Sir Terry Pratchett was one of those authors I meant to have read more than I actually read. I enjoyed several of the Discworld books but didn’t love all of them. I did, on the other hand, love Good Omens. This seems like a fine time to read it once more. RIP Sir Terry.  

Michael Tsai’s collection of people Switching to Smaller iPhones: Count me in as someone who prefers the shape, size, and feel of an iPhone 5 over the iPhone 6. The 6 is the first phone that I felt had to have a case or I’d drop it. It’s too big and too slippery. I haven’t gone back to a 5S only because the camera on the 6 is really nice. I’m actually hoping they release an iPhone Nano at some point1

As a Mac user I’ve never seriously considered ConnectedText despite so many smart people1 who rave about it. I recently installed Parallels and Windows 8.1 for a work project, so I thought it a good opportunity to give ConnectedText a go. Here are a few things I like about it so far. It’s a wiki. Someone once told me that the word “wiki” is Hawaiian for “can’t find shit”. When it comes to large, shared wikis I might agree.

Gruber commenting on The Apple Watch Edition’s Upgrade Dilemma: The single most frequent question I’ve received this week is how can Apple justify $10,000+ prices for a watch that will be technically outdated in a few years. The simplest answer is that it’s for people who don’t care. I suppose there are a small but significant number of people who can afford a $10,000 watch. What I find harder to imagine is that many of those people actually “don’t care” that their $10,000 watch will rapidly become obsolete.

Matt Gemmell on date-based permalinks: We’re all familiar with those URLs. The date of the post is explicit, so you need never wonder when it was written, or how recent it is. Here’s the thing, though: they’re horrible. On the other hand, I don’t think date-encrusted URLs are horrible at all. In fact, I often wish they were mandatory on anything even remotely time-sensitive. They’re visually ugly.

It took a few people recommending Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” before I decided to read it. I’m glad I did, but not only for the intended reasons. I also got a few chuckles out of some of the sillier recommendations. Not all the book’s recommendations are as silly as they first seem. For example, she suggests that before discarding something that I thank it for its service.

I’ve never read anything by Ursula K. Le Guin so I thought I’d start with the Hugo and Nebula award-winning “The Left Hand of Darkness”. I was disappointed and only grudgingly finished it.

I found an Apple IIc and monitor in storage so I thought I’d see if it would fire up. It did. Apple IIc  The IIc uses an internal 5 1/4 floppy and the only one I could find was “Writer Rabbit” so I popped it in, turned it on and everything, surprisingly, worked. I have no idea what to do with it now, but it seems a shame to put it back into a box in the basement.

I’ve tried many window management apps but none ever seem to stick around for long. The problem I have with most of these types of utilities is that they’re very keyboard-centric. When I think about arranging windows I’m generally in mouse mode, not keyboard mode. Moom comes close in that it’s triggered when hovering over a window’s zoom button but the target is pretty small. I like Window Tidy’s approach of showing several large targets after I begin dragging a window, since that’s when I typically want to arrange things.

For 35mm color negatives, I’ve always shot either Portra 400 or Fuji Pro 400H; both great films. Also, at between $7.50 and $10.00 per roll, they’re expensive. And let’s face it, I’m shooting fast and loose, taking what most would call snapshots. It’s not art, that’s for sure. Kodak 400 and Fuji 400 consumer films Since I’m not creating art, I thought I’d try some cheaper films. I’m going to give the “consumer” films from Kodak and Fuji a try.

The microwave I bought 13 years ago (a Sharp Carousel) finally died last week, so I started shopping for a replacement. I wanted something simple. The simpler the better. I mostly just need to reheat leftovers. I looked at several models recommended by The Sweethome but those fell into the same add-every-feature-we-can-think of trap that I was hoping to avoid. Why do microwaves need so many unnecessary buttons and modes and readouts?