July 2, 2008 at 10:10 am · tag/s : blog
although i never really abandoned it, i have recently moved back to macjournal after working with devonthink for half a year. the new version macjournal 5 has some of the same features as devonthink, and is much cheaper and leaner. this is useful for me since i work exclusively on pre-intel macs with tiger and i have only 1gb of ram in my ibook. devonthink demands oodles of ram. hopefully macjournal 5 won’t prove equally demanding!
when the fabled devonthink 2 is released, if ever, i might have another go with it, but i think it is a little too ambitious for its own good, at least in the pro version which you have to use if you want to have more than one database. macjournal now also allows multiple database, (which it calls ‘documents’). this is great if you don’t need to access all of your data all of the time. mj5 also introduces smart folders (or journals) and status, flagging, tagging, priority and rating options for each entry. most importantly it allows you to import any sort of file and view or launch it from within mj. you can also open and edit a file or entry in a separate window and have different windows open at any one time. there is also a liveword count.
under the hood things are also much improved : you can just double click on one of your macjournal data files to open it, and the single huge unwieldy database is a thing of the past. unless they are encoded, files are just saved as rtf or rtfd and can be accessed externally from the macjournal application. without a doubt this would also improve .mac synching which was so horrible in macjournal 4. as i finally gave up on my .mac account at the beginning of the year i have no way of testing this but i will report on my tests using a webdav server and ben rister’s synk in an update to this post later, if anyone is interested.
of course being able to post directly to your blog as i am doing with this post, and downloading and editing all your existing posts from within mj is one of the crucial features which makes this software so useful. last but not least, the personalized support provided by the developer dan schimpf is also brilliant.
wishlist : although i haven’t got one (yet!) obviously iphone syncing is a must. also it would be nice to be able to link to journals and entries in different documents and have mj open them if necessary and to be able to change the status labels. smarter smart journals? a ‘today’ smart journal? tumblr support? (is coming dan says)
but it’s good to be back!
June 11, 2008 at 4:14 pm · tag/s : software, sound
i have been testing FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) as a compression method for a special itunes library of lossless audio and in case anyone is interested i have found a couple of bits of mac freeware that seem really good : xAct and Fluke.
xAct is an audio compressor which encodes and decodes FLAC and a number of other codecs. you drag the files, straight out of the CD if you like, into the programme’s icon and away it goes. once the tracks are encoded you fire up Fluke and it imports them into itunes for your listening pleasure, retaining the FLAC encoding of course.
the first CD i did was at 4 am jetlagged and discombobulated and if i can do it in that state anyone can. appropriately enough it was Entertainment! by the Gang of Four (1979) = 50 minutes of music = 317Mb and worth every bit and byte : i am no audiophile but the record sounds wonderful through my little KingRex CLASST+U amplifier which sucks the digits right out of my USB hole.
amazingly crisp, cold and hard - yet … warm and sweet.
better than on CD?
possibly!
May 23, 2008 at 2:14 pm · tag/s : blog
so yeah. well see tumblr is this other blogging thing that occupies a space somewhere between your twitter and delicious and flickr and google reader shared items page and your own perfectly good blog but although you are always posting things up here and there, good serious blogging is hard and you are busy and then you discover tumblr. everything you post anywhere in one flat file, and the ability to make smallish but bigger than twitter posts. and so one morning you wake up and you think about just replacing all your websites with this one. for a while anyway. and : all your other blogs and link sites and other blah are still online if people really want to find them. but you don’t actually do it. do you? not yet anyway …
April 19, 2008 at 12:46 pm · tag/s : art, blog, death, doubt, loss, people, reading, writing
a much more engaging and humble piece by alex james in the independent about the suicide of his friend angus fairhurst (4.10.1966 - 29.3.2008) than the annoying self-serving piece by tracy emin which i linked some time ago to in ephemeral.
unlike his close friends damien hirst and sarah lucas, fairhurst was full of doubt. a few weeks ago he went alone to scotland and “with a ladder and a rope that he’d handwoven in silk, climbed the ladder and hanged himself in a meticulously planned grisly piece of theatre.”
April 10, 2008 at 8:23 am · tag/s : amerika, australia, death, life, loss, love, people
a story is doing the rounds of the internets about an 80 year old man in new york who has been calling his late wife’s answering service every day since she died in 2005 just to hear her voice. unfortunately the phone company deleted the message and the old man was heartbroken. tough shit said verizon when he rang them asking if they could restore the message. then the story hit the internets and hey presto, the phone company found a backup of the message and restored it. where there is a will (or a potential public relations disaster) there is a way. there are a number of variants of the story, some of which claim the voice said : “the whitings aren’t home…” and in others “this is catherine whiting…” but no matter it is a great story. how long before there is service where you can record a message before you die so people can ring a number and hear your voice after you have passed away?
April 9, 2008 at 8:21 am · tag/s : australia, blog, blogs, melbourne, reading
letter to the editor
I love clocks, in fact I have 17 of them. But what a bore, having to get up at 2am to put them all back an hour. I mean, couldn’t they let us put them back at 10pm as we go to bed.
- Doug Jacques,
Nambucca Heads.
ha ha ha … doug : you are a genius. marieke hardy thought you were serious.
but then she is not very smart.
and she is annoying.
and she has a stupid haircut.
and her blog sucks.
March 27, 2008 at 8:08 pm · tag/s : blog, holocaust, reading, text, writing
Published in 1975, Charles Reznikoff’s book-length poem Holocaust is a collage of witness testimonies from the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.
“By using the language of others he attends to the “object” of genocide without imaginative or philosophical flourish, and by reciting it again in his own rhythm he becomes a second witness to its truth. Ultimately, the reader responds not to the poet but to the testimony itself.” writes Kathryn Crim in the Boston Review.
read more »
February 25, 2008 at 3:34 pm · tag/s : film, mp3, music, stuff
I haven’t seen Juno but according to wikipedia Anyone Else But You, the first track on the first album by The Moldy Peaches (which was released on September 11, 2001), is central to the film and a version is performed by the two main characters. The song was also used in a mobile phone TV-ad in France featuring Zinedine Zidane during the World Cup in 2006 (which Italy shouldn’t have won because they didn’t deserve to beat Australia) and in an Academy Award-nominated documentary about quadriplegics who play wheelchair rugby, called Murderball. I can see the first connection, but the other two have me stumped.
Anyway, it’s a good song. Listen to it.
February 6, 2008 at 9:58 am · tag/s : computers, melbourne, software, writing
and so we write and that is all we do. and there is nothing on the screen except our writing. in fact the only pixels that are switched on are the ones necessary to show the writing and as i type, more pixels switch on to show the new words and they’re green and that is kinda cute, and somehow it is much more relaxing to see just the words on the screen and none of the other distractions.*
and so write is all we do. that is the default position. and none of it is of any interest to any one else. at least not yet. or maybe it never will be. and maybe this doesn’t matter.
essentially i have bought a year to write. there is just a little bit of this and that, here and there. but minimal. so a miracle : i have time. to write, two more things are needed : a method and a rhythm. oh and rain helps. thank you. but it is not essential. and if the greek next door would shut the fuck up as well and people would stop slamming their doors and cuntface upstairs would stop dropping marbles on the floor that would help. but it is not essential. all i need is time, method and rhythm. and it seems i have them. now and now and now and now.
and now it is raining too. bucketing down as it happens. at last. and cuntface has gone out. and the rain is masking the sound of the greek next door.
it seems in this new life that i go to bed grumpy when the feature creature is away, except this morning i have woken up grumpy too and after an hour or two of grumping around i realize/decide that i have a headache and that a pain killer is appropriate, and some toasted grain bread from dench (have you tried their donuts?!) with peanut butter and some of that nice french cherry jam and a big pot of strong tea.
oh yeah.
and so i can write. and that is all i need to do. and the second cup of tea is nice and strong. that’s the advantage of a smaller cup : by the time you get to the second cup it is nice and strong.
ss officer to the jew : i will release you if you can guess which one of my eyes is made of glass.
jew : it is the left one.
ss officer : correct. how did you know?
jew : it looks more human than the other one.
renowned holocaust historian yehuda bauer told a version of this story in his speech to the german parliament on 27 january 1998. one of the roles of the historian he says, is to tell true stories. (i had been wondering about the use of fiction.) but he prefaces the glass eye story by saying that he doesn’t know if it is true or not. it is worth telling anyway, no? one wonders where it came from. is it at all possible that it is a joke? told by one jew to another? in the lager?
* ok. so i am a slut. after i wrote my daily 500 words today i discovered that jesse, the ceo of
hogbay software and the developer of
writeroom which i am testing and which gives me the clutter-free screen described above, will give
a free licence to people who post a review on their blog. so i thought why not post them? but since i didn’t write these words
in order to get the free licence and he may well have judged this post to be too crude and rude, and too vague to qualify as a review, i was well prepared to be unsuccessful. so i may be a slut but i am not a whore. :p anyway i did get the free licence. thanks jesse. if you want to
try writeroom gentle reader you can use it free for 30 days. if you want to keep using it after that you’ll have to
pay $25… oh. you’ll need a mac. is it even necessary to say that?
January 8, 2008 at 9:55 am · tag/s : film, melbourne, strange
one of the joys of melbourne on a monday : until 4pm the nova cinema in carlton only charges $5.50 admission. of course you are not the only person who knows this and the 4pm session of todd haynes‘ i’m not there is completely sold out. haynes is a seriously film literate director and he knows a thing or two about bob dylan too. although whilst his songs are the backbone of the film, of course it is not a film about bob dylan. it is an anti-biopic : a crazy ramshackle assemblage of references. dylan’s name is never mentioned, and there are six different actors playing the bizarro not- dylan. only one of them tries (too hard) to look like him : cate blanchett, who apparently used a sock down her pants to make her walk like a man. should have used a rolled up towel. does not convince. but doesn’t matter. only her attempts at amphetaminized not-dylan irritate. film half succeeds. which means it half fails. unfortunately it is the second half. and that means you leave the cinema with a bad taste in your mouth. and it is too long. that means you spend the last third of the film wishing that he would please just shut the fuck up and you leave the cinema with a full bladder. the film is so laden with signifiers it ultimately collapses under its own weight and you leave the cinema dazed. but then haynes has a degree in semiotics so i guess he is allowed. is it a masterpiece? no - but if you know and love (or hate) dylan you should see it anyway. why? this review by larry gross explains it better than i ever could. three and a half stars.
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