The footage they show here is so incredibly close to the graphic novel, it’s spooky. This has the potential to be a fantastic movie. YouTube – NBS Nightly News with Ted Philips, March 11th 1970. ps: I’m also testing a few new WordPress tweaks with this post
I’ve just finished installing WordPress onto Yeraze.com, and managed to successfully import all of my old Geeklog Data. I’m still working on it, so expect to see things in rapid flux right now. I’m having issues with Disqus showing all stories as ‘Comments closed’ and alot of links are broken right now, but I’m on [...]
As a relative newbie to the Cult of Mac, I’m always looking for neat pieces of software to optimize my Mac Experience. One I hear about over and over again is a tool called "NetNewsWire". It’s an RSS Aggregator desktop client, which a few neat features like the ability to sync with their iPhone version.
This is an app I simply don’t understand. Why is it so popular? I currently use Google Reader for my RSS needs, and before that BlogLines. With a Web-based RSS reader, it retrieves new feeds in the background, and I can then hit the website from anywhere to browse feeds, and I don’t need to worry about syncing. Both tools offer a nice iPhone interface and it all works fine. With the desktop client, I’ld have to fire up the app and wait for it to poll all my RSS feeds (currently 180), before reading. And it wouldn’t work when I leave my Mac and go to work (a Windows Machine where I can’t install software).
Am I missing something? What makes NetNewsWire a "must-have" for the Mac? Is it simply a personal preference thing? Is there some amazing feature that Google Reader doesn’t/can’t have? Have I misunderstood how NNW works? I’m not trying to bash the product, I’m just trying to figure out why I would want it. [tag:rss][tag:netnewswire][tag:mac]
Still working on Freezerburn & SQLite, and I ran into an interested quirk yesterday involving SQLite’s interoperation with threads.
My application uses 3 threads:
Establishing a Database connection can take a little bit of time, so I wrote a simple wrapper function to check if a connection was already established and use that one instead. That was where my problems began. [tag:python][tag:sqlite]
Yesterday I heard about "TweetBacks" for the first time. They’re very similar to Trackbacks or Comments, except they work with Twitter. The idea is that whenever someone links to a blog post, that’s essentially a comment and it would be nice if they appeared next to the blog-post. Well, the idea was mentioned less than a week ago on Mashable (10 ways Twitter will change Blog Design ), and already a talented guy named Dan Zarella has implemented it. Currently on version .2 beta, it’s a simple JavaScript you can include on any webpage to show TweetBacks. He’s already released a Wordpress plugin, and the 1-line Script tag was trivial for me to add to Geeklog’s templates.
So, you’ll notice that individual articles pages now have a Tweetbacks section! Currently, they just show me talking about my own blog most of the time, but hopefully it’ll grow over time. Enjoy! [tag:tweetback][tag:blog][tag:twitter]
This weekend I stopped by the Apple store and was pleasantly surprised to find the Griffin Clarifi case in stock. The Clarifi case is a simple slide-in hardshell case with a Macro Lens for improved close-up photos. I take alot of photos of text, business cards, and receipts (mostly for use with EverNote) so I’ve been watching it for a while. After picking one up and trying it out, I’m happy to report it works better than I ever expected. See below two photos of a receipt, taken inside a darkly lit restaurant: (Click to enlarge)
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| Without Clarifi | With Clarifi |
It’s pretty easy to see the improvement. While the iPhone + the Clarifi case will no longer fit inside my belt-pouch, I think it’s worth the extra pocket-weight to have the Clarifi available. Hopefully, it’ll significantly improve EverNote’s Text-Recognition features. [tag:clarifi][tag:case][tag:iphone]
Update: After a week of using it, I can say definitively it makes a HUGE improvement in Evernote’s OCR abilities.
For the last week or two I’ve been working on rewriting FreezerBurn to use SQLite database instead of the scattered INI files it currently uses. I’m hoping it will be faster, more reliable, and significantly reduce some of the complicated code I’m having to use to manage huge lists & dict’s of Jobs, Nodes, Frames, and more.
In doing this, tho, I’ve found a few interesting performance quirks of SQLite that I thought I would share. Specifically two things:
So come on inside and read up if you’re interested. [tag:python][tag:sqlite][tag:code][tag:optimization]
