Linked List: October 12, 2007

Friday, 12 October 2007

Front-Page Congratulations to Al Gore on Apple.com 

“Al has put his heart and soul, and much of his life during the past several years, into alerting and educating us all on the climate crisis. We are bursting with pride for Al and this historic recognition of his global contributions.”

Primordial AppleScript and Plugins With Coda 

Read-only access via AppleScript is, indeed, primordial, but the plugin interface might prove pretty useful already.

Harrington vs. Anderson 

Halfway through and really enjoying today’s Layer Tennis match between Steven Harrington and Chuck Anderson.

WireTap Studio 1.0 

Ambrosia Software:

Using WireTap Studio, you can record the discrete audio output of any application, as well as all system audio, or record audio input from any microphone, line-in, or audio input hardware.

If you can hear it, WireTap Studio can record it.

$69 for a new license, $30 to upgrade or crossgrade from WireTap Pro or Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack Pro or Fission.

Flickr Group: “Quotation Mark” Abuse 

Flickr group for “documenting” the abuse of quotation marks.

Clay Shirky: Arrogance and Humility 

“Arrogance without humility is a recipe for high-concept irrelevance; humility without arrogance guarantees unending mediocrity.”

iMovie ’08 Library Compressor 

Freeware utility by Nik Friedman TeBockhorst that will translate DV-format video in your iMovie ’08 library to H.264 — saving significant disk space with relatively minimal loss of quality.

Al Gore and U.N. Panel Win Nobel Peace Prize for Climate Work 

Walter Gibbs, reporting for The New York Times:

The award immediately renewed calls from Mr. Gore’s supporters for him to run for president in 2008, joining an already crowded field of Democrats. Mr. Gore, who lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, has said he is not interested in running but has not flatly rejected the notion.

Mentat 

My thanks to Mentat, a new web-based project and task tracker from Brain Murmurs, for sponsoring the DF RSS feed this week.

What I like best about Mentat is that in addition to letting you group tasks as projects, it lets you easily build a daily agenda of tasks from multiple projects — a very clean separation between storing everything you need to do, and presenting only what you want to do today. Mentat also has some useful features for team-based collaboration.

Best ways to learn more: the FAQ, the screencasts, and Brain Murmurs’s weblog.

Ze Frank: ‘A Social Network for Two’ 

Christ, do I miss Ze Frank’s The Show. (Via Andy Baio.)

Coda 1.0.4 

Update to Panic’s Apple Design Award-winning IDE for web developers. I wrote about Coda 1.0 back in April.

The Nifty Fifty 

Bill Bumgarner:

I have been wanting a new lens for a while (what SLR photographer — amateur or otherwise — doesn’t?) and had been eying up some serious pieces of glass.

After doing a bunch of research, I ended up with a Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens. Complete opposite end of the spectrum from the various L series bits of glass linked above. Instead of dropping $1,500 or even $5,000, it cost me all of $76.30.

I’ve said it before and will say it again: the 50mm f/1.8 prime lens is the best deal in photography. Everyone with an SLR should have one — even if you already own the $310 50mm f/1.4 (which is both technically and optically superior to the f/1.8), it’s worth buying the f/1.8 for $80 because it costs so little and weighs so much less. The f/1.4 weighs 290g; the f/1.8 weighs just 130g — the difference is very noticeable. (A Canon Rebel XT body with no attached lens weighs 485g.)

Nikon makes a very similar lens for just $110.