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- Politics 2005
- June - May - April - March - February - January
2004
- December - November - October - August - July - June - May - April - March - February - January
2003
- December - November - October - August - July - June - May - April - March - February - January
2002
- December - November - TidBITS - Apple - Macintouch laptop battery report - Apple - Tinderbox Community Forum (not official) - WhatIsMyIP - Wherever you are, there you are... - TinyURL - Turn big ugly URLs into cute little ones... - rob at whiterabbits.com - rmchuff - Eudora - Fire - BBEdit - Mozilla - Internet Explorer - Transmit - iTunes - VNCthing - Terminal
MNJ RSS
MNJ Politics RSS Here is a collection of link to sites maintained by people who have mentioned that they read MNJ:
- Dan Hon - An imaginary place in a reactionary time - dws
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Tall Ships visit Tacoma through July 5 
Tall Ships Tacoma 2005 kicked off yesterday with the Parade of Sail, which surprisingly drew at least 125,000 people to the shores of Commencement Bay on a Thursday afternoon. In order to get the photos I wanted for the City of Tacoma home page and the City's Online Newsroom page, I spent four hours walking along the Tacoma waterfront. My pedometer said I had walked 13,000 steps during the day - roughly 5.5 miles of walking in the sun to get 175 photos. The photo above was taken from Ruston Way, about a mile from my house. It shows the Mexican and Russian tall ships as they make their turn into the wind near Point Defiance Park. Great news for the day is that the new Canon 75-300 mm image stabilized lens that I bought earlier this week proved its worth yesterday. I took all of my photos without using a tripod, and most of them look very sharp. It looks like it was a good addition to the digital photography arsenal. |
Tinderbox 2.5 arrives Mark Bernstein's site is full of news about the release of Tinderbox 2.5, as well as a Fourth of July weekend special for buyers of the most useful piece of software I have on my PowerBook. This is on my must download and upgrade list for the weekend!
iTunes 4.9 is all about podcasting As was widely rumored over the last week, Apple today has released iTunes 4.9. MacCentral has a brief story about the new features, which center around making it easy for users to subscribe and listen to podcasts. I will be installing this later tonight... You can grab the update by using the Software Update mechanism in Mac OS X.
A little Republican humor If a picture is worth a thousand words, I wonder what this shot of the front window of the Pierce County Republican headquarters has to tell us? 
A new photo banner for MNJ I finally took the time today to find a photo suitable to serve as the banner graphic for Mac Net Journal. The new banner shows the view of Mt Rainier from downtown Tacoma. The shot was taken earlier this year with our Canon EOS 20D. |
The News Tribune overview on blogs There is nothing groundbreaking here, but my local paper The News Tribune writes today about blogs, including a page with a short list of TNT blogs and other blogs from around Tacoma. They didn't look very hard. They didn't find any of the blogs I run... What blogs do I run?
The joys of digging through ancient media As Natalie and I work on our book about disasters in Washington state's history, one of the joys of the project is spending hours viewing old newspapers on microfiche at the Tacoma Public Library. Last weekend I was able to put the context of the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge - Galloping Gertie - into perspective when I realized that just days before the collapse the United States voted to make FDR president for another term, the term in which he would have to lead the country finally into World War II. I also read how amateur weather forecasters predicted the storm that would send 40-plus mile an hour gusts that would send the too narrow and not aerodynamicaly designed bridge to the bottom of the swift waters of the Tacoma Narrows in one of the biggest engineering and design screw ups of the 20th Century. (Learn more about the collapse on the Wikipedia...) The other interesting part of digging through historical documents is seeing just how many more venues there were for news in the early 1900s and late 1800s. Every small town seems to have had a historian or writer covering the town happenings in small newspapers, not unlike the role that bloggers can fill now by paying attention to their local world and relaying the news over the Internet. The big difference is that those blogs won't stand up to history unless they are carefully archived. Imagine a historian of the future and the wealth of material he or she could wade through in order to write about life in 2005. Will all of the personal writing, blogs and even comments to newspaper stories on sites like the one for The News Tribune be lost forever in a few weeks, months or years? Ironically, without a real concerted effort, all of this personal journalism may just disappear into the ether... | Related link: Archiving digital history at NARA (Slashdot)
A new version of NeoOffice Update: NeoOffice/J 1.1 - NeoOffice/J, a Mac OS X native version of OpenOffice, adds support for Tiger, Spotlight integration, right-to-left and complex text layout, faster startup, drag-and-drop support, and much more. [MacInTouch]
Happy Summer Solstice to all! We are just 20 minutes from the official marking of the Summer Solstice here in Puget Sound country. Here's wishing for a safe, lazy and wonderful summer! Of course, I think today really marks the middle of the season, but I am just a contrarian...
Congratulations to Robert Scoble It takes a big man to admit when he is wrong. Robert Scoble gets my congratulations for his post this afternoon - A week of being told "you're wrong." Now I have to wonder what the admission means in the bigger picture, since Microsoft has shown no signs of changing its business as usual approach to censoring the Chinese people in order to make another buck.
How to get inspired to write about history There is nothing better than hearing one of the best living history writers speak about his new book, 1776, and the founding of the United States to help inspire me to work on my own little history book about the disasters that have struck Washington state in its 116 year history. Two nights ago Natalie and I listened to a talk and reading by David McCullough, who brought his speaking tour to the Pacific Northwest this week with talks in Tacoma and Seattle. It was interesting listening to McCullough speak about our nation's history and its founding. I have yet to read any of his well-reviewed books, which will change soon, and so instead of associating him with being a great writer, I think of him as a regular on PBS with a familiar and authoritative voice. But McCullough had a way of boiling history down to critical moments in his speech in Tacoma this week, and I look forward to reading 1776 to find out how he brings the narrative together in book form. If you get a chance to hear the now 72 year old historian and writer speak, sieze the moment. It cost us just $10 - OK, $55 since we bought two of his books - to hear McCullough speak. Powells.com has an interview with McCullough on its excellent Web site. My favorite quote from McCullough's talk came during the question-and-answer period. When asked about the benefits of being a historical writer, McCullough answered:
MacCentral reviews ChronoSync 3 Review: ChronoSync 3.0 - Whether you need to back up your Mac or synchronize files among multiple Macs, Econ Technologies' ChronoSync 3.0 is a potent but friendly tool that will let you get the job done.
Tips for syncing iTunes Syncing iTunes - What happens if instead of sharing your iTunes libraries, you want to keep multiple libraries synchronized? This should sound familiar to anyone with a laptop computer on the go and a desktop sitting at home. Throughout the course of the day, you tweak some playlists and would like to have those changes automatically reflected in your library at home. David Miller shows you how to sync up your music. [O'Reilly MacDevCenter.com]
A designer's guide to CSS CSS: A Designer's Guide - Whether you're a CSS adept who needs help remembering the 342 approved hacks, or a traditional print (or Dreamweaver) designer for whom CSS layout is scary and confusing, Charles Wyke-Smith's designer's guide to CSS has you covered. [Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report]
Microsoft as evil - it's not just for jokes any more After doing some reading recently on the Net and then hearing a National Public Radio piece this morning on Microsoft's complicity in helping the Chinese government to censor its citizens, I am taking a clearer stance on how I feel about Bill Gates and company. I used to joke about Microsoft being the evil empire. Now it is true. There's an even better reason to use products that don't carry Microsoft's label, including Windows and Office... Rebecca McKinnon writes elloquently and forcefully about the issue, along with her opinion of the excuses some at Microsoft are using to justify helping the Chinese government to silence Chinese bloggers' use of such words as "democracy" and "human rights" in their online writing.
Experimenting with NeoOffice After using the newest versions of OpenOffice.org under X11 on my PowerBook over the last few years - including writing Birding Washington using the program - I made a switch a few weeks ago to a more Mac-like version of the open source office suite, NeoOffice. So far I find NeoOffice to be much easier to use. It still isn't completely Mac-like, but it comes much closer than OOo. Although I am very happy with NeoOffice to this point, I have to throw in some caveats:
I have started writing our latest book using NeoOffice, and I have done some of my city work using the track changes feature and found that the changes show up as expected when the document is then opened in Microsoft Office. So why bother trying another open source office suite? Well, I still think that Office costs too much to be worth it, and since I do most of my work in a word processor, I would use any Mac alternative that allows interoperability with Word and offers full features like the track changes feature. Unfortunately, most alternative word processors for the Mac are sorely lacking when it comes to features like track changes. OOo and NeoOffice simply work. They take a while to launch on first opening, but once you get past that overhead, they simply work. That sounds like the trademark of the whole Mac experience. |
Shifting the focus of Mac Net Journal Given the fact that for the last year I have posted less on Mac Net Journal, and seen the number of daily readers fall as a result, it is rewarding to read the thoughts of Amy Gahran about how daily blogging may not be a good idea. The premise is simple: Posting blather does nothing to add to the global conversation. This is one reason I am posting less on MNJ these days. Besides the fact that I work 50 hours a week on average for the City of Tacoma and that I have to update portions of the city's Web site every day, like the online newsroom I created, and the fact that my work as president of the Tahoma Audubon Society and my hours spent writing our newest book project all eat up time, I also had grown tired of posting endless links to the latest Apple products and essentially serving as a shill for the Mac industry. I chatted about this a couple of weeks ago with Doug Miller - how I had considered shutting down MNJ over the last year. I am not going to end my work on Mac Net Journal. But I am shifting the focus of the site to be a little wider and less all Mac, all the time. The reason is that I am simply not interested enough in the Mac world these days to stick just to that topic. I still plan to post mainly about the Mac and making the most of using these machines for creative work and living what I hope will be a rewarding life in the coming years, but expect more photography, more real life and less pushing the latest Mac gadgets and software. I must be growing up or something... |
Report states developer version of OS X runs on any Intel machine Report: Mac OS X 10.4.1 for Intel hits Internet software piracy sites - There is nothing at all that prevents the version of Mac OS X that runs on the developer transition machines from running on any PC... [MacDailyNews]
Conversion to Intel will vary for programmers Developers get taste of Intel-based Macs - For developers, the amount of work needed to make their code ready for next year's arrival of Intel-based Macs varies considerably. For Mac programs that are fairly new, written after the arrival of Mac OS X in Apple's Cocoa environment, the changes can be made in a matter of hours, or even less in some cases. [Studio Log]
Apple releases new security update Apple: Security Update 2005-006 - Released for 10.4.1 and 10.3.9 client and server, the update addresses a number of vulnerabilities in PHP, VPN, CoreGraphics, and more. [MacInTouch]
Automator scripts for iView MediaPro The blog for iView MediaPro points out new Automator scripts for use with the digital assets management tool. Excellent!
Macintouch reader report on Macs on Intel Macintouch has introduced a new reader report, this time focusing on the major news of the week: Macs on Intel.
And Classic shall be no more John Gruber speculates that Mac Classic will no longer exist when Apple actually makes the switch to Intel:
Writing on the MacDevCenter, Derrick Story brings the Apple on Intel questions to a head with this closing line:
So, would you buy a new Mac now? After all the buzz winds down and people realize it will effectively be two years before today's Intel announcement becomes reality and Mac OS X is another operating system to run on Intel-based PCs, the next logical question is whether you should buy a new Mac now or whether you should wait until the next generation machines arrive? There's an easy answer, of course - if you want to run Mac OS X today then you need a Mac. But it is a tougher question if, like me, you live your life on a PowerBook. From the sounds of things, PowerBook and iBook users are likely to be stuck with essentially the same computing choices for the next two years if they want to keep using Mac OS X. Ouch. What are your thoughts? I know that if I were a stock analyst, today I would see a hug hole in Apple's hardware strategy that extends into 2007, and that hole is an even bigger cause of concern if you are a PowerBook user. |
Apple announces its switch to Intel processors Apple: Steve Switches the Mac - He really did it - Steve Jobs just switched the Macintosh from PowerPC to the Intel x86 platform. Developers can order $999 "Developer Transition Kits" today. Meanwhile, a revolutionary translation technology, which Apple calls "Rosetta", might have a little bit to do with Transitive, whose board of directors chairman just happens to be the former president of NeXT.... Supposedly, this will let you run existing Mac applications on the Intel platform without great performance penalties. [MacInTouch]
The real value of our environment Dave Batker writes an informative and insightful piece in today's issue of The News Tribune on the economic value of natural systems like wetlands: http://www.thenewstribune.com/opinion/insight/story/4922968p-4508706c.html">Ecological assets. Dave, who is a friend and member of the Tahoma Audubon Society, offers solid reasoning for the way that developers of new housing in the hinterlands of Pierce County are getting off without paying the real costs of their impacts on the environment that everyone needs. It's worth reading, no matter where you live.
Robert Scoble's sources confirm Apple on Intel story Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble says his sources have confirmed that Steve Jobs will announce that Apple is switching to Intel chips for Mac OS X on Monday. Cats and dogs living together...mass hysteria...
Apple on Intel story may have traction Apple: Steve Jobs Switching? - Cnet reports that Steve Jobs will switch the Macintosh to Intel in his keynote address to developers on Monday.... [MacInTouch] If this is true, it may indeed be time that pigs fly on Monday.
Outlining and styles About This Particular Macintoush continues its excellent series of articles on outliners with a story this month about Outlining and styles. If you live in outliners or stay organized using outliner features, this article could be useful...
Apple announces free iPod recycling program Apple Announces Free iPod Recycling Program at... - Apple Announces Free iPod Recycling Program at US Retail Stores [Apple Press Releases] |
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