Favorite links

Tue - July 14, 2009

I am sorry I pulled a false alarm

Posted at 08:23 PM

Mon - July 13, 2009

More good old days

I wrote a few weeks ago about a couple of sites dealing with pictures of Seattle history. Here is another site for those interested in Seattle history: The Seattle Municipal Archives Flickr photostream.

I haven't looked at them all yet, but it says there are 889 pictures there. Maybe there is a picture of them first grading your street.

Posted at 03:07 PM

Mon - June 15, 2009

Good old days

Here are a couple of sites devoted to photographs of old-time Seattle: PaulDorpat.com and VintageSeattle.org.

Paul Dorpat has for many years written the "Seattle Now and Then" page in the Sunday magazine supplement of the Seattle Times. His web site offers archives of those columns, and lots of new old stuff.

VintageSeattle.org mostly just shows high resolution photos of bygone days in Seattle. For example, check out this entry, Seattle By Air, 1979. I point that one out because that's pretty much what Seattle looked like when moved here two years later -- the Seafirst Building (now the 1001 Fourth Avenue Building) was, at 40 stories, the tallest building in town, and there were few other tall buildings. They used to call the Seafirst Building, a glass and steel rectangular cube, "the box the Space Needle came in." I haven't heard THAT one for a long time.

Posted at 03:08 PM

Mon - March 2, 2009

"I can only speak to a Mr or Mrs Nyborg."*

Here is the MovieWAVs Page, which features thousands of little sound clips from movies and TV shows and cartoons. And no, despite the name, they are not only in the crappy WAV format.

If you have an iPhone, you will want to know that, besides .wav and .mp3, these clips are available for download in .m4r format, the iPhone ringtone format, the better to annoy everyone around you. Imagine how great it would be if every time someone called you, your phone gave out with this clip from David Mamet's magnificent "Glengarry Glen Ross":

That is the greatest line of all time from any movie.

I said that the clips are available as .m4r files. To be more accurate, let me say that all the ones I have looked at are in that format, but I can't say they ALL are, because I have not looked at them all. If you ever have a sound clip you want to turn into an iPhone ringtone, that is easily done by importing the clip into GarageBand and then clicking on the "Send Ringtone to iTunes" option in the Share menu.

* Alas, the clips of Jack Lemmon making sales calls are not in there.

Posted at 02:51 PM

Tue - August 12, 2008

See you in the funny papers

Here is Obit Magazine, a very slick site devoted to obituaries.

They have recent obituaries, links to the local obituary pages of newspapers around the country, a "Died on the same day" page, and more.

Posted at 03:14 PM

Sun - June 15, 2008

Trust, but verify

Here is a web site, RepairPal, where you choose the make, model, and year of your car, and type in where you live, and select from a menu of car repairs, and it tells you how much you should expect to pay for those repairs.

So you can know if your mechanic is robbing you.

Now, the thing is, for most of us, you don't know exactly what repair your car needs until the mechanic has taken it apart a little. So you would have to have the mechanic tell you what he plans to do to your car, and how much it is going to cost, and then you would look it up in RepairPal, and then negotiate if necessary. And I don't think you have a lot of leverage when your car is in pieces.

Still, knowledge is power.

RepairPal has other features, but the repair cost estimator is the most powerful, in my opinion.

Posted at 10:33 PM

Sun - March 23, 2008

Waste your time in even more arcane ways

Here is PuddleBlog, devoted to documenting a seemingly-permanent puddle at the corner of Jay Street and Plymouth Street in Brooklyn, New York.

Inspired!

[Found by ear at TBTL.]

Posted at 12:15 PM

Sat - November 10, 2007

Shape yourself up -- you KNOW you need it

Here is a short list of web sites that offer advice on how to have a better life and get more done, from the simple to the profound. Some I have mentioned before, some not. I read them all. All have RSS feeds for efficient browsing.

Lifehack.org - From clever household tips to planning your life.

Lifehacker.com - Tips for improved efficiency, mostly, but not totally, regarding your computer.

Unclutterer.com - All about getting and staying organized -- physically organized, anyway.

The Happiness Project - Lawyer and author Gretchen Rubin decided to spend a year "test-driving every principle, tip, theory, and scientific study I could find, whether from Aristotle or St. Therese or Martin Seligman or Oprah," and then write about it.

The Simple Dollar - Tips about money, from constructive frugality to investment.

43 Folders - A GTD-themed site, but you can find useful advice there even if you don't practice GTD. The author is a Mac user and offers Mac productivity tips, as well.

Productivity501 - More productivity tips, tending towards technology.

Posted at 09:57 AM

Fri - March 30, 2007

Leave me alone, unless I don't want you to

So, I finally got caller ID on my home phone.

Now I can see who is calling me before I answer, so I can decide whether to answer or not. This, after a couple of decades of screening calls by letting them go to the answering machine and listening to the plaintive message of the caller, and picking up mid-message or not as I chose to -- no more of that. This is much nicer for everyone, I think.

So, now I can see all these calls from charities and political organizations (which are not bound by the Do Not Call law) and ignore them. And any call that either does not display a number, or displays a number but does not display a name, is not answered. So, if you have your outgoing number blocked, and want to talk to me, you need to hit *82 before dialing my number.

But, anyway, these calls that show a number but no name -- they started bugging me. "Who IS that?" I would ask myself. So I started typing the phone numbers in Google and seeing what I got. And that is how I discovered WhoCalled.Us. It is a site where people post what they know about anonymous phone numbers that call them. So when you get a call from an anonymous number that you are curious about, you can go there and type it in and find dozens or hundreds of people who have posted that they got called by that number, too, and several of those people will have tracked down the caller and found out what they were up to. And you can post your experiences, too, if you want to, though I have not.

So now I know that (503) 412-3352 is Research Data Design of Portland, Oregon, and that they do surveys and set up focus groups for reputable clients like J D Power, so maybe I will answer that one if I feel like making $50 by being in a focus group, while (701) 365-0215 is Strategic Fundraising of North Dakota, so they will never get answered, ever. Meanwhile, I also learned that when you get a call raising money for the Washington State Council of Firefighters charitable fund [(253) 983-8739], it is in fact coming from a company called SRI of Lakewood, Washington, which has paid the WSCFF a flat annual fee to raise money in their name, so the WSCFF has already gotten all the money they are going to get whether you donate anything or not. So don't.

Ah, data.

Posted at 02:01 PM

Sun - March 25, 2007

Simplifying the complex

I have discovered the Indexed blog, where a woman explains the world through simple, hand-drawn charts and Venn diagrams.

Like this one, reproduced without permission:

She has both an RSS feed AND a Mac dashboard widget, so you have no excuse.

Posted at 01:59 PM

Wed - April 19, 2006

What time is it?

If you want to know what time it is, you can check The Human Clock.

(Learned of while listening to the Mac Geek Gab podcast. You can learn a lot from that podcast.)

Posted at 01:10 PM

Sun - February 26, 2006

They all speak English, but some not so well

Found at Yu Hu Stewardess: Here is a web site, LiveATC.net, devoted to providing Internet feeds of air traffic control radio (ATC) from airports all over the world.

For example, right now I am now listening to ATC at the airport in Sofia, Bulgaria.

The streams are all streaming MP3, which means they are crystal-clear and are open-source, which means they will play in any MP3-playing software, such as iTunes or Winamp. (When you are at your supermarket buying Internet streams, don't settle for proprietary streams like Windows Media and RealPlayer -- ask your grocer for streaming MP3.)

Listening to ATC is more interesting when I have a horse in the race, i.e., when I am on the plane. But LiveATC.net offers the Seattle tower, too, so I can listen to the radio communications of the planes flying over my head. Which is moderately interesting. (This morning at SeaTac, lots of planes are asking for ice checks before they take off.) So this isn't the sort of thing I will listen to a lot, but I'll dip into it from time to time.

Posted at 09:25 AM

Fri - January 20, 2006

A cornucopia of clips

I only recently discovered The Daily .WAV.

It's a site where a man has been posting one new audio clip from a movie or TV show every day for eleven years.

Like these:

(Which reminds me -- I REALLY have to get to work on that list of the top one hundred movies of all time.)

He has his vast archives available for hours of browsing. I wish he had an RSS feed.

Posted at 08:53 PM

Mon - December 19, 2005

I wish Seattle had this

Chicago readers may wish to make use of GrubHub.com.

Type in your address and Grub Hub will show you what Chicago restaurants will deliver to you right now. Very handy when you need Chinese food at 11:40 p.m..

Posted at 10:09 PM

Fri - December 9, 2005

For the compulsive databasists (you know who you are)

I have been updating the tags ("Info") on my songs and what-not in iTunes, and I couldn't have done it without allmusic.com, so I thought I'd mention it to you, in case you weren't aware of it.

allmusic.com is like IMDb.com, only for music. You can search on a name and find all the albums and songs that act recorded or wrote. You can search on a song and find everybody who recorded it and on what album you would find it. And you can search on album, and see all the songs on it.

For just about every act, there is a biography/history. For just about every album, there is a review, the credits, and the cover artwork. For the more well-known songs, there is a review and often a clip to listen to.

Anyway, it's very handy for updating information that might be missing in your song files, such as composer, and for dragging the album art and dropping it on a song to update that tag. (Yes, you can use Fetch Art for the latter task, but maybe you don't want to install a piece of freeware of unknown origin.)

I think it might make you register to use it -- I can't remember, since I am registered. If that makes you queasy, well, that's why one gets extra semi-anonymous email addresses from gmail and the like. (If you need a gmail address, let me know.)

Posted at 11:18 AM

Map nut, that's me (redux)

An oldie but a goodie

They beat me to it

Tricks of the Trade

I have only one thing to say to you this morning

More hours at the browser

Google map mashups

Just one more brow lift and then you'll be perfect

Hours of happy browsing

In a previous life, he was a dalmatian

I don't know what I did wrong