Disabling Locked Documents on Lion

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Dan Studnicky

The oddest thing about this tip is that it wouldn’t need to exist if Lion’s autosave function wasn’t fundamentally broken. It’s a feature that’s supposed to add convenience, but all I think it’s done for me is help me accidentally save over other files I use as a starting document.

Bottom line – I like things being saved when I hit the save button. It’s nice having a generated backup in case something crashes, but the final commit to disk? That should belong to me. Hitting Command+S isn’t an inconvenience, it’s a confirmation that things are saved the way I want them to be saved. Autosave removes that.

Nintendo Power’s Super Nintendo Preview

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Dan Studnicky

Scan of the preview coverage Nintendo Power published on the Super Nintendo. I remember reading this over and over again when I was a kid. Having the “actual voices of Jack Nicholson and Michael Keaton” was a big deal.

EDIT: Looks like there’s an entire archive of old skool Nintendo Powers here in CBR/CBZ format. Check out this issue’s NES Achievers under Gremlins II. That’s me.

This isn’t HTML

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Dan Studnicky

Dr. Drang on Markdown editors:

…this isn’t HTML or LaTeX. Trying to remember a dozen or more hotkey combinations to do things that are both relatively rare and easily accomplished with a small amount of normal typing seems like the wrong thing to be using your brain for.

I think the reason we see so many markdown/text-editing feature comparisons is because the Mac and iOS software market has been flooded with editors. But Markdown is such a simple syntax to follow that, unless you’re doing some heavy-duty writing, most of the features aren’t really that useful.

For me I settled on Byword and haven’t looked back. I don’t make use of many of the shortcuts, but when I do it’s because someone sent me a Word document that I need to format into HTML. That’s when I’m glad that shortcuts that turn each line into a list item are there. Without that it would be much more tedious.

The Ad Pipeline

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Dan Studnicky

…one of the first indications of whether Apple is capable of continuing its explosion of creative energy without Jobs at the helm may be found in its advertising. The product pipeline will take years to screw up. But the ad pipeline can be screwed up in no time.

- Hoffman, Bob, 101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising

Eh…

Ben Folds’s “To Aspiring Musicians”

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Dan Studnicky

Ben Folds wrote a Facebook note to people who ask how to get that big break:

I realize the big question for most aspiring musical artist is how to get your break. There isn’t really a break. It’s a lot of different breaks, some good and some bad. There will be significant lucky opportunities that you may or may not recognize as such. It’s not an exact science and the landscape is constantly morphing. Advice on how to ‘make it’ is dubious business. I do believe that if you’re not ready musically, the best opportunity in the world isn’t even an opportunity.

We Both Believe In Love

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Dan Studnicky

WHAAA?!

On the origins of Huey Lewis and the News’s Do you believe in love:

When Lange wrote the song and submitted it to the band, it was entitled “We Both Believe In Love”, but was retitled after Lewis made revisions. The unrevised version was originally recorded by British band Supercharge, on which Lange sang lead vocals, on the 1979 album Body Rhythm.

Well, that’s one way to build an email list

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Dan Studnicky

This author claims one of the newspapers in my area is trying to set a dangerous precedent.

At a public hearing on the budget, LGSD1 asked for people who wanted to receive budget information from the district to sign up to an email newsletter. Those interested provided their email addresses (to the district).

But a critic of the school board inexplicably felt he was somehow entitled to those email addresses, so he could give these people his version of things. The Post-Star, even more inexplicably, backed his Freedom of Information request, under some demented notion of “transparency.”

Crazy. And if you don’t think this is a big deal, go to whitehouse.gov right now and you’ll see this.

stayinformed

Imagine if they had to hand over your email address to some party because of Freedom of Information.

  1. LGSD = A public school district in my area. ↩

Yuppie TV

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Dan Studnicky

In the years to come, America would get other glimpses of this culture in Mad About You, Ally McBeal, Frasier, and The West Wing, among others, but no show ever focused with the same laser intensity on the culture that thirtysomething depicted—understandably, because the people who live in that culture do not make up much of the audience for network television series, and those who are the core demographic for network television series are not particularly fond of the culture that thirtysomething portrayed. It was the emerging culture of the new upper class.

Murray, Charles, Coming Apart, Location 405. Kindle Edition1

I’d posit that this divide has gotten even wider since many of the yuppie tv shows are now on cable (Mad Men, almost everything on HBO) and network TV is filled with dancing and singing criticism.

Could also be why NBC gets low ratings: they target yuppies with shows like The Office and Parks and Recreation and get low viewership as a result.

As long as I’m throwing out TV generalizations, can we all agree that CBS is for old people? It even comes up in search autosuggests.

cbsisforoldpeople

  1. There’s got to be a better way to cite Kindle books than this. ↩

16/44 is the highest number there is!

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Dan Studnicky

Back in 2008, Mix magazine did tests to determine if discerning listeners can hear the difference between CDs and high-resolution audio. Their test subjects picked correctly 50% of the time—no better than if they had flipped a coin.

My long national nightmare of not knowing who said “our long national nightmare is over” is over

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Dan Studnicky

It was Gerald Ford, addressing the country during his swearing-in as president after Nixon resigned.