The days of future past

Face it, ladies and gentlemen, the future is always cool. Even the future past is cool, and that’s why I love Modern Mechanix. Whoever runs this blog spends their days and nights scouring old Scientific American, Popular Mechanics and other various and sundry technology-dominated magazines of yesteryear, presenting sometime dead accurate, other times totally absurd looks at their own tech-forward present and wistful, perfect future.

This image above, from this entry, comes via Popular Science magazine from February, 1947. Hell, they barely had television at all at that time, let alone color.

The whole thing got me thinking about Scientific American, which I’ve read in the past, but not in the recent past, know what I mean? Well, they have a kick-ass Web site, that’s for sure.

Another great site is Sky Tonight from Sky & Telescope magazine, for the astronomy buff within. Try their Interactive Sky Chart, which can give you a view of the night sky from anywhere on Earth at any time between the years 1600 and 2400. Take that, astrologer-to-the-stars Sydney Omarr. Hey, aren’t you dead? Yes, you are — and your real name is Sidney Kimmelman.

I Gimped!

Daily News Web guru Josh Kleinbaum has been encouraging me to use The Gimp to process images for these sites, mostly because it’s free and the Daily News is in no mood to buy everyone Photoshop (or even Photoshop Elements) for all the people who need it.

I downloaded the Gimp and it’s “GTK Runtime” counterpart a couple of months ago. I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it. So I deleted it and continued my search for another free image-editing program.

Nothing. So I tried the Gimp again, and once Josh told me that to put a border on a photo, I had to “stroke” it (either a poor or very, very good choice of words), all was forgiven, and now I can crop, resize and border photos with impunity.

Aside from working and being free, The Gimp is available in all sorts of languages (hence the Spanish screen above, which I did Gimp to make it smaller) and for Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix.

Yet another free program that lets you get real work done. Amazing.

BoingBoing

“Nobody does it … better. Makes me feel sad for the rest. Nobody does it … quite the way you do. Baby, you’re the best.”

Thanks, Carly Simon. Yep, that’s how I feel about BoingBoing, the best nerd blog going. Written by a team of bloggers, and with archives going back to its inception in 2000, BoingBoing is a virtual repository of all things techy-nerdy. I check just about every day and nearly always find something amusing. If I was stuck on a desert island with wireless Web and only 10 browser bookmarks, this would be one of them.

Hey, this is a nerd story, so go with me on the desert-island metaphor.

BoingBoing — your passport to geeky-cool.

Microsoft’s Mac blog

Some day, some year, there will be a new version of Microsoft Office for Windows. Six months after that, there will be one for the Mac.

Keep an eye on how it’s going, and follow the musings of Microsoft’s very own Mac fans (remember, MS is the biggest Mac developer next to Apple itself) with the Mac Mojo blog. It’s Microsoft for Mac from the inside … deep inside.

And check out the individual blogs at the right. I don’t know if Apple’s employees all have company blogs, but Microsoft’s sure do. Same for Sun Microsystems.

In Web we trust

Even though I blog about old PC and Mac hardware, the reality is that I work on between two and four separate computers per day. Often the things I’m actually working on are often stored up there — on the Internet. If there’s a way to do it away from a single PC, via a browser, I’m all for it.

Before I started blogging, I used Pote to write articles. I could write them on a browser and pull the files down when ready to send them to an editor. No smart quotes, but a Microsoft Word autoformat usually took care of it.

(Handy tip: Don’t trust/burden your editor with doing the smart quotes. Chances are they’ll do them wrong, and even if they do them right — and I do them right when I edit — they’ve got better things to do.)

The new state of the art in terms of online composition is Writely. Google bought the small company behind Writely recently, and at that time the site stopped accepting new users. Now open to new accounts again, Writely is still geared more toward Web writing and blogging (you can publish directly to many blog systems, including Google-owned Blogger of course), but it is a way to write and access your work wherever you have Web access.

Writely’s powerful features, in addition to posting to a blog (I’m still not entirely clear on why you’d want to do that, though it does work) include outputting your Writely files as Rich Text Format and even Microsoft Word files. I haven’t tested this feature, but if it does work, and if they can get the paragraph indents and smart quotes right, Writely just might be the writer’s killer app of the late ’00s.

While it’s as ubiquitous as toast for breakfast, Web-based e-mail continues to be one of the most important tools in my computing life. I’ve been using Yahoo! Mail for years now, and the ability to read and write e-mail from any Web-connected computer is pretty much essential to my work and home life. I barely even knew what a traditional mail program like Outlook or Eudora did until about a year ago, and while I finally got one to work on my Powerbook 1400 (don’t ask), the whole idea of my e-mail being stuck on a single hard drive is a bit unnerving to say the least.

As far as photos go, sites like the Yahoo-owned Flickr (if you’re cool) and Kodak Gallery (if you’re me) allow you to store, share and print photos. I haven’t delved into them yet, but I can’t believe that the kind of storage required to do this is available to mass numbers of people — and it’s definitely something I’d be willing to pay for.

Google is committed to bringing more computing tasks to the Web. In addition to Writely and Gmail, Google also has a spreadsheet program in beta. The spreadsheet and Writely both encourage collaboration. In Writely, for instance, you can release a document for editing by others. And you can track all those changes.

The new Blogger beta, for which users will have to get a Google sign-on (you have one already, don’t you?) seems to me to be aimed at businesses; there are provisions for “private blogs,” which I imagine can keep sensitive business information within a group and out of the eyes of the casual Web surfer.

Between these Web-based applications and free, open-source software like OpenOffice (we use it at the Daily News), Microsoft has to be re-evaluating its business model. Even http://www.adobe.com/ will be affected. The Gimp program I use to work on photos is free. It may not be as powerful as Photoshop, but it’s adequate for what I need — and you can’t beat free.

For Better or for Worse (or What Is a Foob?)

Did you know that “For Better or for Worse,” is one of the most popular newspaper comics in the country? Make that two countries, because the strip is produced in Canada and is so relentlessly Canadian that they must love it up there, too.

Well, if you think the Pattersons and their various and sundry friends/co-workers/stalkers are saying one thing in their dialogue bubbles but really saying something else, check out End of the Foobiverse. (For those not in the know, or perhaps who aren’t Canadian, a “foob” is a derogatory term used, if not by the whole of Canada, at least by those Canadians in “For Better or for Worse.”

I found out about this blog entry from the king of all newspaper-comic-commentary sites (that’s assuming there are others, but rest assured, this one is great), The Comics Curmudgeon.

Oprah and Dave, a love story

Remember the time when Dave Letterman was begging Oprah Winfrey to be a guest on his show. For months. Remember the haunting love theme, “It Ain’t Oprah Till It’s Oprah,” as sung by Paul Shaffer?

Well, the memories can be yours once again. The exhaustive archive of “It Ain’t Oprah Till It’s Oprahs,” show banter and more is still on the Internet for you to do with what you will. I annoyed plenty of people by playing these songs incessantly. Now it’s your turn.

Recommended: The Bryant Gumbel version of “It Ain’t Oprah Till It’s Oprah”
Dave sings the Oprah love theme

Just GO TO THE PAGE ALREADY and download everything.

Ask the Macist

I just want to give a shout-out to the new L.A.-based Macintosh columnist on the block. Ask the Macist, on the Laist blog, has just started to answer the Mac questions we all have (those of us who aren’t as geeked out as we think we are, anyway).

He already hipped me to some cool backup software, as I elaborate on at my own geeky Mac blog.

Tons of music — all free and legal

Hey kids, have you heard about this thing called the “iPod”? Did you know that you can pull songs through the tubes of the Internets and cram your little digital music player with all kinds of stuff?

Well, Mark Swed, the L.A. Times classical music critic revels in the possibilities of his very own iPod in this longish piece, which did serve to clue me into a very cool site: Archive.org.

Funny, I couldn’t find much in the way of classical music, or even jazz, but if you’re into the Grateful Dead, they’ve got 2,842 full concerts for you to peruse.

OK, I’ll admit it, I did listen to a 24-minute “Playin’ in the Band” with enough noodling to keep a Japanese restaurant in udon for a decade, not to mention the tell-tale caterwauling of the still-living Donna Godchaux. (I had her pegged as dead until my good friend, Mr. Bradley Hotzman, Deadhead extraordinare, clued me in to her “alive and kicking” status.)

Hey, I went to school at UC Santa Cruz, whaddaya want from me? Also Santa Cruz-friendly — 119 concerts from the great Camper Van Beethoven.

Back to the Dead. Brad tells me that Archive.org is the site that used to have all the Grateful Dead “mixing board” recordings, which had to be taken down (or at least made stream-only) when members of the band protested. It was Bob Weir who had a beef, not Jerry Garcia, he being dead and all. Bet they buried him in a faded black T-shirt. But I digress.

Archive.org is pretty ungainly. Start here for an artist listing. So far, I’ve been pleased to discover a bunch of Tenacious D — who doesn’t love Jack Black, am I right?

And in case you didn’t thing archive.org was anything more than a front for jam-band enthusiasts, there are a whopping 1,044 Moe. shows on there. (But no Phish, points out Brad — guess they don’t what their junk out there for free.)

And what about the best L.A. band of the 1980s? Three Dream Syndicate shows.

There are tons — TONS — of stuff I’ve never heard of here, 38,516 total concerts at last count, and that makes it hard to find the “good” stuff. Hey, maybe some of this obscure junk is good?

But it’s all free and legal, and that counts for a whole lot.

Going beyond music, the main Archive.org page offers more than 41,000 videos, 95,000 miscellaneous audio recordings and almost 31,000 texts.

Before there was the Web, there was the Whole Earth Catalog

Sure it was full of hippy-dippy shit, but the Whole Earth Catalog, published from the ’60s through the ’90s, said it all in its subtitle: Access to Tools. That’s what the Whole Earth Catalog was — in spades.

I first encountered it as the Next Whole Earth Catalog in the ’80s — and it was a mighty tome at that stage, perfect for leaving in the bathroom, or even on the coffee table, if you were the sort to leave extremely well-thumbed books there. It sure didn’t fit on any shelves.

Everything from farm implements to Swiss Army Knives, Buckminster Fuller, computers, Buddhism, auto repair — the Whole Earth Catalog had you covered, pointing to books, other catalogs, people and companies where you could get info on just about everything that mattered.

It was like Google, Yahoo! and Amazon rolled up into one big ball, before any of them — or the Web which propagated them — even existed.

Ironically, it’s where I first heard about hypertext — the idea that became the clickable, linkable Web. I found the book there to fix my old VWs, and another book that taught me how to convert a 79 Honda Civic into a camper (don’t ask).

I don’t know what happened to my Whole Earth Catalog … but even in this Web-centric world, I have a pretty good feeling that it could succeed today as the supreme bullshit detector we all so desperately still need.