High Holy Mass of Contradictions

Web-forward people, particularly iPhone users, what’s the next thing after Quicken? Mint? Wesabe? Quicken online? I’ve tried all of these, and I have some complaints about each. Quicken no longer affords me the convenience it used to before I had an iPhone, when I used Pocket Quicken on my Treo to record expenses as I transacted them and could sync them up back at my laptop whenever. Now I have a stack of receipts piling up and no motivation to do anything with them, but I miss the granular visibility I used to have into my finances when that system was working well for me.

So what now?

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

Thanks to the fine folks at ContentRobot, this blog is now equipped with an iPhone-ready theme. If you view www.honeybowtie.com/blog from an iPhone, it will automatically show up in a minimalist iPhone format.

And thanks to Dan Dickinson’s simple explanation, the whole honeybowtie.com site now has a custom webclip icon if you add it to your home page.

Whee!

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

I'm buried at work, but since Ginger did me the honor of calling me both cool and hip for using a Treo, I want to at least reply with a list of my favorite Treo-ready web sites. Ever helpful, that's me.

I also wanted to do this anyway, since I had the opportunity the other evening to visit the Apple store (yes, I'm slow, but I avoid the mall like it's toxic) and got my hands on an iPhone. Short recap: I went in inclined to fall in love with it. I'm an Apple fan in general, and I love a slick interface. But after working with it a bit, I was left feeling a bit, eh, it's nice, but my Treo can do most of this stuff already and with a much easier-to-use keypad. Sure, that large iPhone screen is beautiful and when you don't need a keypad, it's a sweet interface. But that virtual keypad sucks. I'm curious to see what the next-generation iPhone looks like.

But anyway, while I stood there scrutinizing it, I overheard the couple across the table from me talking about how amazing it is. The man was telling the woman about how you can visit this site or that site, and she stood agog at the idea of visiting web sites from your phone.

And no, I didn't tell them that was old news. I decided to let them revel in their fandom.

But I did decide right there and then that I should put together a list of my favorite PDA-ready web sites. (And I thought about doing a Treo vs. iPhone comparison, but I see a good one's already been done.) So here's the quick and dirty version of my links reference: all bookmarks borrowed from the Blazer browser on my Treo. I've tried to designate which use WAP or WML (which means they're efficient on cell phones other than Treo-like PDAs) and which are simply designed for a smaller screen.

( The list of links is behind this cut )

Turns out Macs may not be so hacker-safe after all.

Edited to add: related news and perspective about Germany's new anti-hacker law.

This is cool: a visual history of Apple product design.

HT: Gizmodo

I love the internet. A minute ago I stumbled across a blog post on organization I wanted to keep, and I thought, “I bet I could write an Applescript so that I could mail something to myself at a particular address, set up a rule in Apple Mail to run that Applescript, and have it automatically copied into Yojimbo with the appropriate title and tags.” And then a second later I thought, “But before I do that, I should look to see if someone’s already done it.”

So I typed “applescript copy yojimbo” into Google, and lo and behold, it was the first result.

Or maybe this isn’t actually laziness. Maybe it’s being productive like a ninja. A ninja kitten. Yeah.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

I love the internet. A minute ago I stumbled across a blog post on organization I wanted to keep, and I thought, "I bet I could write an Applescript so that I could mail something to myself at a particular address, set up a rule in Apple Mail to run that Applescript, and have it automatically copied into Yojimbo with the appropriate title and tags." And then a second later I thought, "But before I do that, I should look to see if someone's already done it."

So I typed "applescript copy yojimbo" into Google, and lo and behold, it was the first result.

Or maybe this isn't actually laziness. Maybe it's being productive like a ninja. A ninja kitten. Yeah.

Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.

What an oddball bit of news this is. On one hand, what with the bizarre Foleo release last week, I was thinking Palm was basically an old dog with no new tricks and so new ownership is as good a way as any to teach it a few. On the other hand… Bono? Huh. Well, I’ll definitely reserve judgment and see what comes of it. If they can pull together a strong iPhone contender, they may just keep me around. But they better hurry, because I’m getting more and more attracted to that iPhone.

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I upgraded the RAM in my PowerBook from 512 MB to 2 GB last night but it's still a bit sluggish. Must be a different problem. Hard drive, perhaps. Suggestions?

The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a great article on how to organize your iTunes library, just in time for their readers' New Year's Resolutions. It's a wonderful set of suggestions, but I'm not seeing how they'll work for me.

Most people who use iTunes have probably put some effort into organizing their iTunes Library. What makes me different, perhaps, are a few characteristics: I'm using iTunes to organize not only multiple users (Karsten and myself) and multiple media (music, movies, etc) just like everyone else, but I'm also using it to organize both business and pleasure. I acquire a lot of music that isn't for my listening pleasure; it's for songwriting research. Believe me, I'm not a big fan of certain war-mongering politically-über-conservative country artists I could name, but I have copies of most of their CDs anyway. It's important to me to be familiar with what's getting sales and radio play, even as Karsten and I strive to bring our own style to pop country songwriting. Anyway, all that means that I have a huge passive library of music on my external hard drive.

So here's what I do.

( Manage that metadata! )

( Rate it! )

( Back it up! )

So what are your methods? What do you do to make sure your music collection (whether in iTunes or not) is organized the way you need it and backed up properly?

According to an article in theglobeandmail.com, the latest battle of the sexes is over whether laptops belong in the bedroom. The article positions men as being for, women as against. I already knew I was, well, unusual when it comes to preferences typically associated with my gender, but this helps confirm it. I always have my Treo 650 on my nightstand (it's my alarm clock, after all), and more often than not, my Powerbook makes the journey to the bedroom with me before sleep, too. And I really don't see a significant difference between reading a book in bed and using a laptop.

On the other hand, it's not a barrier to intimacy in our relationship, unlike what's described in the article. And with uncharacteristic propriety, that's all I'll say about that.

HT: Techdirt

I just recently joined the macintosh community and now every time I see a post from that group on my friends list, I have to do a double-take. I keep reading macintosh as mactavish.