Posted on by mwhybark

Sweet!

Local software company Ranchero just sold its’ creamy-smooth RSS reader, NetNewsWire, to RSS agglomeration juggernaut Newsgator. Paid users, TidBITS reports and NewsGator confirms, get a bonus:

As part of this deal, existing NetNewsWire full-version customers will receive a free 2-year paid subscription to NewsGator Online. More details will be announced with the next release of NetNewsWire, which will include advanced features and functions from NewsGator Online.



In theory, wiser persons inform me, that means a full cross-platform blogstream, retaining read state from machine to machine across platforms. Oh man. Two years is surely long enough for Google to shake the crap out of the underwhelming Google Reader.

Thank you Paul for hipping me to NNW at some point in the past year!

Posted on by mwhybark

Graphic Novels Come of Age (Again)

The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl runs a long look at the graphic novel, now that it’s all grown up (presumably not having really been so twenty years ago on the publication of Maus, or forty years ago on the publication of A Contract with God.

He opens, more or less, with a paean to Chris Ware, who, possibly non-coincidentally, was granted the honor of the cover of the magazine two issues back.

Posted on by mwhybark

Bulk to Flickr

As a part of my multivalent photo-storage disaster, I am finally exporting from iPhoto to Flickr. The flickrexport iPhoto plugin works OK, but I need to export about 150 albums to Flickr as sets with the same names as the albums. Flickrexport allows one to export more than one album at a time, but it does not automatically create the sets on an album-by-album basis.

I suppose the workaround here involves tagging the pics pre-export, uploading the whole schmeer, and then selecting by tags in the organizr to create the sets. That’s not quite as big a PITA as uploading the albums as sets one at a time, but it creates a problem in that the work of assigning the tagged pics to sets is time-consuming and subject to interruption and abandonment.

Hm.

UPDATE:

PF sez “try flickruploader.”

Posted on by mwhybark

Echo

The Greatest Bus Driver in the World takes a moment to note the 50th anniversary of ‘Howl’. He notes that he sports a tatoo dedicated to the pome, something that interests me.

Years ago I noticed that the first line of ‘Howl’ can be disassembled and reassembled, essentially at random, without appreciably diminishing the verbal power of the line. I mused about building a Howl first-line randomizer, but had no idea how to do it. As I sxtarted to write this entry, I realized that now I do know how to do it, easily. But I don’t have the time to do it just this second. Bug me about this and I will execute the project, internets!

I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness

I have minded the generated scenes of my madness, best destroyed

I have maddened the best generation of my sight by destroying minds

I have destroyed my mind by besting generations of maddening sights

I have X the Y Z of my foo bar, baz (by) quux

(cf. metasyntactic variables, for the puzzled)

Posted on by mwhybark

Up-and-coming

Yahoo Acquires Upcoming.org (MetaFilter), Andy Baio’s announcement.

Hm, despite Andy’s involvement in Upcoming, I never really even bothered to look into it. Looks like I should. I do know that I really want a private, distributed calendaring solution that accepts input from my family, not my “team,” and which publishes in multiple formats. Something like iCal if it weren’t feature-dead, with event-level and groups-based privacy settings. I want my mom and my wife to know what my chores are and I want to know what city my dad will be in on a given day. I also want to see my mom’s upcoming friends-and-relations birthdays. I would even appreciate knowing my parents’ evening engagement schedule, for that matter.