Great compendium of articles. Includes three by David Foster Wallace, and two from Michael Lewis, two of my favorites. Also has Neal Stephenson’s mammoth 1996 article for Wired about the Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe 1. The single page/print version is here if you’re not big on hitting ‘next page’…fifty-six times.
Over 42,000 words and worth every one. One of two issues of Wired I still own, the other being issue #1.↩
While trying to make some progress whittling down my Instapaper queue, here’s two recent articles on one of the more fascinating topics (to me at least) in a long while: the ingenious Stuxnet worm and how it was used to degrade Iran’s nuclear capability.
Wired: Stuxnet Missing Link Found, Resolves Some Mysteries Around the Cyberweapon
IEEE Spectrum: The Real Story of Stuxnet
And two older articles:
The NY Times (June 2012): Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran
Vanity Fair (April 2011): A Declaration of Cyber-War
A fine defense of Christopher Hitchens from James Kirkchick against a new, and conveniently posthumous biography:
Hitchens would surely be proud that someone saw him as influential enough to merit such a fervid, if often inaccurate and borderline libelous, attack on his career. And given Hitchens’s own propensity to assail public figures as their bodies lay warm, it would be unfair to call UnHitched “cowardly” or “disrespectful” or any of the other epithets that were deployed against Hitchens in his time. What’s good for the goose, and all that. But Seymour should consider himself lucky that the subject of his book isn’t here to respond to such drivel.
Incredible story from World War II about a Luftwaffe pilot and the pilot of a crippled B-17.
John Gruber, in relation to a New York Times infographic that illustrates per capita federal aid for 31 smaller states compared to the 3 largest:
Everything that’s wrong with U.S. politics, in one picture.
What I think he is actually railing against, because he has before, is the both groups each represent about 25% of the population, but the former is represented by 62 Senators and the latter six. Gruber doesn’t really give a shit that Wyoming’s per capita aid is $4,180 compared to California’s $1,790.
Gruber is pissed that Wyoming Senators each represent about 290,000 people, and Senators Boxer and Feinstein from California represent 19 million-plus each, and each holds one single vote.
Nevermind Article 1, Section 3 of the US Constitution:
The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State,
chosen by the Legislature thereof,1 for six years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.
Nevermind that Wyoming has one congressional district and California has 53, and the House holds the purse strings.
Nevermind that that zero US Senators have passed a budget in 1,400 days, because none of them want to be on the record and accountable to those they represent – a significantly bigger issue than the how many of them there are. 2
There are a myriad of things wrong with politics in the US. The fact that Wyoming and Vermont are on equal footing with New York and Texas in the Senate is by design and doesn’t break the top 25.
I venture a guess that if the 10 smallest states by population were all blue states (there are actually 5, and the red/blue split between the 31 is about even), Gruber would be singing a different tune. But a few small red states holding sway over the liberal lions from New York and California? A crisis of government. Remember, liberals only cry about tyranny of the majority when they aren’t in it. 3
Sarah Pavis, on Kottke:
A popular option for moving companies to offer in Japan is, not only to transport your belongings, but to pack them and unpack them for you.
Seriously? I have moved twenty times and every single time, they pack and unpack my stuff. BFD. Now, packers here in America are hardly as dedicated as those in Japan (see the video), but I did move to Korea (and back) twice. Those dudes are efficient as hell and they can cut cardboard into any shape to wrap anything. Including my couch.
Jason Santa Maria talking about his new project, Editorially, yesterday:
For today we ship.
“Coming soon. Sign up to get invited.” That’s not quite shipping.
Contrast with Macdrifter’s and Erik Hess’ new project, CriticMarkup–a tool by coincidence not completely unrelated to Editorially. Announced with no pre-hype, and available on multiple platforms.
Editorially maybe the coolest thing for writing since the typewriter. But I’ll reserve judgment until it actually, you know, ships.
This is a productivity nerd post that is not about OmniFocus. Not that I dislike OmniFocus, I own and use it, but it is not always the right tool for the job.
One of my larger projects is redesigning this site. It has been an ongoing affair, and at various times the rather large task list associated with it has moved from OmniFocus, to a Markdown outline in nvALT, with a brief stint as a taskpaper document.
Since 96% of my time with this project involves hammering away in a text editor writing HTML and CSS, all of these suffered from being a bit too far removed from the project itself. In addition, I found the OmniFocus “paradigm” to be a tad constricting–contexts where pointless, and it doesn’t lend itself to large chunks of text.
My editor of choice is Sublime Text 2 and there are two excellent plugins available for it that make keeping track of any web, software, or writing project a breeze.
Plain Tasks is like having taskpaper embedded in your Sublime project. It treats files with certain extensions (.todo, .tasks, etc) as special documents with their own formatting and shortcuts. Lines ending in a colon are projects, and tags can added with the @tag style. Keyboard shortcuts include ‘⌘ D’ to mark a task complete and ‘Shift ⌘ A’ to move all completed tasks to the Archive section at the end of the list. Check the plugin tutorial for the full lowdown.
The main benefit I get out of using this is I have a lab.TODO file that lives in the root in my redesign folder and I open it first to see what needs to get accomplished. Invariably when I’m working on one aspect of the site, a related task or idea arises that I need to capture quickly. Rather than switching to completely different app, my task list is just a tab away (⌥ ⌘ left/right arrow to cycle through open tabs). Significant friction reduction, as the productivity dorks say.
Plain Task works great for keeping track of things with a wide scope. For fine-grain task-foo, I use Sublime TODO, which can easily keep track of all your tasks, down to the line level. I have a line in a Sass file for the new site that looks like this:
1 2 3 4 5 | |
Open Sublime’s Command Palette (Shift ⌘ P), then type todo and select from either of two options: Search TODOs across all project files, or just open files. The resulting tab looks like this:
The plug-in will find every instance of TODO, NOTE, FIXME, and CHANGED across all the applicable files. The comment patterns can be customized in your user settings file, or on a per-project basis. The killer aspect of this plugin is you can navigate the list with the n or p keys and when the desired item is highlighted, press return. The file will open at the specific comment, with the cursor at the beginning of the line. 1
This tool isn’t necessary limited to code or HTML/CSS. You could litter your next angst-ridden hipster novel (written in Markdown, of course) with FIXME's and NOTES, and this plug will find them all.
The big advantage of having both of these tools basically embedded in the project is also a potential disadvantage: they only live with the project. No iPhone access to my web redesign tasks. No awesome iCloud sync.
Me: so what. If an awesome idea for the site explodes forth while buying some kick-ass gas station coffee, I’ll just dump it in my OmniFocus inbox and process into my Plain Task list later.
How awesome would it be if OmniFocus could do this? Highlight “Buy Milk”, hit return, and be magically transported to the dairy aisle at Safeway. Since version 2 is already in work, I’ll give the Omni group until 3.0 to get this done. Or I’m switching to back to Things. They’ll knock it out right quick.↩
Well, not really a return. It has always been there, but I have finally got around to putting back a link to it after the Octopress changeover.
The Lab is my HTML/CSS playground. When I’m messing around with some web-related thingy, I build a page for it in the Lab. Maintaining a vertical rhythm with type, responsive layouts, shiny CSS3 stuff, whatever. The big project currently is a planned re-design for this site. I have been working on it off and on for the past eighteen months. The big remaining hurdle is to convert the templates over to my Octopress installation.
Refreshingly honest interview with soon-to-be-former director Steven Soderbergh. I like his take on movie critics and that he’s a fan of Shane Carruth, who made Primer.