February 2006 Archives

I like trying out lots of shareware and freeware programs. If I don't like them, I drag the application into the trash. But that's not really the best way to delete applications, because a lot of them have preference files and other supporting files. Who knows where they are or what they are called? I don't.

But a Mac OS X application called AppZapper does know about all the extra files that are associated with an application. To delete an application, just drag it onto the AppZapper icon. In a matter of seconds, you'll be presented with a list of folders and files that belong to the application. You can uncheck any file you want to keep (I've deleted about 20 applications with AppZapper and haven't had to uncheck anything yet.) I've zapped away about 2 GB worth of unwanted junk from my hard drive.

You can zap five applications for free. After that, you have to pay $12.95, which includes free upgrades for life. Link

I'm angry that I didn't buy this 20-inch Apple monitor for my 12-inch PowerBook sooner. All those wasted days of dragging and clicking windows on a cramped screen!

I really like the fact that I no longer dread doing things that require copy and pasting information from one window to another. My productivity has truly gone up since I got this. It's a bargain. $749 on Amazon

Born in 1895 in the Bronx, Milt Gross was a cartoonist during the first half of the 20th Century. He's not well-known today, but among today's top cartoonists, he is considered one of the masters of the field. This 256 graphic novel was created by Gross in 1930, and like the movies of the era, is "silent" in that it has no words in it. It's no coincidence that Gross collaborated with Charlie Chaplin in the 1928 movie, The Circus.

When I first came across Milt Gross, I suddenly realized where Mad magazine creator Harvey Kurtzman got his inspiration. I think it is safe to say that if there was no Milt Gross, there'd be no Mad magazine.

Here's what Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi said about Gross:

John K: "The greatest guy even in that style is Milt Gross -- the greatest comic strip artist of all time and he does a style that's very similar to Gerald McBoingBoing except it's funny. It's funny and it's human. He'd draw a crowd scene and every character looks completely different, and you can tell instantly by looking at the character what kind of a person it is. He is amazing. And he has great drawing principles behind his work. A lot of people will look at his work, a lot of accomplished artists today and they would say he draws primitively. He doesn't at all. He has fantastic composition; the best composition of any cartoonist I've ever seen in my life." $11.53 on Amazon

When the Royal Hawaiian Hotel opened for business in March 1927, guests enjoyed the sounds of the hotel orchestra in the Monarch Room. The ukulele player in the band was a 21-year-old named Bill Tapia, who learned how to play the uke after buying one at the age of seven from Manuel Nunes, one of the very first ukulele makers on earth (Nunes ukes are worth a fortune today.)

Bill Tapia is 97, and he still gives lessons and plays the ukulele in clubs around Southern California. I've had the pleasure of twices seeing the dapper and happy Tapia perform.

This CD, the Duke of Uke, has songs recorded recently and in 1936. They music is sweet and jazzy, as all uke music should be. $16.99 on Amazon

It's commonly known that the displays on iPod Videos and iPod Nanos scratch if you look at them cross-eyed. I tried taking good care of my iPod video, but the screen got scratches all over it in a matter of days. Whatever they are using for the display, it is one of the softest materials known to man.

Being good at closing the barn door after the cows have gotten out, I bought a Macally IP-P802. It's a bad name for a nice product: a sheet of clear plastic that wraps around the iPod, protecting the display. The neat thing about it is that the plastic (or the undetectable adhesive on the plastic) covered up the scratches so that I barely notice them. I don't know how long this stuff will hold up to scratches, but at least they're cheap. Until Apple starts playing nice, you need to protect your iPod's display. $7.98 on Amazon

How Computers Work: Processor and Main Memory, by Roger Young is a free PDF and Internet book that explains how computers do their thing at the very lowest, bit-shuffling level. You don't need to know anything about math or science to understand this book. Excerpt:

The picture above shows a 'bottom key' that controls an electromagnet.

The electromagnet, in turn, controls the top key. A key and the electromagnet that controls it are, together, called a relay. The relay is in the dashed box.

When the bottom key is pressed, the electromagnet is powered and the electromagnet becomes magnetic. That makes the electromagnet attract the top key and pull the top key down just like a finger can push a key down. A magnet (or a powered electromagnet) attracts the top key because the top key is made of steel. A magnet (or a powered electromagnet) does not attract the wires because the wires are made of copper.

Important: The electromagnet does not ever touch the top key. No electricity can go from the electromagnet to the wires attached to the top key.

A computer is almost entirely made up of a lot of relays (today, transistors) connected by wires. Just how the relays are connected and just what they do is the main subject of this book. Other concepts, especially programming, will also be explained.

If you read this book and Forest M. Mim III's Getting Started in Electronics, you'll know more about the subject than 99.9 percent of the people on the planet. Link

After reading this piece by Getting Started in Electronics author Forest M. Mims III on how dry air on airplanes is a big reason why people catch colds, I bought humidfiers for the house. I got my two daughters these adorable animals humidifiers. My girls love the way the fog comes out of the elephant's trunk.

The air in our house gets really dry in the winter and the girls have been coughing off and on for months. They've stopped coughing since I've put these in their rooms. Coincidence? I think not. $29.99 on Amazon

I have an 80 GB hard drive, and it's always on the verge of filling up. Most of the files are podcasts, music, and videos. To reclaim space, every month or so I go through the disk, deleting applications and files I don't need any longer.

A free application for Macintosh OS X called Disk Inventory X is a wonderful visual tool that shows me which folders and files are taking up the most space on my computer. It color codes the files by type, making it easy to pinpoint the storage hogs. One of the most common culprits are AIFF files that I have yet to convert to MP3s. I've also found duplicate email folders and iPhoto volumes using Disk Inventory X. It's a must-have utility. Link

These inexpensive anthologies of 1960s Jack Kirby comics contain the finest stories Marvel comics ever published. As far as superheroes go, nothing can compare with these. I haven't read them in a long time, and I expected the passing of time, as well as the jadedness that comes with age, to diminish my enjoyment of this work. But they're fresh and exciting. Kirby really is king. Vol 3 Vol 4 (More Kirby: Kamandi, Marvel Masterworks Fantastic Four)

One square inch of a Todd Schorr painting has more eyeball kicks than an acre of canvases from a typical modern art gallery. Schorr begins where Robert Williams leaves off -- both artists mine the artifacts of trash pop culture: tikis, Bettie Page, hot rods, tattoos, cartoon characters, bikers, skulls, Polynesian pop, Beatniks, kitsch -- but Schorr's level of detail surpasses Williams. It must take him months to complete a painting, and they are all beautiful and a joy to pore over.

As a bonus, the accompanying commentary is expertly written by former bOING bOING contributor and science fiction writer, Paul DiFilippo, who has an eye for the whimsical and the intellect to find the profound truths hiding behind the pop culture icons that Schorr incorporates into his work. $25.17 on Amazon

You can't go wrong with a Bill Bryson book. I've read several, and they're all excellent. Bryson is mainly known as a travel writer. He was born in the midwest, but spent 20 years living in England, where he got married to a Brit and raised a family. (He even picked up a bit of a British accent, judging from the audio book version of In A Sunburned Country the he entertainingly read.)

When Bryson returned to the United States, one of his UK newspaper editors asked him to write a weekly column about what it was like to move back to America after two decades in the UK. This book, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away is a compilation of those columns. Bryson insightfully and hilariously (I had to suppress laughter while reading it late at night in bed so as not to wake up my wife) comments on everyday life in a small New England town. Excerpt:

Still, I can't criticize because I live in the state with the most demented of all license plate slogans, the strange and pugnacious "Live Free or Die." Perhaps I take these things too literally, but I really don't like driving around with an explicit written vow to expire if things don't go right. Frankly, I would prefer something a little more equivocal and less terminal-"Live Free or Pout" perhaps, or maybe "Live Free or Bitch Mightily to Anyone Who'll Listen."

All this is a somewhat circuitous way of introducing our important topic-namely, how boring it is to make a long car journey these days. If you have been following this space closely (and if not, why not?) you will recall that last week I discussed how we recently drove from New Hampshire to Ohio in order to deliver my eldest son to a university that had offered to house and educate him for the next four years in return for a sum of money not unadjacent to the cost of a moon launch.

What I didn't tell you then, because I didn't want to upset you on my first week back from vacation, is what a nightmare experience it was. Now please understand, I am as fond of my wife and children as the next man, no matter how much they cost me per annum in footwear and Nintendo games (which is, frankly, a lot), but that isn't to say that I wish to pass a week with them ever again in a sealed metal chamber on an American highway.

$10.17 on Amazon

I've tried several different kinds of expensive polishing liquids to keep my eyeglasses, iPod, laptops, and CDs/DVDs clean and shiny, but none work as well as a cheap microfiber cloth and a few drops of water (preferably filtered). These cloths are great at removing fingerprints from brushed stainless steel too. I have ten of them distributed around my home, office, and car. $1.95 at Amazon

I recently got an iPod video and I use it to watch movies while I pedal and climb on the machines at the gym. It makes the time go by so quickly that I sometimes stay on the machine for an extra five minutes or so during especially good parts of a movie. This is a miracle for me.

I use a fantastic free application called HandBrake Lite to transfer my DVDs to a format playable on the iPod. It's free and couldn't be simpler to use. You stick a DVD into your Mac, click "Open" to select the DVD, then click "Rip." That's it.

On my G3 eMac, it takes about 2 hours to convert a movie. The final size is about 500 MB. I like watching classic movies on the iPod the best, because they fill the entire iPod screen. Newer letterbox movies become thin horizontal strips.
Link

If you read Mad Professor via RSS, please resubscribe using this feed:

Subscribe to Mad Professor

Everyone has heard of John Huston's movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, starring Humphrey Bogart. For some reason, I never got around to seeing it. I decided to read the book first. It ranks among the top 20 or so books I've ever read.

Dobbs is an out-of-work hard-luck American loser living in Mexico in the 1930s, in the waning years of the Mexican oil boom. Work in the oil fields is hard to come by, and he makes ends meet by bumming pesos off well-heeled Americans. One night, he and another drifter listen to an old man named Howard spin a tale about a fabulous gold mine in the Sierra Madre mountains. The next day, the trio make up their mind to prospect for gold in the lawless Mexican countryside.

It's a lot harder getting the gold than the two younger men expect. You have to grind up tons of rocks into sand, and haul water a long distance to wash the sand, just to yield a few ounces of gold. Days are scorching, nights are freezing, the diet is monotonous, the work is exhausting, and there's the constant fear of banditos and corrupt soldiers waiting to take their gold and shoot them on the spot. But bit-by-bit, the three men accumulate a sizable pile of gold dust, and that's when the greed of gold-fever sets in, with nasty consequences.

The author B. Traven, reminds me a bit of Hemingway and Steinbeck, but I find his work even more engaging and empathetic. Not much is know about Traven. He appears to have been as desirous of his privacy as Pynchon. The rumor is that he was a German anarchist who fled to Mexico in the early 1930s. No one knows for sure. $10.20 on Amazon

The earphones that come with the iPod are kind of like the one button mouse that used to come with the Mac -- good looking but functionally crippled.

Even though the latest iPod is much improved over the first 5GB model, Apple pigheadedly insists on including the same round earphones they issued with the original iPod. These earphones fall out of my ears and aren't loud enough.

Griffin's EarThumps are the earphones that should come with every iPod. I usually don't like buds that stick in my ear, but the EarThumps are very comfortable, even when I push them far into my ear canals to block out the grunting sounds that the steroid junkies at the gym make while they're weighlifting.

I'm not an audiophile, so I can't tell you about dynamic frequency response or that kind of stuff. They sound fine to me, but most of what I listen to consists of low-fi podcasts and MP3s of scratchy LPs and 78s. $19.99 at Amazon

I'm an unabashed fan of Merlin Mann's 43 Folders productivity weblog. It's where I learned about David Allen's now-famous book about productivity, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity . I bought the book and read it last year, and incorporated a lot of what I learned into my daily routine. But I re-read the book recently and came back with a deeper understanding of what the book is really about. The best summary is on page 19: "The real issue is how to make appropriate choices about what to do at any point in time. The real issue is how we manage actions."

That's the GTD process in a nutshell. It's about setting up a system that allows you to quickly review every single thing you want to do -- large (writing a book) and small (changing the wiper blades on your car) -- so you can decide on the best next physical action you can take to elicit the changes in your life that you desire.

I want to read this book once a year. I have a feeling there is still much to learn. $10.20 on Amazon