as we may blog

Lots of people are chattering on the nets lately about Yahoo Pipes, a new service that lets you take feeds from different sites, mash them together, and presumably, create a richer and more pleasing experience with the result than you could ever hope to enjoy by browsing the feeds individually.

Upon learning that Pipes is capitalizing on the increasingly semantic nature of the web, I seized the opportunity to use Pipes to answer one of the most frequently asked questions I get here at As We May Blog:

"How can I see all the beer-related content from The Content Webring, translated into French and then translated back into English?"

With Yahoo Pipes, I don’t have to spend any more sleepless nights translating content by hand. The answer is now generated automagically and published to the entire world, free of charge: Beer content from The Content Webring.

Original content:

• You think we have it bad?
• Between a Beer and a Hard Place (Sports betting, week 3)
• Dial-a-Brew, Take Two
• Area Drunkard Drunk

Piped content:

• You think that we have it bad?
• Between a Bi? and a hard place (sports betting, week 3)
• Dial-a-Brew, The Catch Two
• Drunkard Of Drunk Sector

Web 3.0. Sense: made.

I have a new blog! It’s sanscomicsans.com and it operates under the bylaws of The Content Webring.

I’ve had this going for a little while but I wasn’t sure what exactly to do with it. It’s more professional in nature so expect to see posts about design, user experience, and technology. Today I posted a riveting analysis of a WEATHER GRAPHIC. Don’t everyone rush over there so fast that you bring my server down.

Giving those posts their own home seemed logical, since it seems like most of you are here to read about sports and Brooklyn gossip. Anyway, if you do wander over there, leave a comment if you find something interesting. I’d like it to be more than just another blahg about design. I’ve got a few ideas up my sleeve.

After years of hemming and hawing about whether a laptop would fit well with my Digital Lifestyle™, I gave in to the inevitable last week and picked up an educationally discounted 12″ PowerBook. My initial thinking was that a laptop would be a great complement to my PC, something that would be useful for group project work and taking notes (or, uh, otherwise passing the time) in class. In just a few days of use, though, the PowerBook has pretty much rendered GRAYBOX obsolete, much to my surprise.

First of all, the PowerBook specs for those who care:

• 1.5 GHz G4
• 1.25 GB RAM
• 64 MB nVidia video card w/DVI out
• 60 GB hard drive
• Software I care about: OmniGraffle, Adium, Adobe Creative Suite

Web development
I’m a hand-coder and don’t do anything exceptionally difficult from a technical perspective, just HTML and some basic PHP. I set up Apache and PHP on my PowerBook and I can develop and test webpages much more rapidly than I could on my PC. Instead of 1) editing, 2) saving, 3) uploading via FTP, and 4) refreshing a browser, I 1) edit a file and 2) refresh Safari. I know there are options to do this same thing in Windows, but IIS or Apache for Windows? Come on. Plus vi is nerdy chic in a way that notepad just can’t be.

Planning and wireframing
There’s no comparison to OmniGraffle. None. It was a large part of the reason I finally purchased the PowerBook.

Dashboard
I knew Dashboard was well-loved before I started using it, but it really is one of the best UI and functionality improvements to happen to an OS in a long time. I use widgets for Google Maps, 37signals’ Backpack, and iTunes, and I’m sure there are a million other great ones I haven’t discovered yet.

It’s the little things…

• Checking the weather: WeatherPulse for Windows is a nice bloat-free program, but being able to hit F12 and see the temp and forecast in the Dashboard is much easier.
• The keys on the keyboard have a great snap to them, and accidental keystrokes rarely happen, which is important when you cram so many keys into such a small space.
• Mail and Safari are surprisingly good. I expected to use Thunderbird and Firefox, but both are a little sluggish in comparison. An AdBlock-type extension for Safari would convert me full time.
• With the PowerBook’s DVI out, I can use my 19″ LCD on my desktop in either dual or single screen mode at full 1280×1024 resolution.

GRAYBOX dead?
Well, not quite. There are still some things that the PowerBook can’t accommodate. I have about 60 GB of music which I’ve been streaming over iTunes from my PC. I’m not sure I would want all that data on the laptop anyway. GRAYBOX has the DVD burner, so it will still be in charge of making legal backups of my DVD collection. Microsoft Office for Mac sucks hard. Later in the semester when I need to sit down and really hammer stuff out, I’m sure I’ll be doing it on the PC.

I can compare and contrast all I want, the biggest sign that I love my new Mac is that I’m blogging about it. On a Saturday night.

This post is dedicated to fbroz, who hung in there all these years gently reminding me that I both needed a laptop and it would make me cooler.

Key to a good tax return: work half a year full-time with benefits, sit on your ass for three months, and then pay out of state tuition for the rest of the year.

Anyone have any experience with any of these? I’m especially interested in the first one as there’s a deal on for the next few days that nets me a $200 savings. Remember that hearsay is good enough around here.

Dell UltraSharp 2005FPW, 20″ 1680×1050, 75Hz, DVI

Samsung 910T, 19″, 1280×1024, .294mm, DVI

Sony SDM-HS94P/S, 19″, 1280×1024, .264mm, DVI

Or any other quality 19″+ LCDs?

This is pretty cool stuff:

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Google and the University of Michigan today (Tuesday) announced a joint agreement that will add the 7 million volumes in the U-M library to the Google search engine and open the way to universal access to information.

… Google will digitally scan and make searchable virtually the entire collection of the U-M library. A person looking for information will gain the extraordinary capability to use Google to locate and read the full text of printed works that are out of copyright. For works in copyright, a search will point the way to the existence of relevant volumes by returning a snippet of text, along with information that identifies publishers or libraries where the work can be found.

… At its current rate of digital production, however, it would take the University more than a thousand years to digitize the 7 million volumes in the collection. Google plans to do the job in a matter of years.

Google also has entered into agreements with Harvard University, Stanford University, Oxford University and the New York Public Library.

I wonder if that copy of Czechoslovak Forestry I walk past nearly every day will make the cut?