If you are ever looking to get a whole mess of ISBNs into Delicious Library (say, for example, from a different book database), and have DL2 freshly slurp all the books’ info from the web, you should use this Applescript. It saved me Lotsa Work™.
(I tend to prefer Bruji Software’s Bookpedia over Delicious Library from a straight-up features standpoint, but I do use both)
My thanks to my friend @drdrang for using a screenshot of Commonplace Cartography in his post about his experience with NetNewsWire.
I stopped using NNW in favor of Google Reader awhile ago, myself—in large part because I didn’t care for the iPhone application. The desktop implementation is still the best on the Mac.
When you consider that a fairly hefty slice of the success of my company still depends on the health of print media, it’s a little alarming to note that I’m actually surprised by just how many print magazines we still receive here in the Morrow household.
Magazines have been an easy place to cut spending iver the past year, but we still get a bunch.
Do we read them? Do you read all your magazines? Us neither.
Here’s a rundown of mags you’ll find around here:
(inspired by the Plinky prompt for 2/14/09)
Hey—what do you read? What am I missing out on?
I can’t remember where I first so this, but this might just win the Internet.
(via DF)
Wanna see how quickly things can get really screwy on Twitter? Here’s a fun little exchange between @aprildunford and @sirdavid, during which National Post reporter David George-Cosh gets pwned and implodes. Read it all here.
I think it’s particularly amusing that @sirdavid has now protected his updates. Probably a better idea to just mind what you say in public.
(Via BuzzFeed)
I ordered one of them fancypants ee-lectronic book readers from The Amazon, and if their delivery status is correct it will arrive two short weeks.
Last May, I wrote the following about my desire (and hesitations) about the Kindle:
As someone who always has at least two books on his person at almost all times and who agonizes about which books to bring along on a trip, I really like the idea of a smallish device with an entire library on-board, ready for any reading whim that may strike. I love the idea of decreasing the amount of physical clutter in our home that my book addiction creates (and I know my wife will appreciate this too!). I even like the idea that reading a book on-screen may even be helpful to the environment. I like the idea of searchable, easily retrievable notes and annotations, and the promise of instant, wireless delivery of a passing fancy.
And:
So could I be afraid that I’ll like an e-book reader too much? I think that may be closer to the truth. As a bibliophile, what does it mean if I prefer this new experience to the more tactile act of reading a paper book?
Once it shows up, I’ll keep you posted on the experience.
In the meantime, do you have any suggestions for my first Kindle reading experience?
Sometimes it’s the simple things.
Today it’s listening to Neil Gaiman reading The Graveyard Book on a lovely pre-Spring lunch hour.
Twitterman Alex Payne wrote a pretty interesting an provocative post the other day, titled “The Case Against Everything Buckets.”
Rather than try to recreate his argument for him, go read it yourself. I’ll wait here.
At least in principle, I agree with Alex’s assertion that it can be immensely better to have your information available in an app that actually can do something with it. Nine times out of ten I prefer not to have information in any app at all, I like most of my stuff in the Finder where it is easily backed up, found, and mashed into other places. Preferably in plain text. Yes, I’m one of those people who buys $2,000 computers and prefers to work in the oldest and simplest data format in existence.
But I digress. I think Al3x is missing an angle in his implied assertion that Everything Buckets don’t do anything particularly well.
I think the value of Everything Bucket software, and in particular of Everything Bucket software that is either cloud-based or syncs nicely between desktop and mobile clients, is that these applications open your mind to the notion of ubiquitous capture.
And after all, you use a bucket for temporary storage, right? It’s a waystation.
I freely shove stuff into Evernote, Instapaper, and Everything Buckets because it’s so easy to do. The secret sauce that keeps it from becoming A Bad Thing is that I’ve built in a routine to go through them regularly, processing them David-Allen-style down to zero. It’s at that point that I’ll move data into another environment if it makes sense.
For example, I’ll see a link in Google Reader, scan it for interest, identify that I might want to use the idea in a story someday, and clip it to Evernote. Then at some regular interval I’ll pull the PDF out of that Evernote inbox and into the Finder as a PDF or webarchive in a directory structure like “Story Ideas/2009/…”
The only stuff I keep in Evernote full-time is stuff I know I’d like to have reference to no matter were I am—be it on my Macbook, on my iPhone, or on my work PC.
Not really rocket science, and YMMV. The point is, as always, pare down the number of places something can be, and put it somewhere where it should be. Those definitions of can and should are yours to make.
Update 2009-02-10: Here’s Buzz Andersen’s take on it.
