Ommwriter – Plaintext editing, zen style.

How to read without distraction.

Dieter Rams, a major inspiration for design at Apple.

Safari Reader Mod, makes things a bit nicer.

Miniature Pencil Art, carved in the lead/graphite of pencils.

I guess Android development rakes in the cash after all.

Fighter jets and Russian bombers, in Canada:

In the summer of 2005, I watched Steve Jobs demo the new version of iTunes on stage at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference, and was quickly interested in the world of “Podcasts” that he introduced to me. Podcasts are audio or video shows that you can download on the internet, automatically, by subscribing to them in a podcast client (e.g. iTunes). Podcasts almost all free, so there’s no cost associated  with them – other than your internet connection. So now, five years after being introduced to podcasts, and years of listening/watching later, I’m going to share a few of the ones that I have found interesting over the years…

Daily Giz Wiz

The Daily Giz Wiz is a five day a week revolving door of sometimes crazy, sometimes useful gizmos and gadgets being reviewed. The show and its two hosts (Leo Laporte and Dick DeBartolo) are light-hearted and comedic, full of some good and groan worthy jokes, as they review a gadget a day. (iTunes link/Show site)

Tips from the Top Floor

Tips from the top floor is great, long running, podcast that teaches you about digital photography. Hosted by Chris Marquardt, aus Deutschland, the show is a reliable source for good advice – and the back catalogue of shows are worth the listen as well, as there’s plenty of great material. (iTunes link/Show site)

The Economist: The week ahead

You may have heard of The Economist, a reputable and well established magazine covering business and the world at large. However, you might not have known that they offer several free podcasts, among them “The week ahead”, which offers a concise and nuanced look into what’s expected to make the headlines each week. Interesting and well-researched. (iTunes link/Show site)

iTunes: Meet the Author

Apple regularly hosts “Meet the Author” events, where they interview famous or up-and-coming authors. They record these events, and publish them as a free podcast. The authors are always usually wonderfully eloquent, with interviewers that are well briefed and ask insightful questions (of everyone from Stephen Fry to John Hodgman). It’s well worth the listen, in my book. There are two versions, the UK version and the US version – of which you normally only see the one for your country, however you use a little trickery to get both. (From the advanced menu in iTunes, select “Subscribe to Podcast”, and paste these links in: Meet the Author UK, Meet the Author USA)

Know Tech

Know Tech is a bit of a hodgepodge. It doesn’t focus on any central topic, and isn’t structured like a regular show. Rather, you feel like you’re listening in on a conversation between friends, talking about their shared interests (which are often computer-focused, but also revolving around everything from photography to typography, to design and beyond). An always intelligent show, where you come away knowing more than you knew at the start, and one that never feels scripted or pre-packaged. (iTunes link/Show site)

net@night

net@night (hosted by Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte), is a show that covers the internet and social media at large. Every week, they cover the big stories, talk about the great new web sites they’ve found, and interview people working at -usually the founders of- new startups. (iTunes link/Show site)

No Agenda

No Agenda is a bi-weekly show that covers what’s happening in the news. Hosted by the “Crackpot” Adam Curry, and the “Buzzkill” John C. Dvorak, the hosts try to deconstruct the media and make links between events that the mainstream media doesn’t. I often find the show a bit “out there”, but the show has been running for three years, and is usually right more than wrong, providing a perspective you definitely won’t hear on CNN or Fox News. (iTunes link/Show site)

Just a quick sketch in my notebook, while I was waiting for something.

Introduction

I first started reading fanfiction around 1999, and ever since, I’ve kept coming back to it – some might even say that I’m addicted to it. What are fanfiction stories? Fanfiction stories are stories about the characters or world of some pre-existing fiction (be it a movie, book, game, TV show, etc.), by unofficial authors (i.e. it’s “fiction”, written by “fans”, thus the term “fanfiction”. Throughout most of the time I’ve been reading, I’ve done so on a site called “Fanfiction.net” – one of the largest fanfiction repositories for English language “fics” (a slang term used to refer to fanfiction stories).

Having read thousands of fics, I like to think I’ve somewhat refined my reading habits, and perhaps even streamlined the process somewhat. So, I’m writing a description of my insanity, and plan to focus on three main areas: finding stories, reading stories, and bookmarking/returning to stories.

I. Finding Stories

Lord of The Rings story listing, and available filters.

The most obvious way to find stories on Fanfiction.net is to browse through the specific section for the “fandom” that you’re interested in (e.g. the section for Star Wars, or Harry Potter). This method allows you a number of controls to help filter the list of stories down to you are interested in; Fanfiction.net provides filters for genre, rating (similar to the MPAA ratings), main characters/romantic pairing, story length, and language, among others. Browsing through the category listings is the most popular way to find stories, and most people never go any further. However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other, more effective, ways to find stories.

Lord of The Rings Communities directory

Browsing through the section for a fandom can be a great way to find stories. However, you also run across a lot of cruft (i.e. stories with bad plot, or atrocious grammar). So, the logical next step is to look for some form of curation – some way to narrow things down to stories that another human has looked at, and deemed of reasonable quality. This is where the “Communities” (or “C2s”) enters the picture. C2s are kind of like “best of” lists – each C2 contains a list of stories that its founder and/or staff feel met a certain level of quality, and also coincide with their tastes. Depending on the fandom, there can be massive numbers of C2s, each catering to its own specific style of stories. Want a Harry Potter story where he travels back in time? There are a number of C2s for that. Wish you had list of stories for your favourite romantic pairing, and one that cut out all of the badly written stories that prevent you from finding the real gems? There probably is one, just waiting for you to click its link and view it.

Now, this is where things can really start to get interesting. Once you find a C2 you like, you can subscribe to it. When subscribed, you’ll get e-mail alerts whenever a story is added to that C2. So, if you subscribe to a number of C2s for a fandom with a large number of stories (such as the Harry Potter, Twilight, or Naruto categories), you can get a selection of quality stories delivered to your virtual doorstep as they appear – all without having to do the work of manually searching the fandom’s main listing to find them yourself!

Additionally, C2s aren’t the only thing you can subscribe to. It’s also possible to subscribe to authors. Having found  an author whose stories you enjoy, you can subscribe to that author, and you’ll be informed whenever they add a new story, or update an existing one.

II. Reading Stories

Reading customization options.

Having been around for over ten years, Fanfiction.net has added a few useful features for reading stories on their site. When you’re on a story page, the story bar above the story itself allows for a number of handy customizations, including:  typeface, font size, line spacing, line width, and colour scheme. A little tweaking with these settings can go a long way in improving your reading experience.

However, you can take your reading experience a few steps further, by utilizing something like GreaseMonkey to customize your reading experience. GreaseMonkey is a plug-in that allows you to modify the web pages you view. For my Fanfiction.net browsing, I use the following five scripts:

1. Menu Remover, this script is pretty self-explanatory. It prevents the top menu bar from expanding when you mouse over it. I find my accidentally mousing over it all the time, and that it would automatically expand downward was chipping away at my sanity, until I came across this script.
2. Power Fanfiction.net, this is the “power user” script for Fanfiction.net. From the script page, it does as follows: auto-loads the next page (for stories and lists), combines the review link with the review count, can highlight words in the summary (user definable, e.g. for things like “slash” or “John/Jane”), makes dates relative (“yesterday” or “2 weeks ago”), applies colours to the update date based on age, and several other small modifications. This is the Rolls Royce of Fanfiction.net scripts.
3. Story Export Script, this script allows you load all the chapters in a story on one page with a click of a button, add headings for each chapter, and create an index with internal chapter links at the top of the page. This is useful when you want to save a story, perhaps one that is particularly good, or if you’re going to be offline and just want something to read.
4. Anti-Twilight, the name says it all. If a story has “Twilight” in its summary, the script will hide it from the list. Useful for those of us who don’t care for the series, or its proliferation of badly written crossovers in our favoured fandoms.
5. Automatically Show All. By default, when you go to a C2 page, it will be set to filter the rating from K-T, and sort stories by the date they were added to the C2. This script will change that to show all ratings, and sort by the update dates of the stories, rather than when they were added to the C2.

III. Bookmarking and Returning to Stories

Unlike the traditional “book”, fanfiction stories usually aren’t completely written before being presented to the public. Often, authors post chapters as they write them. This leads to the interesting problem of how to check all these stories for new chapters, and keep them organized.

Bookmarks hierarchy

My personal preference is to use a system of folders in my fanfiction browser of choice (FireFox, though my system should work in the other major browsers  as well). I begin with a parent folder in my bookmarks bar, for the fandom – e.g. “HP” for Harry Potter. Then, within that parent folder, I create numbered folders for each batch of one hundred stories; so, Harry Potter bookmarked stories 0-100 would be in a folder named “1″ or “HP 1″. I then have another folder inside the parent folder named “Completed”, where I place stories that have been finished, and wont be having any more updates.

To check for updates to these stories, I use the “Open All in Tabs” option at the bottom of each folder’s menu, to open blocks of one hundred stories at a time. When they’ve loaded, I then blur through them, using the command-option-right/left arrow (control-alt-left/right arrow on Windows) keyboard command to scan through the tabs. If I find a story that’s been updated since I last bookmarked it, I then read the updated chapter, and update the old bookmark with the new chapter number using a search for its story ID in the bookmarks manager.

There are, though not my favoured tactics, two more mechanisms for keeping track of story updates. The first is to subscribe to each story for “Story Alerts” – like with C2 and author alerts, you’ll get an e-mail each time a new chapter is posted to a story on  your alert list. The second option is Fanfiction.net’s built-in “Storymarks” feature, in the upper right-hand corner of each page. While Storymarks might be useful to some, it simply doesn’t scale well for me personally, with the numbers of stories I want to have bookmarked.

In Closing

Probably more than you ever wanted to know about the habits of an addicted fanfiction reader, but there you go. Hopefully, this is helpful to somebody out there who is struggling to keep a bit saner with their own addiction.

Everything started not this most recent Wednesday, but the one previous to it, when I went in for the extraction. The procedure seemed to go smoothly, and as I left the dental office everything was all smiles. The surgical site seemed to be bleeding rather heavily (i.e. the I have to keep swallowing my own blood kind of heavy). However, the bleeding seemed to subside and be healing well, at least that night and the next day.

The status on Thursday.

The drama struck Friday night, when the lower left hand side began bleeding quite profusely around 10 PM. After the bleeding kept up quite strongly for about thirty minutes, having to swallow to spit out a mouthful of my own blood about at least once or twice a minute, I decided that I probably needed to head over to the hospital – especially as I have a vitamin K deficiency (which means that blood takes a lot longer to clot than it normally would, or to put it colloquially: I’m a “bleeder”). So, it was off to the hospital, filling up a mason jar and a half of fresh blood in the process.

Shortly after the bleeding began on Friday night, before the filling of mason jars.

Probably the worst thing about the mouthfuls of blood was that the blood would start to coagulate inside my mouth, even as it was gushing out. So, I have a mass of blood in my mouth, which began to form solid strands, and congeal into a sort of rubbery mass This mass would then cut off my airway – meaning I had to spit it out so as not to choke. Of course, spitting it out left room for yet more blood to spurt out, and the process repeated itself infinitely.

Hospital emergency wards are also very busy places. So, lucky me, I got to enjoy this wonderful feeling of bleeding out and choking on my own blood from about 11 PM Friday night, until 1:30-2 AM Saturday morning, when a doctor could be spared to see me. Bundles of joy, I assure you.

It took another four hours to finally come on a solution to stop the bleeding. It was a type of cellulose patch (in medical terms, a haemostat), that was able to seal off the wound. Along the way, of course, the process took a lot of pain, a few failed attempts, two IVs, and a narcotic ten times more powerful than morphine (called dilaudid) to get through. According to the doctor, the haemostat cost around $400.00 CAD, which makes me very happy to have Canada’s public healthcare system at my back. Departing the hospital at around 5 AM, I thought everything was finally taken care of, and I that I could just relax and heal.

After the haemostat.

However, the story wasn’t over just yet. Having slept through Saturday afternoon and evening, I woke up on Sunday and was happy to note that I wasn’t bleeding. This good trend continued for all of a few hours, before promptly reversing itself, and the wound began bleeding at the same rate it had been on Friday night.

Cue a tired sigh at this point of the story. A bit weary, I decided it would be good to visit the emergency on-call dentist (who hand’t been available Friday night). So, another blood filled drive to medical professionals ensued.

When the on-call dentist took a look, he was quickly able to discern what had happened: my dentist had “gone too far/deep” when he removed my lower left wisdom tooth, and had cut an artery – which was now gushing blood. He decided the best course of action would be to re-suture the wound, and try and get the artery closed off. So, he removed the old stitches, and proceeded to do so. Let me tell you, the feeling of blood literally shooting up in a stream from one side of your mouth to the other -like a fountain- is not something comforting. However, he was able to successfully close it off, and I could finally relax (unless, as he warned, it started bleeding again – in which case I need to go have emergency surgery by an oral surgeon, while sedated).

Finally, something that will hold.

It’s now a week later, and it seems like everything is melding back together quite nicely. Still a bit tender, but healing quite nicely (a week and a half without solid food was rather difficult as well). Yay. This better not happen again.

Update: (Aug. 5, 2010) Seems to be all healed up. Woohoo!

All healed!

]]> http://noahdj.ca/2010/07/27/wisdom-teeth-yay/feed 0 http://noahdj.ca/2010/07/26/quick-logo-v1-1 http://noahdj.ca/2010/07/26/quick-logo-v1-1#comments Mon, 26 Jul 2010 06:49:22 +0000 Noah http://noahdj.ca/?p=240 Hurrah for severed arteries, and gobs and gobs of blood. (A separate post on that later, perhaps).

Based on Pihi’s comments from the previous logo post, I made a few quick adjustments. Still not happy with it, but I’ll see where I can go with it when I have a bit more time to do so.

Despite the cat and mouse game that’s been revolving around Google and the Chinese government, the Chinese have renewed Google’s “Internet License” (which allows them to operate in China). (via GigaOm)

IKEA Announces an End to Sale of Incandescent Lightbulbs

The Swedish mega-furniture retailer IKEA, has announced that it plans to end the sale of incandescent lightbulbs in the US, by January of 2011. Instead, the retailer will begin offering a halogen lightbulb that fits into existing incandescent sockets, and provides a similar warm light. These new “retro-fit” bulbs will enter onto store shelves in the fall. (via Inhabitat)

Access Hulu From Outside the US

A new method to access Hulu.com from outside the United States -without a proxy- is sure to be blocked soon, but it’s working for the moment. This clever work around requires Firefox, a Firefox extension, and a few blocked ports. The full writeup is available at Lifehacker.

A quick logo, made at three in the morning.

I don’t quite like the brackets on the “N”, which was quickly dredged up by hand. However, that’s quick work at three AM for you.

YouTube has launched a new “Leanback” service. In short, Leanback will automatically play videos it thinks you’re interested it, based on your subscriptions, and what friends of yours have liked. The few videos I watched were rather “meh”, but I suspect the experience will vary widely for people, depending on who you have as friends, and what you’re subscribed to. (via Lifehacker)

Phone Disk is Free until September

MacroPlant’s “Phone Disk“, a program that mounts your iOS devices (iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches) as native volumes you can browse in the Finder, is being offered for free – until September 1st. Free copies will work and receive updates after the date passes, but you have to grab your copy and register it before that happens. (via Lifehacker)

Hint: Use Colour to Obscure Text

A fairly basic hint, for those who might wish to hide text on their screens. Turn the colour of the text to match the background, and you can quickly select and deselect it to see what it says – reducing the chance that some nosy co-worker around you can walk by and steal all your passwords. Not perfect, not ideal, but something if you use a normal file/spreadsheet to manage your passwords. (via Mac OS X Hints)

Time Lapse of the TWiT Studio Being Re-Lit

A cool time lapse video of the TWiT (Leo Laporte’s podcasting network) studio having its lighting overhauled. The video is on Leo’s blog, here.