Ch, ch, changes….
It’s been a long time quiet on this site. Far beyond a quick hiatus. I don’t know how often I’ll post, but I think posting may pickup soon. Changes in the real world will kinda drive it. 🤞🏼
Thirty second slogans
I saw a bumper sticker today - "War is not an option". Sounds great on the back of a car - but I think it's wrong. The right message is "War is always an option, it's just the worse one and the one of *Last* resort."
Problem with my slogan - it's too long and means you have to think. Something people seem highly disinclined to do these days.
New blog!
Starting soon is a new blog section - RAD's sports talk. Keep an eye out!
Meaning of a name
From Wikipedia:
The word, Apurva, is a Sanskrit word which in its common usage means, One of a kind, Unique, Like non-other, Like never before or Unprecedented. It is a negative term i.e. not purva, it is something not foreseen, unpreceded, unprecedented, never seen before; in brief it means that which did not exist before or is newly born. Apurva cannot be denoted through any noun or by any verb; it is comprehended as a result of an act.[1]
sounds and light
Recently we "suffered" a loss of satellite TV access for a few weeks (I was busy and online sources like Netflix and Roku, plus OTA HDTV worked, so no real rush to get it repaired.) and I noticed just how much we can do, or choose not to do when our favorite TV shows are "gone."
Obvious, I know. A point made by many others wiser than me.
But it just struck me that being forced to change, even for a short time, exposes some interesting quirks. I found myself catching up on reading books (something I had promised myself months back to do) and using my Roku to catch up anime I wanted to watch as well alas old friends on Netflix. My family were more upset, especially the family sports fan, whose teams were only on CSN. Luckily, some games were on ESPN, so the fan got their 'fix' 😉
But all good things come to an end and I finally called the satellite company to send out a tech to fix things. Sigh.
New Year, new site
Welcome to the new home of Inkspot! Hope you find something interesting to read.
Quiet dignity
I just read this article on Business Week's mobile site - an open letter from Apple CEO Tim Cook. Well done and worth a read:
http://mobile.businessweek.com/articles/2014-10-30/tim-cook-im-proud-to-be-gay
Fear
This week I have been spending a good portion of my free time culling my ebook collection and using calibre to catalog and convert books to ePub format. I've come across a bunch of classic hard SF books from authors like Heinlein, Clarke et al., and it made me wonder where has this country's drive for exploration and science gone? When did we lose our sense of wonder and courage?
The picture attached to this post is Olympus Mons as seen from orbit. Where is the Edmund Hilary who will plant the flag on *this* peak?
Why do we hesitate at the thought of a one way trip to colonize Mars? Our ancestors did the same for North and South America, for Australia (albeit as prisoners) and even earlier in humankind's history - we've been willing to go, knowing we may not come back.
Why does 21st Century mankind lack that willingness?
Stellar nursery
Asteroid close up
Cool
Rain
Gray skies, intermittent 'tears'. Melancholy blues to end the week.
Grief
It doesn't rain, but it pours. Sigh. Dad's been gone since November, now my masaji.
Drupal
Hired web designer to refresh firm website. We'll be moving to a Drupal based site. Need to learn enough Drupal to manage the site. Something new to learn. Cool!!
Writer's block
Starting a blog. Scary. Seeking to capture experiences in a central area that's accessible and intelligent. *Sigh*
Managing multiple windows on Windows
During the day I often have 10-15 windows open and using Alt+Tab to jump around is an invitation to an ulcer. One of the things I love about my Apple iBook is the Expose function. With a single swipe of my mouse to a corner of the screen the machine shrinks and displays all open windows. Then I can click on the one I want to jump to. Quick, intuitive. Windows (all versions) doesn't have this capability natively. But there is an answer - WinPLOSION. For $9.95 (after 7 day free trial) you get the same Expose ability on your Windows machines that Apple gives on its units. Definitely a worthwhile addition.
Give it a whirl.
Enjoy.
Pervasive dictionary
Everyone uses Google to search, but did you know it was a dictionary, too? To get the definition of a word or phrase, add the code "define:" (without the quotes) in front of the word you want to define in the Google search box and Google will produce a wealth of definitions from across the web. Enjoy.
Zoë : Turning your computer into a mini-search server
Sounds bland, doesn't it?? Well, it's not really. Earlier I posted about the latest generation of personal search tools like Google Deskbar and MSN Deskbar. Similar to this, yet in many ways a different take on this is Zoë. Zoë has been around for a long time, since 2002, so its a bit of an old timer. The current version is 0.6.2. In its default installation, Zoë acts like an email client - downloading your email and indexing it. The interface is a web browser and you're shown the mail dated for Today as the start point. Then you can switch days, or search for particular terms and it displays only those email that qualify. The messages can be sorted by date or sender or subject. And along the side bar Zoë creates direct links to the attachments (if any) in your email and creates a list of senders for quick retrieval of all messages from a particular person. That's neat. For another opinion on how neat Zoë can be, read Jon Udell's review at O'Reilly Network.
Beyond the basic configuration, if you want, you can configure Zoë to be an email server. Thus you continue to use your normal email client, but Zoë sits in the middle - takes a copy of each inbound and outbound message to work its magic - and sends the message onto its final destination.
This is a nice bit of code - all in Java, by the way, so its cross-platform - and it really works well. I have it on my iBook and find it very useful. Try it. You may like it.
Maps, maps, and more maps!!!
A short while ago Google bought keyhole. a mapping software company whose product allows you to creat amazing maps (even of Mars!!). This software has even been used by the U.S. military. See them at Keyhole. But more importantly, it appears that Google is using this technology to give the public access to amazingly detailed maps and directions of the the US. Go, run - do not walk - to maps.google.com. Enjoy!!
Book Catalog Software for Mac OS X
I have a large book collection that is just crying out for organization. But the idea of manually coding all the books in a database - not for me. Happily someone else has done the work for me. The people at Deepprose have a wonderful product called Booxter that does all that for you. Its written for Mac OS X, so older OS 9 Macs and Windows users are out of luck. It has a very intuitive interface and if you have a webcam, you can scan the barcode on the back of the book to query Amazon or the Library of Congress for detailed information about the book. It will download the book cover image from Amazon (if available) and allow you to annotate the record with comments about the book. If you loan books to friends, it can assist in tracking who has it (and since when). It also grabs the list price for the book and you can add the actual price you paid for it. Booxter will calculate a running total - both of what you paid and what is the total replacement value of your collection. The price for all this? $14.99. Highly Recommend it.
An alternative (and one that is more expensive - $40) is Delicious Monster's Delicious Library. It has the added ability to organize your CD and DVD collections. I found the information it collected on books less complete than Booxter and I didn't need the CD and DVD coverage (I use iTunes for the former and don't have that many DVDs) to justify the higher cost. But your mileage may vary. Both have trial periods, so go ahead and try'em.
Enjoy.
Some cool freeware utilities
Songstech is the home of a sweet set of 4 freeware utilities that just might make your life a bit easier. First is eLibPro, a book cataloging tool for those who want to organize their book collection. Closely linked to this is BookInfo, a search tool to retrieve information on a specific book. The next two, HTML Linker and HTML Tag Remover target html files. The former allows you to automatically add Previous and Next tags to a group of related or unrelated html files and the last let's you do a find and remove in one or a folder-full of html files.
Neat little utilities that could make life just a bit easier. And free too!
Enjoy.