I recently switched from Google Reader to Fever°. I am happy I switched, but I quickly missed the ease with which I could save articles to Instapaper. The Instapaper bookmarklet has some way of divining which article you’re focused on in Google Reader, so you can add the article right from the feed page, instead of opening the article itself, then adding it to Instapaper. It’s very convenient, and fast. 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. ...

iPad Launch Day is upon us, and with it comes another wave of articles and opinions. This week I’ve read several times about the coming death of the tinkerer class. Old-school hackers bemoaning the closed nature of the iPad/iPhone ecosystem, theorizing that if iPad were the state of the art when they came of age, they would never have become programmers. They dangle this theory like a specter: a future is coming when young people won’t have the opportunity to tinker, to become entranced by technology, or to ultimately grow up and become as awesome as they are. ...

Yesterday afternoon, my wife lost her grip on her MacBook, and it fell to the floor, resulting in a catastrophic hard drive failure. The disk utilities could no longer even detect there was a drive installed. I created a temporary account on my laptop for her, and prepared myself for a major headache recovering data the next day. This morning, I picked up a new disk at Best Buy. (That I can now buy 250GB, at retail, for only $60, is mind-boggling.) It took only a few minutes to swap the disks physically, and another ten or so to boot from the Snow Leopard DVD, plug in the Time Machine backup disk, and start a restore. It told me to come back in about two hours, and when I did, the machine was ready to go. ...

SPOILER ALERT: This post discusses the film adaptation of “Where the Wild Things Are.” It came out quite a while ago. If you wanted to see it, you probably already have. Still, if you don’t want any spoilers, mosey on along. I saw “Where the Wild Things Are” with my wife, back when it was in theaters. I didn’t see it because I had any particular attachment to the book from my childhood. Nor because of the controversy at the time surrounding the question of whether it was too visceral or violent for children (though I now realize young children are not, and never were, its audience). I saw it because we hadn’t gone to a movie in a while, and we had a sitter. ...

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard about iPad by now. Given the rhetoric that Apple is using, it’s no surprise that there’s an insane amount of discussion (and argument) going on in the blogosphere and the media. iPad is, as Apple has said, a new category of product. It’s not a handheld, but it’s not a computer, or a netbook. Using the traditional definition of a tablet computer, it’s not that either. When I saw it in the keynote, the first thing I thought of was those pads everybody carried around in Star Trek: The Next Generation (incidentally, those are called PADDs). Which puts Apple around 300 years ahead of the curve. It makes me hope Levar Burton already pre-ordered his. ...

The Story of Stuff discusses the environmental and social impacts of the American “obsession with stuff” including our habit of buying items that live a relatively short useful life and then end up in a landfill. It is not available for the Kindle. The Case for Books, as its title suggests, makes the case that printed books are not going away any time soon. It is available for the Kindle. ...

Logger town, Ketchikan, Alaska. Colored pencil on Bristol vellum. Completed 3 June 2007. I didn’t think to do scans for a progression. I believe the photo was taken here. Source image.

I have been working from home full-time for nine years, and I’ve been very happy with the arrangement. But when I became a father almost two years ago, I found that working at home with a baby around brings some new challenges. Sure, I can step away from my desk almost whenever I want and hang out with my son for a while. I can relieve my wife if she’s having a rough day or has errands to run. We can go to the park, or just play in the yard. I don’t have complete freedom from my desk, but I have a very flexible schedule. ...

My nephew, wearing his grandfather’s reading glasses. Colored pencil on Bristol vellum. Background is pastel.

Colored pencil on Bristol vellum. Started 2/1/06, completed 3/20/06. Source image. 2/8/06 – Base skin layer put down, started facial modeling. I wish I could take credit for those perfectly rendered eyes, but I can’t. The instructor drew them, as a demonstration for the class on how to draw realistic eyes. Skin layers: cream, deco pink, light peach, pink, peach, white. Modeling layer is goldenrod. ...