When you’re holding a Kindle, all you can do is read. When I read on an iPad, I always want to go check my email. And my feeds. And Tumblr. And Twitter. Just for a minute.

Marco.org – The Kindle update

If i-dosing means putting on your headphones and being alone in your head for a few minutes at a time, then it sounds more like a cure than a disease. The participating kids think they are getting high, but they’re really feeling the sensation of turning off their social network and reducing multiple incoming feeds to one monotonous signal. And it makes perfect sense that, after being surrounded by incoming data from every angle, kids would look for a “high” by closing their eyes and covering their ears.

Tweetage Wasteland : Dude, I’m Totally Wasted on the Internet

The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind’s filing system. When facts and experiences enter our long-term memory, we are able to weave them into the complex ideas that give richness to our thought. But the passage from working memory to long-term memory also forms a bottleneck in our brain. Whereas long-term memory has an almost unlimited capacity, working memory can hold only a relatively small amount of information at a time. And that short-term storage is fragile: A break in our attention can sweep its contents from our mind.

The penalty is amplified by what brain scientists call switching costs. Every time we shift our attention, the brain has to reorient itself, further taxing our mental resources. Many studies have shown that switching between just two tasks can add substantially to our cognitive load, impeding our thinking and increasing the likelihood that we’ll overlook or misinterpret important information. On the Internet, where we generally juggle several tasks, the switching costs pile ever higher.

The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains

Read the full series:

Darryl Cunningham Investigates: Homeopathy

Half marks are given for fragments of work; also for wrong answers arrived at via correct methods: “A kid who answers that a 2-foot-long skateboard is 48 inches long gets half-credit for adding 24 and 24 instead of the correct 12 plus 12 …”

The notion of “giftedness” is blurred and diluted down to nothing (current official ed-theory doctrine is that all students are gifted – I have not made that up) while heroic efforts, and boxcar-loads of cash, are devoted to instilling bookishness in the un-bookish. Often the bookish and the un-bookish are taught together, with malign results for both: the smart kids slumber in slowed-down lessons, while dim ones are academically overwhelmed.

Review: Educational Reductionism

Neither Google nor the current Android device manufacturers embody the part of Apple’s culture that allows them to release a great product on day one. They have a different pattern: It’s always getting better. We’re always supposedly one or two releases from it being really great.

Much like desktop Linux.

Marco.org – Great since day one

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

It brings to mind the current dichotomy between iPad fans and its detractors.

On new technology in general:

Another problem with the net is that it’s still “technology”, and “technology”, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is “stuff that doesn’t work yet.” We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often “crash” when we tried to use them.

How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet

Spider-Man swings all around the city on thick, sticky ropes of web. Who cleans it up? How many people arrive to work in the morning, only to find their windows covered with it?

Batman uses a lot of high-tech top-secret tools. He has a handheld gun that can fire a rope into a beam and lift him to the rafters of a warehouse, or the top of a skyscraper. He has batarangs that he throws all over the place, and never seems to retrieve. Is there a black market in found bat-items?

Superman, Spider-Man and other superheroes wear their costume under their street clothes, and at a moment’s notice they slip into a phone booth or a dark alley and transform in order to save the day. Don’t Peter Parker and Clark Kent carry a wallet with a driver’s license, credit cards and the like? Yet they have not been identified based on the contents of the pockets of their frequently abandoned clothes. How often do they have to buy new clothes?

How does Superman keep his hair so perfectly styled when he flies “faster than a speeding bullet”?

If Iceman is made of ice, how exactly does he move his limbs?

What is Destro’s head supposed to be made out of? If it’s metal, how does he make facial expressions and move his lips?

What are the odds that G.I. Joe and Cobra each recruited no more than and no less than one ninja? And that those two ninja happen to have a history?

Will the new line of Batman films ever introduce Robin? Let me go on record as saying I hope not.

What do you suppose Steve Jobs’ secret identity is?

I recently disabled comments on this site. It’s not widely read, and what readers I have don’t often comment. The level of attempted spam finally decided it. Readers can still remark using my contact form. The ones who know me personally know how to find me using Twitter, Facebook, or email.

But the truth is that spam isn’t the only reason I turned off comments; that was just the catalyst.

Of the many blogs I read, two do not have commenting systems: Daring Fireball and Marco.org. I have a certain sense of relief when I read those sites, and it feels like a different level of quality. Is it entirely due to the content, or is part of it that the cacophony of the unwashed masses isn’t waiting below to spoil the experience?

These two blogs are not like most blogs I read. They are platforms, or to borrow Gruber’s term, soapboxes. Somehow it feels better to read them.

My theory is that when you write for a site with a commenting system, everything you write is tainted by the expectation that there will be a response, and that the response will be attached. Like letting random strangers add footnotes to your thoughts. As I write these words, I feel a certain level of freedom, not caring what anybody might say or think about it. Sure, people can email me. There’s a slight possibility that someone will write a response on another site. But what I write here will stand as published, its message not driven in other directions by outside forces.

Blogs are often hailed as a participatory medium, where readers and authors can engage in a conversation. On a carefully managed site, I suppose that might be possible. But anyone who has managed a blog in recent history can tell you that a non-curated site will quickly become a link farm, peppered with flamewars. On popular sites, especially those with a technical or political bent, comment threads devolve rapidly.

Don’t even get me started on the “First!” idiots.

What is a comment, really? In rare cases, perhaps a thoughtful contribution to the initial statement or question. More commonly, it’s ego-stroking; people pick up their megaphone and shout into the darkness, simply because they can.

Sorry, but I’ll skip it. When I wear my writer’s hat, I’ll say what I want to say, and none of you out there get to slap a post-it note on the side with your brilliant observations. If you want a voice, get your own soapbox.

Programming is an embarrassment compared to other fields of engineering and design. Our mainstream culture is one of adolescent self-indulgence. It is like something from Gulliver’s Travels, with the curly-bracketeers vs. the indentationites vs. the parenthesesophiles. The only thing that everyone seems to agree upon is how stupid all the other programmers are.

Mea Culpa

It occurred to me that a small pop-up window would be much better than having a full-size browser window come up just for a second. Then I wondered if I could put a javascript: URL into the Fever˚ settings. And whaddya know, it works!

The new link I’m using (wrapped for readability):

javascript:window.open(
  'http://mysite.com/instapaper.php?url=%u&title=%t&selection=%e',
  'instapaper',
  'width=300,height=200,toolbar=0,scrollbars=0,resizable=1'
);

Right-click this link to copy it: Instapaper

On Earth Day, I feel it’s important to note a class of people who so far have gotten a complete pass in their complicity in destroying our environment. Everyone finds them oh-so-bemusing with their top hats and leather trench coats. And no one asks the question…

WHERE DOES ALL THAT STEAM COME FROM?

Yes, I’m talking, of course, about steampunk cosplayers.

THINK BEFORE YOU COSPLAY

Fever˚ also has Instapaper support, but it works a little differently. When focused on an article, you tap ‘i’ to open a new window containing a pre-filled Instapaper form, then click the ‘Add’ button. The item is added, and you’re left with a window showing your Instapaper unread items.

That’s not bad, but I didn’t want that window hanging around. I had to wait for it to load, then get rid of it. I had to take my hand off the keyboard to click the ‘Add’ button. It worked, but was less graceful than what I had before.

I spent a few minutes with PHP and came up with a solution. It’s not as pretty as what I had with Google Reader, but it’s just as fast, and works without any mousing, clicking, or lingering windows. I tap ‘i’ on an article, and a window pops up, says ‘Saved,’ and disappears on its own after a second or so. (If there’s a problem, you see an error instead and the window does not go away.)

First, create a script on your site. I named mine instapaper.php and put it at the root of my Fever˚ site. But you can put it anywhere, including on another domain entirely. You just need to know the URL to configure Fever˚ later.

<?php

$api = 'https://www.instapaper.com/api/add';
$close_timer = 750; // how many ms to display 'Saved!'

// Your instapaper.com credentials
$user = 'my_username';
$pass = 'my_password';

$u = urlencode( $_GET[ 'url' ] );
$t = urlencode( $_GET[ 'title' ] );
$s = urlencode( $_GET[ 'selection' ] );

$curl_url = "$api?username=$user&password=$pass&url=$u&title=$t&selection=$s";

$ch = curl_init( $curl_url );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE );
$ret = curl_exec( $ch );
curl_close( $ch );

if ( $ret == '201' ):
?>

<h2>Saved!</h2>
<script language="javascript"> 
setTimeout("self.close();",<?php echo $close_timer ?>) 
</script>

<?php else: ?>

<p>ERROR: instead of response code 201, we got:<br />
<?php echo $ret ?></p>

<?php endif ?>

Now, go into your Fever˚ preferences and click the ‘Sharing’ tab. I suggest removing the ‘i’ key from the Instapaper item, and changing its name (I used ‘ORIGINAL Instapaper’). That way it’s still there if you ever want to switch back.

Click the ‘+’ icon to add a new service. Name it ‘Instapaper,’ set the key to ‘i’ or whatever you prefer, and set the URL as follows. You’ll need to substitute the path to your script.

http://mysite.com/fever/instapaper.php?url=%u&title=%t&selection=%e

Click ‘Save’ and you’re done.

(I’ll write more about Fever˚ itself after I’ve used it for a while longer.)

But here’s what struck me most: their bathroom. Yes, yes, I know, I’m hopeless. Bear with me.

First, the toilet. As described to the user via a small plaque on the wall, there are two buttons on top. You push the button corresponding to your (ahem) deposit. The toilet will use more or less water to flush depending on your choice. Or, if you don’t want to touch anything, it will attempt to divine which way to go based on how long you took. Here is a toilet that thinks.

Did I mention there’s a solar panel on top? There’s another on top of the sink faucet. I can’t imagine they see much sunlight.

Speaking of light, it’s controlled by a motion sensor, so you can’t forget to turn it off when you leave.

The hand dryer has a spout at the bottom, on which is a sticker reading, “Feel the Power.” I smirked and thought “What idiot decided to put that stupid sticker there?” And then, I put my hands beneath it and felt the power. This machine must have put out three times the air velocity of your typical hand dryer. It was a wall-mounted jet engine.

Bravo, Chef Sawyer. Your staff are great; your food is fantastic; your bathroom, sir, is well-engineered.

A couple of them boiled down to: it just didn’t do what I needed. Alright, I have no problem with that. Doesn’t work for you, don’t keep it. Far be it from me to tell you how to spend your hard-earned dollars.

But over half of them complained about the closed, controlled nature of the device and the App Store model, and cited that as one of the reasons they didn’t keep the iPad.

And to you, dear sirs and madams, I can only say:

You are a sanctimonious asshole.

You heard me. What, do you think I don’t know that you have been well aware for years now how the App Store works? Did you think the iPad was magically going to be different from the iPhone in that respect? Am I supposed to believe that you are clueless about this issue, when you mentioned right in your post that you also own an iPhone?

I’m sure you had some other reason for returning the iPad, and that reason may well be one I have no argument with. But to complain about the software model, which you were fully informed about well before you bought an iPad?

That takes some gall.

So it’s not just that Apple has refused to support Flash. It cannot, logically, be done. A finger is not a mouse, and Flash sites are designed to require a mouse pointer (and keyboard) in fundamental ways. Someday that may change, and every Flash site could be redesigned with touch-friendly Flash. But that doesn’t make Flash sites work now.

Even if slow performance, battery drain and crashes weren’t problems with Flash (and they truly are), nothing can give users of any touchscreen, from any company, an acceptable experience with today’s Flash sites. The thing so many complainers want is simply an impossibility.

An Adobe Flash developer on why the iPad can’t use Flash

In an effort to curtail the genetic pollution created by “inferior” genes, some governments even enacted laws authorizing the forcible sterilization of the “insane, idiotic, imbecile, feebleminded or epileptic,” as well as individuals with criminal or promiscuous inclinations. Ultimately hundreds of thousands of people were forced or coerced into sterilization worldwide, over 65,000 of them in the country which pioneered the eugenic effort: The United States of America.

The group also spread their vision of genetic superiority by sponsoring a series of “Fitter Families” contests which were held at state fairs throughout the US. Alongside the state’s portliest pigs, swiftest horses, and most majestic vegetables, American families were judged for their quality of breeding. Entrants’ pedigrees were reviewed, their bodies examined, and their mental capacity measured.

Eugenics and You

You’re absolutely right. You’re gonna die. You’re gonna die. And nobody’s gonna care which version of the iPhone you used to make something on Twitter, or to go and post about your bowel movement on Facebook. And I’m not even talking about legacy; I’m talking about the fact that I personally feel most alive when I’m making something, and I feel least alive when I’m being led around by some obnoxious use of my attention that I wasn’t aware of. To me, that’s the thing. You can buy the jogging shoes and you can buy the Runner’s World, but until you put them on and walk out the door every day, you’re just a fat man.

There’s no amount of information that’s going to take the place of putting on the shoes and starting to move a little bit. And you’re not really doing Tae Kwan Do unless you’re kicking people. Reading all the sex manuals in the world is not going to do anything unless you’re touching genitals. Otherwise, you’re just reading. But it’s painful. People get mad when you say that, because we derive a lot of our self-esteem and satisfaction out of these things that we choose to consume. I’m not even talking about Pepsi. I’m talking about blogs, and I’m talking about Facebook. I’m talking about MySpace and what widgets you put where. We form our identity through all these alliances we build, and for a lot of people to say to them, “Well, what are you making as a result of that?”, what they’re making is a different version of their personality every day. That’s fine as long as that’s what they want to do, but when you’re 60, are you going to be happy that that’s where your youth went?

On his essay, Better:

In the “Better” essay, which is just a short kind of rant, I had this thing where I was like, “I want to do less stuff better.” I don’t mean it as a Martin Luther kind of thing. It’s more of a philosophical approach, of saying, “If we all just tried a little bit harder and we thought just a little bit more and we became less obsessed with clicking the buttons that make information move around and thought a little bit more about how our thinking and our cognition and our behavior and our decision-making changes as a result of that information.”

I’ve asked a dozen of my friends, “How many times did you change you mind about who you were going to vote for during the election?” They all say, “Oh, I knew all along.” I was like, “Then why were you reloading Huffington Post 40 times a day?” This is really the crux of where my brain is on this stuff right now. How do you know when you have enough information to do something? I really feel like that combination of little, easy motor skills and clicking combined with feeling a little less bored for a minute is completely addictive to people.

When the main way we communicate with each other is through all these things — and I’m not saying, “Don’t use Facebook, don’t use Twitter.” What I am saying is, if you’re not mindful about the amount of your attention that goes to thinking about and consuming those things, you’re not going to be making good stuff, either for that medium or elsewhere. That’s what I got kind of hung up on, when I finally realized that all I was doing was eating and producing potato chips all day long.

Doing Less Stuff Better, Seeing Your Face in the Marble and Making Immigrants Cry

You can be as cooly aloof as you like about the device, but it won’t change the fact that it’s a fundamental step forward in computing. Many consumers can surely afford to sit this initial release out until the costs come down and the quality goes up. But if you work in tech, you should spend some time with an iPad. If it doesn’t change the way you think about what you do, you’re either a genius or an idiot.

The Moderate’s Position on iPad Openness

iBooks’ use of tons of private APIs is frustrating on a few levels, the biggest that it makes all third-party reading-related apps second-class citizens.

I won’t be able to offer many features that iBooks has (such as a true brightness control or integration with the system dictionary), but my customers will expect them, making my app inferior to Apple’s in key areas.

It’s also a slap in the face that Apple is listing iBooks in the App Store, since they employ technical measures to ensure that every other App Store app doesn’t call any undocumented or private APIs. This app wouldn’t pass the App Store submission process, yet developers need to compete with it for App Store attention. One of the great potential failures of an app-review system is inconsistent or unfair enforcement of the rules.

Why are some APIs private or undocumented? Because they are not ready to be made public. If Apple isn’t sure it can support an API into the future, they aren’t going to make it public. Maybe they’ll make it public someday; maybe they won’t. But as soon as they make it public, they officially support it and therefore can’t change it easily (at least, not the external interface or the way it functions as exposed to the outside).

Example: Developers were originally not permitted to use UIGetScreenImage(), but Apple decided to make it public (sort of).

Imagine the uproar if they made a not-yet-ready API public, it became popular, and then they rearranged it completely, breaking a bunch of apps. Nobody wants that, least of all third party developers.

It only makes sense that Apple would have private APIs in their own apps. What better place to take a test drive and kick the tires?

I feel for Marco, and I’d love to see some of these features make it into Instapaper. But Apple didn’t create the most popular mobile platform in the world by cutting corners and bending their own rules about quality.

(By the way, you should try Instapaper. It’s completely changed how I use the web.)

She has been trying to drag photos out to a desktop folder, so she can upload them to a printing service. She’s found several photos that she can’t drag out. Most seem to work fine, but these won’t permit the file to be dragged.

Normally when you drag a photo out you get the green “plus sign” overlay icon, meaning a copy will be made. On these photos, she gets the “no smoking” slash-circle symbol.

Other symptoms:

• Right-click and “Show File” brings up a Finder window that shows the root disks of the machine. Normally you would get the folder where the photo lives, with the photo selected.

• If you double-click the photo to bring up the large view, you get a big pixellated question mark. Normally you’d get the large version of the photo.

It’s as if the photo’s entry is still in the database/index, but the actual photo file has gone missing.

I’ve tried a systemwide Repair Permissions in Disk Utility. I also started iPhoto up while holding cmd + opt, and selected several options:

• Rebuild the photos’ small thumbnails
• Recover orphaned photos in the iPhoto Library folder
• Examine and repair iPhoto Library file permissions
• Rebuild the iPhoto Library Database from automatic backup
• Reclaim unused disk space from databases

(In other words, the only option I did not try was “Rebuild all of the photos’ thumbnails.)

I’ve tried going into Time Machine, searching back to the oldest occurrence of the image I could find, and restoring it.

So far, nothing’s worked. I’m starting to fear filesystem corruption.

Anybody with any ideas, please let me know. If you already know my email address or have me on Facebook, feel free to contact me there. If you have neither, you can drop me a line using my contact form.

The most watched minute of video made in the last five years shows baby Charlie biting his brother’s finger. (Twice!) That minute has been watched by more people than the viewership of American Idol, Dancing With The Stars, and the Superbowl combined. (174 million views and counting.)

The Collapse of Complex Business Models

These people are utterly missing the point.

Human beings are, by our nature, tinkerers. Nothing is going to stop that. We started out in caves and straw huts, and a mere few thousand years later, we have walked on the moon and created objects that would have had us burned as witches two hundred years ago. The iPad is not going to kill that spirit.

What these people are completely ignoring is what Apple is. I know the common wisdom: Apple is a hardware company. They make software, but only to sell hardware. In a sense that’s true. But that’s not really what Apple is, at least not anymore.

Apple is an experience company.

Apple isn’t selling a pound and a half of silicon, aluminum and glass. They’re not selling you a machine. What Apple sells is an end-to-end experience, one that they want to work perfectly. That takes quality control.

By “quality control” I mean the App Store approval process. I’ve read many arguments against it. It goes against free software principles. It is the Disneyfication of software. It allows Apple to exercise great power over developers.

Sure, the App Store has some downsides, in the eyes of a certain class of user. But for the other 99.9% of the world, it has one huge, huge upside. You aren’t going to get malware from the App Store. You aren’t going to get porn in the App Store. And, within reason, you won’t get horribly buggy crap from the App Store.

You can trust the App Store.

That’s huge. We are told constantly that it’s not safe out there; you can’t open an attachment in an email; you have to constantly update your system with patches. In the traditional computer world, you can’t trust anything. Any program you find on the Internet could have a malicious purpose; you just don’t know.

That concern goes away on an iPhone or iPad.

And that’s a great experience.

My top picks

LaunchBar

LaunchBar is the ultimate Batman utility belt for your Mac. It’s difficult to concisely describe what it does, but I’ll try: you hit a key combo to bring up a small bar at the top of your screen, and with a few keystrokes you can find and run applications, locate and open files, contacts, or bookmarks, execute dozens (hundreds?) of commands doing all sorts of things, search Google and other services, control iTunes, and even do math. You can even add your own commands.

The only way to really understand why LaunchBar is great is to try it. There’s a free 30-day trial download; after that you have to buy a license. I’ve seen people balk at the price for what they consider a “basic” utility. I use LaunchBar easily fifty times a day, so I consider the price a bargain.

LaunchBar is powerful and full of surprises and functionality. I may write more about it another time.

If you’ve heard of Quicksilver, let me put it this way: LaunchBar is like Quicksilver, but without all the slowness, bugs, and developer abandonment.

1Password

1Password is a versatile vault for all kinds of information. Passwords, credit card info, random notes, software licenses, anything you want. It ties into most browsers and lets you auto-fill logins on sites. It also has an easy-to-use random password creator built in.

Here’s how I use 1Password when I set up a new account on a site.

1. I use 1Password’s random password generator to create a randomized, long password. I usually use about 20-24 characters, but you can go up to 50.

2. I log into the site with my newly minted password. 1Password will automatically detect the login and ask if I want to save it. I say yes.

3. The next time I need to log into the site, I just hit a key combo, and I’m automatically logged in.

Do you see the real advantage? It’s not just that I have the convenience of having something type my password for me. It’s that I can use a different and completely random password for every site I use, and I never have to remember any of them. All I need to know is the one password (get it?) to unlock my 1Password database.

If someone managed to crack my Facebook password, the damage would be limited to Facebook. They wouldn’t automatically have access to my Twitter account, my email, or (God forbid) be able to log into my bank account. I use Dropbox (see below) to sync my 1Password database between my desktop and my laptop, so I always have up-to-date data, whichever machine I am using.

1Password optionally syncs data to an iPhone app (via wifi), so you can have your data on-the-go.

Evernote

Evernote is a place to put anything you might want to remember and find later on. I use Evernote for all kinds of things. It has completely replaced all of the sticky notes, scraps of paper, random emails to myself, etc., which I used to use to stash bits of data that I didn’t want to lose. Now I just stuff it into Evernote, forget about it, and if I ever need it again, it’s right there.

Evernote can read images and extract words. You can take a picture of a sheet of paper, upload it to Evernote, and search for words in the picture to find it later. They even do handwriting recognition.

Another big plus to Evernote is that you can tag something with a URL. This is great for bookmarking articles. I used to use Delicious for these bookmarks, but I found that I would often go back to the site and the URL no longer worked. In the case of certain publications, the content would expire from the site (I’m looking at you, newspaper industry). The advantage with Evernote is that I can create a note containing the page’s contents, tag it with the URL, and if the link is broken when I go back, so what? I still have the contents of the page.

There are a number of Evernote clients available (Windows, Mac, iPhone, Blackberry, etc.), as well as access via their web site, so there are many ways to access your Evernote data.

Evernote is free, and you can upgrade to a Premium account if you want a larger monthly upload allowance.

Dropbox

In a word, Dropbox is magic. You have a folder, you drop in files, and they magically appear on any machine where you use Dropbox. I’ve seen other services try to do this (Apple’s iDisk, WebDAV in general…) but Dropbox is the first one I’ve used where it “just works” every time, and it’s fast.

I use Dropbox when I want to edit a file on multiple computers. I also use it to sync my 1Password database between machines. Because the 1Password data is encrypted with AES-128, it’s no problem to leave it out in the cloud.

Bonus: Dropbox is free if you don’t need more than 2GB.

TextMate

TextMate: easily the best text editor I have ever used. As I’ve said before, TextMate has all the extensibility of Emacs, but with none of the Lisp or Richard Stallman.

TextMate is one of those applications that is deceptively simple. At launch, you see nothing but a blank text window. Hidden beneath that simple face is a powerhouse.

I use TextMate for writing, coding, designing, and prototyping. The ability to invent new commands by writing small scripts is very powerful. Unlike some editors, you aren’t limited to a language that was chosen for you. You can use any common interpreted language. I’ve written TextMate commands in Bash, Perl, Ruby, and even PHP. (Though I regret the latter.)

TextMate isn’t cheap for “just a text editor,” but if you spend a significant amount of your time editing text, and especially if you write code more than occasionally, it’s well worth the price. I wrote this post in TextMate using Markdown.

Adium

Adium is a powerful instant messaging client with support for nearly every protocol that exists. I use it for AIM and Jabber, but it also supports ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, Google Talk, Novell Groupwise, Facebook, and a bunch more. In other words, if you’re on a bunch of networks and you don’t want to run a bunch of apps to use them all, Adium is for you.

ClickToFlash

I use ClickToFlash to block Flash content in Safari. Because I hate Flash.

ClickToFlash couldn’t be easier. Wherever Flash would be, you see a gray box that says “Flash” in the middle. If you want to load that object, click. You can also load everything on a page at once, or you can whitelist a domain (e.g. youtube.com) so it always loads Flash without a click. It only works with Safari.

Skitch

Skitch has a simple purpose: let you take a snapshot of something on your screen, and upload it to the web, quickly and easily. I use this at least a few times per week.

By default, Skitch uploads your snapshots to skitch.com. If you prefer, you can configure Skitch to upload elsewhere, like Flickr, or a WebDAV, FTP, or SFTP server. I have Skitch save files to my web site using SFTP.

SSHKeychain

If you use SSH, SSHKeychain is invaluable. As a systems engineer, I use SSH dozens of times every day.

SSHKeychain is an SSH agent, which means it can memorize keys and passphrases for you (to avoid constantly typing them in), and it can forward that authentication data through to other servers (in case you have to jump through one server to get to another, but need to use the same key on both). It can also handle some common tasks like creating SSH tunnels.

Yes, I know, Terminal has an ssh-agent built in, but each window gets its own. So you are constantly typing in your passphrase. It’s annoying, especially if you open several windows in a series.

Second stringers (good to have around)

Firefox

I hardly ever use Firefox, but I keep it around because occasionally I run across a site that is broken in Safari. Usually these sites work in Firefox (but not always – yes, there are still IE-only sites out there).

Flip4Mac WMV Player

Flip4Mac plays Windows Media formats in Quicktime (including in webpage-embedded views).

Perian

Perian is another Quicktime add-on. It understands a bunch of video formats, including DiVX.

ExpanDrive

ExpanDrive allows you to mount remote servers as local volumes. If you have a server that you can access via SSH, you can mount filesystems on that server on your Mac, using SSH (SFTP). It also supports FTP and Amazon S3. This is a great way to edit remote files with your favorite Mac text editor (like TextMate).

ExpanDrive is currently US$39.95.

After studying the 58 scandals over the past 20 years involving all politicians or major candidates for city mayor and above—many involved crimes, others just allegations, but all wound up as tabloid fodder—some conclusions can be reached.

The number [of] sex scandals has increased dramatically over the past few decades, thanks to technology, new press standards and a post-Clinton belief that everything is fair game.

Republicans have more scandals (32 to 26), but Democrats have bigger ones, based on our methodology (13 out of the top 20).

Democrats tend to have more problems with harassment, staffers and underage girls; Republicans tend to have more problems with prostitutes, hypocrisy and underage boys.

Which Party Has More Sex Scandals?