As seen on TV

This video compilation of people doing everything so wrong for products “as seen on TV” makes me laugh every single time I see it. I lost track of it for a while and found it again today, so now you can enjoy it with me.

Two-for-One Black Friday Special

I get to link to two people who delight me: Andy Ithnatko and Jonathan Coulton.
Amazon Advent 02 – “Mr. Fancy Pants” by Jonathan Coulton – Andy Ihnatko’s Celestial Waste of Bandwidth (BETA)

“In his live show, Coulton introduces ‘The Future Soon’ as the thoughts of a 12 year old boy during the Eighties, lying in his bedroom and reading ‘Omni’ magazine and thinking of the future. It’s a time when you’ve yet to figure out how to wield any power over your own destiny. At the same time, you can’t stop thinking about the future. The kid in this song is eager for what his life will be, when technology will have magically eliminated all of the unsolveable problems that stand between himself and what he wants.”

—Andy Ihnatko

Read the rest of Andy’s piece. It’s worth it.

Movable Type Documentation #mt

Presented here for your education is the Mostly Complete Movable Type Documentation (as of November 17, 2012). From my brief introduction to the 476-page compilation: > It is not my intent to present this compilation of Movable Type documentation pages as my original work. In fact, the only original piece of this document is this Introduction! > All of these documentation files are maintained at movabletype.org which is most certainly more up-to-date than this document lovingly collected by hand on November 17, 2012, copied-and-pasted into a Scrivener file to keep it organized and published straight to PDF from that wonderful application with its original formatting. That means it’s not perfectly formatted in book format, but it’s better than nothing. > It is my intent to provide a useful resource to the Movable Type community. When I am learning a new system, I find it helpful to have a guide that stays in context from one section to the next rather than clinking link to link to link and wandering from one guide to the next—author to designer to developer—to find what I need. > So I compiled all of those individual pages into one to help me, and share it here as a PDF to help others who think like me. I hope it helps. So there you go, warts and all. Download it here.

Fantastical-esque BusyCal 2

Shawn Blanc mentioned that BusyCal 2:

“added a Fantastical-esque Menu Bar extra that lets you view your schedule and crate events quickly with natural language.”

I’ve had a BusyCal license for many years and switched to Fantastical in the past year. I have read nothing substantial about the latest version yet, and I’m sure it’s an awesome release, but Blanc’s description implies the upgrade is almost as good as another app. That does not encourage me to upgrade? If you need the full calendar “”experience,”” I can recommend BusyCal based on past performance. If you don’t need a full-screen app, then Fantastical is an awesome alternate and that’s what I will continue to use.

Sparks – building a list of ideas

Steven Berlin Johnson, author and well-known DEVONthink user, recently described what he calls his spark file. It’s a rambling document with no organization where he stores his hunches and questions.

This is why for the past eight years or so I’ve been maintaining a single document where I keep all my hunches: ideas for articles, speeches, software features, startups, ways of framing a chapter I know I’m going to write, even whole books. I now keep it as a Google document so I can update it from wherever I happen to be. There’s no organizing principle to it, no taxonomy–just a chronological list of semi-random ideas that I’ve managed to capture before I forgot them. I call it the spark file.

(via The Spark File — The Writer’s Room — Medium)

This inspired Alex Hillman to elaborate on his perception and use of a spark file. > The Spark File, Steven describes, is a process/tool that he uses to collect “half-baked ideas” and then revisit them. For 8 years, he’s maintained a single document with notes & ideas with zero organization or taxonomy, simply a chronology of thoughts. He calls this document his Spark File.

Once a month, he revisits the ENTIRE Spark File from top to bottom, revisiting old ideas and potentially combing them with newer ideas.

I’ve adopted this process for the last 30 days and it’s had a remarkable effect. The most astounding part is how often I find myself writing the same thing in different ways. I’ve taken that pattern as a clue to explore a concept further, and see if it merits more investigation.

(via Better Answers & How I Learned to Defrag My Brain | Alex Hillman)

This concept of sparks, coupled with a recent article by Federico Viticci at MacStories about Faster Markdown Editing with Nebulous Notes Macros, then multiplied by integration with Launch Center Pro, puts Nebulous Notes back in the lead on my iOS devices. With all of the pieces in place I can now tap a shortcut in LCP, tap the microphone icon on the keyboard, dictate my thought, tap go, and my thought is appended as a new bullet in my Spark File.

I feel like a mad genius watching his creation take its first wobbly steps. This is so simple and makes so much sense. I have already started my spark file; a single plain text document automatically synced among all of my devices where my ideas can percolate. I look forward to seeing what brews in there!


Note: Following links to buy the apps mentioned here help me out.

Updates mean more updates coming

I’ve had a few days off to recover from having my wisdom teeth ripped out of my skull, which gave me plenty of time to muck around in the guts of a new CMS. Clicking on either the CaSt Blog or Linked List (they’re over to the right at the moment) will take you where I hope to take the rest of the site.

My vision at the moment is to have four main pages. A mixture of articles (this page) written solely by me and items I link to on the Web, the CaSt blog and Linked List (which make up the “mixture” I just mentioned, and an archive to help you (and me) find older articles and other items I’ve published.

Other pages will be the obligatory contact and about pages, and maybe a social page showing my other footprints on the Internet. A dedicated photo gallery may or may not be in the future. We’ll see how it goes.

Thanks for your patience while I continue to learn a new system, track down the bugs I’ve introduced, and squash them. I’m digging the new system, but have lots to learn.

Netflix casts presidential vote with video release

We watch a lot of Netflix and I subscribe to the company’s feed of video recently released to “Watch Instantly.”
The feed pushes out new titles with a brief synopsis. I’ve never seen one longer than about 35-50 words. Never, that is, until today.
I clocked the synopsis for Dreams from my Real Father at 274 words. The video is billed as a the “alternative Barack Obama ‘autobiography’offering a divergent theory of what may have shaped our 44th President’s life and politics;” a video that “chronicles Barack Obama’s life journey in socialism.”
The mockumentary poses pressing questions that may even be irrelevant in the mythical bizarro universe of an alternative Obama:

The film begins by presenting the case that Barack Obama’s real father was Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party USA propagandist who likely shaped Obama’s world view during his formative years. Barack Obama sold himself to America as the multi-cultural ideal, a man who stood above politics. Was the goat herding Kenyan father only a fairly [sic] tale to obscure a Marxist agenda, irreconcilable with American values?
It seems odd to me that of the hundreds of Netflix synopses I’ve skimmed, this one stands out like an unpatriotic thumb to perpetuate 1hr 37m of drivel and lies. It seems unlikely that the release of this video mere weeks before the presidential election could be coincidence, and Netflix has been investing quite a bit in Washington D.C.
I hope Netflix intends to commit “equal time” to fictional biographies of Mitt Romney in the run up to election day.

Movable Type: a blessing and a curse

Movable Type–updated to 5.2 just a few days ago–is a professional content management system from which to launch a blogging platform. I have no doubt it is fully capable of presenting anything an accomplished admin can imagine; however, those new to the system must overcome the scattered documentation.

A basic glossary would be helpful. The terms “styles,” “themes,” and “templates” get tossed around quite a bit. Sometimes they seem to be interchangeable while other times they seem exclusive, which adds to the confusion. Whole sections of the dashboard are devoted to creating and managing assets, yet there is no clear definition of what qualifies as an asset. The support docs include six guides (and appendices) covering:

  1. Installation
  2. Upgrading
  3. Authors
  4. Designers
  5. Administrators
  6. Developers

Sometimes the content in these five guides overlap and struggle to separate instructions for different major versions (i.e. 4.x or 5.x). Managing a website with Movable Type involves a lot more typing than drag and drop, which I appreciate and prefer, but someone needs to get a handle on documenting the basics for beginners.

I believe the support team is cursed with prior knowledge and making some leaps in logic that leave frustrated newbies behind. Again, a glossary of common terms would be a great start. As I continue to work with MT and learn more I may even begin that project myself.

CaSt, now with FancyZoom!

From here forward, I plan to use Cabel Sasser’s FancyZoom to allow readers to click on photos and enjoy, well, a fancy zoom. Cabel is known for Panic’s shockingly good software (I recommend Coda 2, which helps me develop this site alongside BBEdit) and yes, he shares his personal thoughts at Cabel’s Blog LOL.
I retrofitted my most recent blog with a photo, “The yellow flag must be down!”, as an example of this new improvement to the Carrying Stones family. Enjoy a fancy way to enjoy the closeup.
If this site moves beyond a hobby and earns any revenue, and I hope it does, the first $39 will go to license FancyZoom. Anyone who wants to advertise at Carrying Stones should drop a line to the [commerce department](mailto:commerce@carryingstones.com?subject=CaSt Advertiser).