I put together a playlist of some of the favorite “new” tracks in my music library. I put new in quotes to emphasize that the list doesn’t consist necessarily of music released in that year, but rather music that was new to me — maybe even an old favorite that I never had a copy of. Here’s this year’s list with a little commentary and the occasional amazon affiliate link.

1. Great Expectations / The Gaslight Anthem
   The opening track from The ’59 Sound is a real burner, and sets the tone for the entire, great album. (at amazon)


2. Here I Am (Come and Take Me) / Al Green
   Because, come on.


3. The Blue / Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit
   I heard this track in lots of unexpected places this year, like over the PA system at the FLG airport. Good stuff. (at amazon)


4. Swim Until You Can’t See Land / Frightened Rabbit
   This song is the first pre-release track over at eMusic. Frightened Rabbit’s new album comes out later this year, and it’s on the AV Club’s most anticipated 2010 entertainment. They say much better than I can, why we’re all eager for this album:

   The jump in excellence between Frightened Rabbit’s first album, Sing The Grays, and its second, 2008’s incredible The Midnight Organ Fight, was huge—anticipating another such leap for the upcoming The Winter Of Mixed Drinks would be ridiculous. But if Drinks is even half as good as Organ Fight, it’ll be twice as good as just about anything else out there: The Scottish band perfectly combines raw emotion and the dourness of everyday life with spikes of roaring joy.

   (Get Frightened Rabbit’s Midnight Organ Fight at amazon)
   



5. Little Lion Man / Mumford & Sons
   Someone posted a link to the video for this track on a forum I read occasionally, and I had to have the whole album. It’s crazy-good wild stringy folk with fantastic vocal harmonies. (at amazon)


6. At Midnight / Glossary


7. Damagasi – Africando / Africando
   We spent a few months taking salsa lessons last year. This is a nice one for dancin. (at amazon)


8. Monster Ballads / Josh Ritter
   Josh Ritter has to make an appearance, of course. This is a great acoustic take on the song, originally from an album that’s on Paste’s best of the decade list:

   13. Josh Ritter: The Animal Years [V2] (2006): After the latter third of the 20th century became littered with “new Dylans,” it became obvious that no one could ever fill that role. So when Ritter made his first few strummy, literate records, there were no lofty expectations to keep him from developing his talent and fanbase. After three promising albums, the masterpiece arrived. Recorded with producer Brian Deck, who stretched Ritter’s rootsy folk in more ambitious directions, The Animal Years is bookended by a pair of epic ballads—“Girl in the War” and “Thin Blue Flame”—which helped secure his place at the table of great songwriters without ever having to live in anybody’s shadow.

   (josh ritter at amazon)
   



9. Black Star / Gillian Welch
   An elegant cover of the Radiohead song, with Welch’s fine voice and David Rawlings’ guitars.


10. Regreso / Aziza Brahim (at amazon)


11. At War With The Sun / The Big Pink (at amazon)


12. Now We Can See / The Thermals
    Yes, have some. (at amazon)


13. Ships With Holes Will Sink / We Were Promised Jetpacks


14. Idle (The Rabbit Song) / Hem
    I totally fell for Hem in 2009. Such great songs, so beautifully performed. (I also learned that Dawn Landes plays with Hem — awesome!) (hem at amazon)


15. Wallflower / Uncle Earl
    The same way Chatham County Line grabbed me last year, Uncle Earl’s classic, clear bluegrass sound got to me this year. (at amazon)


16. Rudie Fails / White Rabbits
    (What is it with band names with “Rabbit”?) It’s Frightening is a super album, absolutely propelled by cracking percussion and Britt Daniels’ (of Spoon) production. Great title, too. (at amazon)


17. Djer aman / Terakaft
    Listen for the instrumental breakdown about 2:30 in for some of the most wide-open, bright guitar around. (at amazon)


18. Here’s Lookin At You, Kid / The Gaslight Anthem
    Closing out the year with the last track from ‘59 Sound is a sweetly regretful love song about convincing yourself that your heart really isn’t broken, like Bob Dylan’s “Most of the Time.” (at amazon)

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