Sunday January 01, 2006; part of:
Nerdery
Let's see: I find every year fresh means of procrastination toys productivity tools: what have this year's been?
- Directory Opus. I've been looking for years for something that would give me simple two-pane file management in Windows to replace explorere. There are lots of things that I try but they all seem to end up slower, less powerful, and less slick that Explorer. This has the opposite faults. It is far too powerful for what I need, and comes with a huge PDF manual I have hardly dented. Also, it's expensive for a utility. But it's a keeper, none the less, since it does all the things that a file manager should and explorer doesn't (two panes, seamless (s)ftp, impressive file viewers). Some time, I may even read the manual.
- OneNote The best note-taking software for interviews I have found, chiefly because it will sync comments to the sounds recording(Charles says that MS Office for the Mac will do this also). Also very good at allowing quick tagging and cross-referencing of notes.
- Yahoo Desktop Search I far prefer this to GDS -- less obtrusive, and offers much more refinement in the searches that you carry out. One reason I haven't used the version 2 OOo file format (Opendocument) is that YDS has no viewer for it, a point which nicely shows the distinction between open and useful standards.
- Google Earth No use whatever, but completely glorious. Google Maps is fairly rapidly replacing all my other mapping services, too, though there is nothing wrong with Yahoo maps.
- Flickr Does for time what cocaine does for money.
- Talking of cocaine, a couple of the downloadable Vault tapes are excellent, especially, for fans of psychadelic noise, this one
- And, since we seem to have drifted into music, the appearance of the complete Naxos catalogue on emusic is another good thing about the year.
- WinScite A nice lightweight editor for little python scripts, especially when used in conjunction with the hideous Ipython shell.
- Two Glorious fonts from P22.
The lower line is a selection from the Day of the Dead font, also known as Posada Extras. The skeleton reading a newspaper is going on all my invoices this year.
Posted by andrewb at January 01, 2006 09:25 PM
I don't know what this sentence does to the enemy, but it scares the bejeezus out of me: "Download Vol. 6 then proceeds into a 60+ minute non-stop jam..."
But, Rupert, in this context, you are the enemy.
Ah, Directory Opus. I bought one of those in 1995. For my Amiga.
Textile formatting works here. Double hyphens are automatically converted to en dashes, quotes are automatically smartened. You can put dashes and asterisks around text to make
italics bold and other silly effects easily.
- Text wrapped in Asterisks which * will be bold. The asterisks must touch each end of the bold text. There must a space before the first and after the last.
- Text wrapped in underscores - _ - will be italicised. The underscores must touch each end of the italics. There must a space before the first and after the last.
- Paragraphs starting bq. will be block quoted. There must be no space before the "b" and one space after the full stop.
- A hyperlink is made by wrapping the link text in double quotes, followed immediately by a colon, then the URL. If there is a question mark in the URL, wrap the whole lot in square brackets.
- I use two classes to mark up text that deserves it. sane text looks like this. loony text looks like that. The syntax for those is %(sane)[space] sane text %; loony is left as an exercise to the reader.
