Archive for the 'Review' Category

An ongoing investigation: Browsing the www

Published
by
Matthew
on April 11, 2009
in Internet, Rants and Review
. 2 Comments

I’ve had a very terrible couple of years coming up on the Internet. When it began, it was easy. I had my gateway laptop, I used IE until 2004 when I heard about Firefox. It was a simple choice. Firefox had tabs, it was faster, it had the luster of being open source. (In fact, it inspired my fanaticism for all things open source). But in 2005 I got a tiny powerbook and Safari was so cute and new. I was disappointed with Firefox on my powerbook. The widgets were ugly and pixelated, nothing like aqua at all. At this point I was dedicated to Safari, only using Firefox for sites that rejected Safari for whatever reason.

But I wasn’t satisfied. I started flirting with other web browsers: Shiira, Opera, OmniWeb, Camino, Optimized Firefox builds… It was a confusing time. I experimented heavily. Eventually I began to fall in love with Camino. It had the tenderness of real mac app, but also the certain flare of being open source and dangerous like Firefox.

When I upgraded to Leopard, it was back to square one. I went with Safari for a while because Camino was struggling with 10.5. Then Firefox 3 came around with its hype and fancy Smart Location Bar. I fell back into my old ways. I was using a PC at work, Firefox felt right, cutting edge, customizable, fun.

Since then I’ve not settled. I can’t decide. I’m switching weekly. Nobody has exactly everything I want. Here is where I stand now:

Safari 3

  • I love to use cmd-1, cmd-2, etc for links on the bookmarks bar
  • You cannot set Google Reader as your default feed reader
  • In general, works fine, but
  • is boring

Safari 4 beta

  • “Smart Address Field”, similar to Firefox’s Smart Location Bar
  • Top tabs, makes sense.
  • Developer Tools are very cool
  • Top Sites? Yuck!
  • Chokes here and there
    • Especially in Wordpress
    • And with the Tumblr bookmarklet: when I use a keyboard shortcut to open, in my case cmd-1 because it is first on my bookmarks bar, it opens into a new tab instead of a new window. Very frustrating.

Camino

  • Uses cmd-1, etc for bookmarks bar
  • Uses Keychain to save passwords
  • Feels very at home in OS X
  • But buttons suck in Leopard
  • Some sites still reject Camino

Camino 2 beta

  • Buttons fixed for Leopard
  • Del key no longer works for going back a page
  • Finally has draggable tabs
  • No smart location bar, which I’ve become very comfortable using

Firefox 3

  • No keyboard shorcuts for the bookmarks bar :-(
  • Doesn’t use Keychain to save passwords, which is very annoying
  • One million awesome extensions

So I have no idea what to do. I was using Firefox for the last month, but last week I went back to Safari. It is hard to choose. What are you feelings? Do you have such trouble deciding?

I read this book: The Survivors

Published
by
Matthew
on April 11, 2008
in Literate, Ocean, Polar and Review
. 1 Comment

The Survivors by Hammond InnesI just finished a book that I must reccomend. It is called The Survivors. I feel so down since I finished this book. It is the essence of everything I love about books lately. Adventure, suspense…

I bought The Survivors along with Rendezvous with Rama, another gem from Counterpoint. I mean, it was on the vintage paperback shelf. I paid $1 for this book. I bought it solely on the cover. Perhaps my greatest find at a used bookstore.

I am deeply obsessed with polar regions for the same reason I’m obsessed with the ocean and outer space. It’s the unknown, it cannot be contained. We cannot really grasp it, even with our thoughts. It is the sublime. It is beautiful and bleak.

Polar regions have incredible occurrences that only happen at the poles. Auroras? High concentration of meteorites? Yeah! Talk about feeling small. The thought of it all overwhelms me.

The Survivors follows the story of Duncan Craig, who left his job in London in search of something new. He travels to South Africa where he thinks he will be able to find work. The work he finds is far different than he imagines. He becomes a skipper of a catcher in a whaling fleet. The circumstances in which he becomes employed are sketchy. There is a lot of unrest in the fleet and speculation of murder and wrong doing. There is a rush to get out into the Atlantic and sort out all the trouble.

As the story begins to become monotonous, Craig goes into the floes in rescue of another catcher whose hull was cracked from the ice. This simple rescue escalates and many ships go down, including the large factory ship The Southern Cross. With over 500 men on the ice, they must figure out how to survive without freezing to death or being crushed by the icebergs moving through the floes. Whoa! You begin to get an idea of what it would be like to be stranded on the ice, how small we are in the scheme of things, how little control we actually have.

And this is the real deal. While researching this post I came across this blurb about the author: “Hammond Innes was a writer who made a point of researching the material for his adventures in great depth. If he was writing about oil-rigs then he spent time on an oil-rig; if about the Antarctic then he spent time in the frozen South.”1 Hammond Innes had personal contact with the forces of the Antarctic. He witnessed the magnitude of the ice. I can’t imagine anything more perfect. This book is “a rousing adventure yarn of derring-do on the Antarctic” written by an author who experienced it first hand.

1 Asto

So I upgraded to Leopard

Published
by
Matthew
on March 16, 2008
in Review
. 0 Comments

A couple weeks ago I finally upgraded to Leopard. I wanted to document some problems I’ve had.

Transparency
I have a G4 Powerbook and the dock and menubar transparency do not work. I tried editing some plist files, but that didn’t work. It actually really messed stuff up. I had to boot into single user mode and fix it. Don’t do this. Transparency is not worth it.

LastFMHelper
Force quit that sucka in Activity Monitor (located in Applications > Utilities). Makes my CPU run high. Quitting this won’t affect Last.fm app in any way. From what I gather, its main purpose is to automatically recognize your iPod when you plug it in.

Adium
Adium got painfully slow. I tried different Message Styles, but it still hung a lot. It stressed me out for it not to keep up with my typing. No fun. I love Adium, but I’m back using iChat. iChat isn’t awful, especially in Leopard because it has tabs.

Camino
Camino! My love! Slowed down a lot since I upgraded. I feel so sad about this. Having a bunch of tabs open makes my fan turn on. I still use it occasionally, but Safari is now my default browser. I do like Find being in the same window and also find-as-you-type in Safari 3.

Flash
Infamously bad in Leopard. Works on 90% of things in Safari. I had to uninstall and reninstall even though I was up-to-date in Tiger. Persistent problems include Google Street View (not all of Google Maps), the audio player for Tumblr, and a few others I can’t think of right now. These both work in Camino though, which is weird. Other weird things, watching Fox online only works in Safari, but watching NBC only works on Camino.

MAXIMUM EDIT:
DOY! My problems with Flash were all my own. I tried going through the process of uninstalling and reinstalling Flash again and I found that the Adobe site showed be the INTEL version instead of the PPC version. So I downloaded the PPC version and everything works well. My bad. Sorry.

Panic
On a positive note, Coda, Transmit, and Unison work perfectly. I was really worried about these because they are so much a part of my daily computer existence (apart from web browsing and IM).

These problems are not all encompassing. They are few and far between. I would definitely recommend Leopard. It works better on newer computers, but what doesn’t?

Klean Kanteen

Published
by
Matthew
on February 26, 2008
in Review
. 4 Comments

Yesterday I got a coupon in the mail for REI reminding me I had dividend to spend. Today I took that coupon and dividend spending spirit to REI, and bought the 40 oz. Klean Kanteen with Loop-Top Cap. I’ve been dreaming of getting a Klean Kanteen since I found out my Nalgene was killing me. I am very excited about my new water bottle. It taste cleaner. It probably doesn’t really, but I thought and stressed out about it so much. I mean Nalgene is probably not killing me. (They are killing baby bunnies.) But I’ve thought about this damn water bottle situation for many hours. I like Klean Kanteen because it doesn’t have a coating inside like Sigg and the cap is even metal. No more leaching for me. Or less leaching I guess. Also, another plus for Klean Kanteen over Sigg is that Sigg says no hot liquid. I guess that’s a plus. I don’t think I would put a hot beverage in a steel bottle thought. It’s 8 oz. more than my bunny killing Nalgene though.

On a side note, as I was writing this post, this came up on my feeds: #76 Bottles of Water. (Also, if you haven’t heard of Stuff White People Like, there was a good interview with the blogger on Talk on the Nation.)

Let’s turn art into rent

Published
by
Matthew
on February 17, 2008
in Music and Review
. 1 Comment

I told Patrick I would write about this before Pitchfork, but I didn’t get to it in time. Thinking about High Places makes me feel very sentimental. I first heard High Places when they played with Lucky Dragons, Bobby Birdman, and YACHT at il corral. I went with Jon and we got there too early and met Jennifer Fodor of G-RAD (this was before G-RAD beat us) and went to an arcade. I really like High Places. They had already run out of CDRs when we saw them so I subsisted on downloads from their myspace. (Later I bought this seven inch on Ancient Almanac.) But my point is that they needed to put out a legit album and the rad cuties at eMusic just did, 03/07 - 09/07 on eMusic Selects. Ok, here is the scoop. eMusic Selects is “a brand-new monthly program featuring exclusive music from handpicked, unsigned new artists.” Whoa! To me this sounds heartfelt. They really want to help out new artists. It benefits the artist and it benefits eMusic. So far I think it has worked. And guess what? February’s releases? Not only High Places, but also Breathe Owl Breathe. I’ve been really digging both albums a lot and I’m going to tell you why. Or why you should buy them right now to support these rad artists.

emusicselects.jpg

Now the music. High Places consists of Rob’s sweet beats and Mary’s ethereal singing. Rob only uses tiny drums and shakers, but the sound is so full you would think there was more. There is no more! Well, there is. There is Mary’s singing. You can’t have one without the other. They sort of just move in your mind to be one solid noise and you forget that shakers can’t sing. Or I do. Mary’s voice is always echoed in this perfect way. You can imagine it. When they play she moves and dances around singing with bells around her wrist. When I say ethereal I don’t mean ethereal like Lavender Diamond, the pace and the attitude is different. Lavender Diamond ethereal feels delicate and light. High Places ethereal feels light, but full. Full in a lofi way or in a low treble way. The best way to understand is to hear:

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03 Banana Slugs/Cosmonaut

(Plus High Places always favorites my photos of the Margot and Travis.)

Breathe Owl Breathe is not an artist I was terribly familiar with before I got Ghost Glacier EP. I knew those Michigan folks were deep into it, but otherwise no. Ok. Immediate reaction: familiarity. Not familiarity like “I think I’ve heard this before”, but familiarity in the way “I think I’ve ALWAYS heard this.” It feels like a distant memory. A fond distant memory. Probably from your childhood. But like a positive experience. Not like when you were chubby and were bad at sports. More like a sunset or a Sunday afternoon. I suppose also sentimental. Their music feels like a fond memory. That’s the best I can say it.

Breathe Owl Breathe would be filed under “folk” I suppose because they play folky instruments. Their voices are comforting and make me weepy. Such mellow vibes!

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04 Ghost In The Morning Moon

“First there was dust, then there was a squirrel, then there was a dog, then there was a cat”

Published
by
Matthew
on February 5, 2008
in Film and Review
. 1 Comment

The Big BangLaura and I were flipping through channels last night and came across the Big Bang. It was that or Puppy Bowl IV so we decided to watch it. I really enjoyed the movie. It was bizarre at times and it clearly was made in 1990. The little synopsis provided by Cox said: “Filmmaker James Toback conducts radical interviews with various people on subjects like sex, death, God.” Basically the movie is the director James Toback interviewing people, asking all sorts of people the same questions. There is the Girl, the Mother, the Boy, the Basketball Star, the Violinist, the Artiste, the Humorist, the Jazz Man, the Astronomer, the Restauranteuse, the Model, the Philosopher, the Painter, the Medical Student, the Writer, the Filmmaker, the Gangster, the Boxer, and the Survivor.

James Toback asked them how they thought the Universe began, what they believed about God, about sex. It was great. It was amusing at times and it was really intense at other times. I was mesmerized by Fred Hess, the Astronomer, because the way he spoke about the big bang, about the conception of the universe, about our star, the sun, was very much like a Baptist preacher. It seemed wrong. The content of what he was saying vs. the way he was saying it. It was moving and confusing. Apparently, that’s his thing. He is often called the Evangelist for Astronomy. Barbara Traub, the Survivor, Holocaust survivor, Auschwitz survivor, was quite intense. She talked about losing her sense of identity. HEAVY. The Little Girl, Emma Astner, says about the conception of the universe, “First there was dust, then there was a squirrel, then there was a dog, then there was a cat.” It is inspired and bizarre, but it holds up just as soundly as the other responses. The Basketball Star talked about having sex with so many women. The Mother talked about almost losing her mind when her daughter was killed. Don Simpson, producer of Top Gun, talked about his conservative upbringing in Alaska and how he became a humanist.

The Big Bang was an unexpected gem. It was the random outcome of a night of channel surfing. I’m a sucker for interviews. It was exactly what I needed.

The New York Times hated it. “What kind of people want to reveal their most profound thoughts and fears on screen? As it turns out, people who ultimately say very little, who are at best amusing, occasionally affecting and more often simply bland.” Well then.

Each person had their own environment that matched their context. The Evangelist for Astronomy was in a large dark room with a single light focused on him. The children were sitting on the carpet in a living room. The Mother seemed to be in a dark closet with only half of her face lit. The Artist was in a loft. The Philosopher is sitting a table next to a bright open window. The problem with the environments was that they lacked an overall cohesion. They almost seemed overly intentional and somewhat annoying.