• Jónsi – Hengilás
  • Jónsi – Grow Till Tall
  • Jónsi – Around Us
  • Jónsi – Kolniður
  • Jónsi – Sinking Friendships
  • Jónsi – Boy Lilikoi
  • Jónsi – Tornado
  • Jónsi – Animal Arithmetic

Tools I like very much

I’m a dab­bler.  Always dab­bling.  I have no qualms about hand­ing over my user­name and pass­word to any webapp that looks use­ful / worth 5 min­utes of my time.  As a result i have A LOT of mem­ber accounts all across the inter­net.  Most of these new sites or ser­vices get tossed aside, either imme­di­ately, or in time.  But a few per­sist.  These are the web apps that are really using web tech­nol­ogy to make life eas­ier and fore fun to live.  Yes, a web­site CAN do that!
In an attempt to try and brain-dump some of my work­flow i’ve decided to write a series of posts on my favorite web apps and how they have touched my life…

HARVEST — The sin­gle best busi­ness expense i’ve made has been my sub­scrip­tion to Har­vests time-tracking and invoic­ing web app.  I use Har­vest to log ALL my time spent work­ing, cod­ing by client and project as i go.  Then, when it comes time to invoice the client, a cou­ple clicks gen­er­ates a professional-looking invoice, and a cou­ple more to send the invoice off to the client, No paper, no postage.  They include an option to receive Pay­pal pay­ments on your invoices, if you’re into that.

Har­vest has also recently got­ten off their duffs and released an offi­cial iPhone app that is just a delight to use!  The old un-official app never quite synced right, so i would end up with timers run­ning overnight.  If only those were bill­able hours.… *sigh*

One great tip i heard from a fel­low Har­vest user was to set up your work­day in Har­vest, cre­ate a timer for each task you plan to accom­plish that day.  As you com­plete a task, stop the timer and just start the next one, like a chess timer.

Another pro­duc­tiv­ity tool that has become more and more use­ful is

Drop­box - Too lazy to reach into your pocket to pull out your flash drive?  Then you need Drop­box! This lit­tle swiss army knife is lit­tle more than a secure, per­sonal, 2GB flash drive that lives on the net.  Where it gets inter­est­ing is the com­pan­ion soft­ware (avail­able for Mac, Win­dows, and Linux) which makes your Drop­box folder appear as a folder in your Home direc­tory.  Just drag & drop.  Love it!

I even have mine set up to allow me to trig­ger down­loads on my home com­puter from any­where.  Very cool/handy.

If you want to check out Drop­box, con­sider using my refer­ral link, as we will both get a nice lit­tle stor­age bump on our accounts ;-)

Please feel free to share your faves too.  i’m always inter­ested in new and cool web tech­nolo­gies so share in the comments!

What I'm Into: lately

It’s not as if you asked, but here are my lat­est deli­cious links, from Feb­ru­ary 16th through March 9th:

  • Slinkware –Ummm, this is so dang cool. So i set it up on my desk­top at home, and then later i’m at the cof­fee shop on my lap­pie and i need a file i know is still sit­ting in my down­loads folder. I fired up Slink and was effort­lessly con­nected to my home net­work. Shared drive, the printer, even Screen Shar­ing worked per­fectly, as if i were sit­ting in my liv­ing room. So sweet. So easy.

What I’m Into: lately

It’s not as if you asked, but here are my lat­est deli­cious links, from Decem­ber 30th through Feb­ru­ary 2nd:

  • Send a FAX by E-mail

    Yes, thats right. SEND a FAX by EMAIL! No reg­is­tra­tion, no cost. Just fol­low the easy instruc­tions on the page. I love this, it’s like the blu-ray ver­sion of BETAMAX.

  • The Card Game — How Visa, Using Fees Behind Its Debit Card, Dom­i­nates a Mar­ket — Series — NYTimes.com

    This detailed look at the world of credit/debit cards is a must read for any­one who uses a card to pay for any­thing. Ever.

    The sys­tem is bro­ken and will never get fixed if we don’t even know that it’s bro­ken because it’s too damn obfus­cated to make any sense out of it. But it sure is con­ve­nient.… Just remem­ber: Con­ve­nience is expensive.

  • 10 Tax Deduc­tions Free­lancers Can Make | Free­lanceSwitch

    Some of these are com­mon sense, some are not. But worth the short read if you are a freelancer.

    The com­ments are lively and infor­ma­tive as well, some extra point­ers in there too.

  • Vir­tu­al­iza­tion: Win­dows on a Mac

    this has been a hot topic as droves of Win­dows devo­tees cast off the dogma of an ancient regime and begin adopt­ing Macs. RobG lays out a com­pre­hen­sive guide here cov­er­ing the 3 major play­ers in Mac vir­tu­al­iza­tion, includ­ing how to pick the right one for you, in-depth looks at each one, caveats, sug­ges­tions, and more. Very use­ful resource if you are just get­ting into the wild, woolly world of OS virtualization.

    I just started play­ing with Par­al­lels 5 and i really like the Coher­ence mode that allows me to run Win­dows apps as if they were just another Mac app on my machine, seam­less, unob­tru­sive, and COOL!

  • Save MySQL! » Cus­tomers pay the bill

    Whether you know it or not this has much to do with the neu­tral­ity of our inter­net. Free soft­ware is used to run MOST of the inter­net. And MySQL is a big part of what makes that pos­si­ble. It puts the “M” in LAMP.

    The acqui­si­tion of MySQL by Ora­cle would be noth­ing short of monop­oly. Ora­cle DBs are the indus­try stan­dard. MySQL is the scrappy open-source alter­na­tive that won’t go away. If Ora­cle acquires MySQL you can be sure that it will finally go away.

  • Move Your Money

    A wor­thy New Years Res­o­lu­tion: Move you money away from “un-failable” bank­ing giants and into your community.

Two Thousand and Fine: Download This

READ THIS:  Impor­tant instruc­tions on get­ting PRESENTS

You lucky, lucky peo­ple!  You don’t even know.

Merry every­thing to every­one, and i truly mean that.

Because i am feel­ing so gen­er­ous i’ve gone ahead and made presents for EVERYONE I KNOW (and even some folks i don’t know, i’m sure)!

To claim your own gift sim­ply click through to the Two Thou­sand and Fine page of my site, there you will find more info and links to down­load your gift(s).  Feel free to down­load one or all of them, whichever sounds most appeal­ing to you really.

What I’m Into: lately

It’s not as if you asked, but here are my lat­est deli­cious links, from Decem­ber 7th through Decem­ber 16th:

  • Dive Into HTML5

    Great ref­er­ence mate­r­ial on HTML5. If you’re into that sort of thing.

  • WhoSam­pled — Dis­cover and Dis­cuss Music Sam­ples and Cover Songs

    This is actu­ally a really cool music-nerd web­site. Search songs, find the sam­ples, lis­ten to the orig­i­nal tracks, lis­ten to the sam­pled ver­sion, simul­ta­ne­ously if you like!

    To test it out i sim­ply did a search on DJ Shadow, what ensued was a cou­ple bliss­ful hours of dig­ging through youtube videos, old soul & R&B record­ings, and in gen­eral los­ing myself in the sounds. Time well-spent if you ask me.

  • 10/GUI

    A thor­ough reex­am­i­na­tion of human-computer inter­ac­tion. Includ­ing where we’ve come from, where we are, and one very intrigu­ing pro­posal for how we move forward.

    If you are in any way inter­ested in how humans inter­act with machines, this video will be inter­est­ing to you.

What I’m Into: lately

It’s not as if you asked, but here are my lat­est deli­cious links, from Novem­ber 25th through Decem­ber 6th:

  • Browse fonts | Type­kit

    Type­kit brings together the @font-face CSS selec­tor and freely avail­able open-source fonts to allow the REAL web­de­sign to begin.

    Type­kit serves up the font files to your web­site in a secure way, and ensures that you won’t be inad­ver­tently vio­lat­ing any IP rights on fonts that you are using, OR inse­curely serv­ing them on your site for other to steal.

    The web inter­face is slick, there are a bunch of good type­faces to choose from (even for the free ver­sion of the ser­vice), and there’s even a cou­ple word­press plu­g­ins for Type­kit already. So what are you wait­ing for?

  • Myths & Mis­con­cep­tions About Grid Sys­tems

    Are you a designer? Do you grid? A rel­e­vant arti­cle on AisleOne dis­cusses some myths & truths about grib-based design (for print OR web) and offer resources and examples.

    I espe­cially like the fluid grid resources.

  • Mak­ing A Glove Work With A Touch Screen

    A handy instructable (pun intended).

    I do hate hav­ing to remove gloves to fid­dle with the iPhone. If i can find some of this con­duc­tive thread i may try this one.

Google DNS benchmarked. And it's s l o w .

It’s offi­cial, Google has taken over the internet.

If you missed the news, or just don’t care, Google announced the launch of their new DNS ser­vice.  In their own words, you could think of DNS as “the switch­board of the Inter­net”.  The move to offer this new ser­vice is a ver­ti­cally inte­grated move for Google to con­trol yet more bits of your over­all inter­net­ing experience.

Recently, the Googs has pub­licly pro­claimed their inter­est in mak­ing the inter­net a faster place to be.  The intro­duc­tion of Google DNS seems to be a step towards mak­ing that a real­ity.  What—reality?  Well, i was curi­ous to see how the Google’s new DNS servers mea­sured up to exist­ing DNS providers.  So i fired up namebench and plugged the Google DNS server addys into it.  Here’s what i got:

DNS Response Time Graph

DNS Response Time Graph

High­lighted are the Google servers.  Not too impres­sive, huh?  Con­tribut­ing fac­tors to this data are my admit­tedly crappy Qwest DSL con­nec­tion, and loca­tion.  But even so, it looks like the ser­vice is not run­ning at top speed just yet, so hold off on switch­ing your name­servers.  Per­haps with time the server response will improve?

Google DNS Server Test

Google DNS Server Test

The above screen­shot shows test details for the Google DNS servers.  Of note from this data are the “shares cache with” lines in the right col­umn.  These are DNS servers that have essen­tially been sub­sumed by the Google’s new DNS servers.  Dwarfed, over­shad­owed, gob­bled up.

If you are inter­ested in test­ing the Goolge DNS servers from your own con­nec­tion here are the name­server addresses to use:

  • 8.8.8.8
  • 8.8.4.4

Easy, right?  I’ll give them that much.  You can use the pre­vi­ously men­tioned namebench, which tests your exist­ing name­servers or any you pro­vide against oth­ers in your area as well as big ones like OpenDNS and UltraDNS.  If you’re CLI inclined then a sim­ple tracer­oute will show you every hop from your ‘puter to the WWW and every­thing along the way.  Like this:

$ traceroute -v 8.8.8.8

You can also per­form a tracer­oute using the Net­work Util­ity app included in OS X (it’s in Applications/Utilities).

The spirit of the times, so says You/Google

Screen shot 2009-12-01 at 12.10.23 PMIt’s Decem­ber 1st.  Let the year-end ret­ro­spec­tives begin!  For the rest of 2009 we will be hear­ing all about the top 5, 10, 100 every­things of 2009.  And who bet­ter to kick that off than the undis­puted keep­ers of our col­lec­tive aware­ness:  the Google.

The Google Zeit­geist is the compendium—boiled-down, con­densed, and pre-digested—of the years hottest trends across the inter­net, based almost entirely on what we are search­ing for at any given time.   Check out trends by cat­e­gory or region, it’s fas­ci­nat­ing.  A true vox pop­uli for the inter­net age.

For me per­son­ally, this years Zeit­geist has suc­ceeded mainly in mak­ing me feel incred­i­bly out of touch with the main­stream (srsly, who IS Tay­lor Swift?)

via the Offi­cial Google Blog

Are energy-drinks really harshing your mellow?

asleepA study in extremes?  A mar­ket­ing fad-wagon?  A good idea?

Promis­ing a “vaca­tion in a bot­tle” or an “acupunc­ture ses­sion in every can,” mak­ers of anti-energy drinks, as they’re known, say that after bailouts, fore­clo­sures and Ponzi schemes, Amer­i­cans nowa­days would rather chill out than tweak out. To help us do so, they’re spik­ing their new bev­er­ages with ingre­di­ents such as chamomile, mela­tonin, and valer­ian root — all known for their sup­posed calm­ing effects.

To be sure, there are def­i­nitely some ben­e­fits to offer­ing mod­ern human­ity more ways to just calm down.  Intro­duc­ing the main­stream to plant med­i­cines such as valer­ian root and kava kava root are also pluses as I see it.  How­ever, these treat­ments need to be more widely under­stood and used if we hope to break our toxic depen­dence on west­ern med­i­cines “treat the symp­tom, not the dis­ease” disease.

As anti-energy drinks gain in pop­u­lar­ity we’ll surely begin to see ever more research on the com­pounds that give the drinks their mel­low.  This will lead to warn­ing labels, con­flict­ing health advice from com­pet­ing drink mak­ers’ mar­ket­ing depart­ments, and fear-mongering of potent plant-based med­i­cines such as valer­ian and kava.  Fur­ther, there have already been stud­ies which have proven that kava lac­tones, the active ingre­di­ent in kava kava can be dam­ag­ing to the liver (made worse if com­bined with alco­hol!) .  This research just under­scores the impor­tance of using these herbs in their whole state, rather than extract­ing the potenet lac­tones and divorc­ing the med­i­cine from the com­plex of vit­a­mins, min­er­als, and flavi­noids that mit­i­gate and bal­ance these strong medicines.

Mela­tonin is also being used in these drinks, and while mela­tonin is a naturally-occurring hor­mone in our brains, it’s the one that reg­u­lates our sleep.  Mess­ing with the bod­ies equi­lib­rium by intro­duc­ing added doses of hor­mones, amino acids, etc. can have all sorts of unde­sired effects (i.e. insomnia).

Ulti­mately, i am of the opin­ion that this newest trend in bev­er­age mar­ket­ing will be the most destruc­tive yet.  These prod­ucts WILL be abused because they are mind/body alter­ing sub­stances and peo­ple seems to really love that shit.

via Daily Finance

What I’m Into: lately

It’s not as if you asked, but here are my lat­est deli­cious links, from Novem­ber 14th through Novem­ber 18th: