What public figures publish and believe, in their own words.
About this feed
Highlights: posts that did unusually well for the person who wrote them, everything
they published at length, each release and new project, and every belief — at most
two a day from anyone. Day by day, newest
day first; within a day, the people with the most beliefs on this site come first. Nothing
else orders it. Show everything instead.
The quoted blocks are what people actually said; a beneath one is
the belief those words support, in korrents' wording. Nobody here wrote their own page.
Top people are the people in this feed with the most beliefs on this site, then the
most here. Choose an area and the row leads with the people whose beliefs are about it;
tap a face for their feed.
If you don’t know the book, Content Rules is the how-to field guide to creating the kind of blogs, videos, FAQs, product pages (or any kind of content!) that will help your organization grow.
This is one of the great political biographies. Teddy Roosevelt was like a character out of a novel, so it's not surprising that his biography reads like one.
Why Nations Fail is by two of my favourite economists, two very close friends and co-authors of mine, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. They're tackling a subject that I've worked on with them, and they do a great job of bringing it to life and making it vivid.
This is my competition. I chose it because I think we need more of these intelligent, thoughtful, well-documented books that scare the pants off you and convince you that action is needed.
Can I recommend the lens? For D800 users, honestly, no. You're better served by the 85/1.8G; use the balance of funds for other glass, or buy one of my prints with some of the money you've saved (shameless plug). It simply lacks the crispness I've seen with other bodies.
You're better served by the 85/1.8G; use the balance of funds for other glass, or buy one of my prints with some of the money you've saved (shameless plug).
The concept of narrative is not absolute. It is merely a label for a cluster of emotional triggers which games happen to share with certain traditional media.
I am a strong proponent of wanton notetaking - words, names, scraps, passages, whole articles, just dump it all in there - and I’d recommend this setup to anyone.
I’ve been places in Turkey and Greece where my shiny iPhone showed no bars but the quiet resourceful Kindle could reach Gmail without a hitch. Strange and miraculous.
AutoHotkey - I used to use a program called Winkey, but that got discontinued, so now I use this. It's free software that lets you map all sorts of actions to the keyboard.
I guess I should mention I also got a 3G Kindle which I love and a Withings scale that posts my weight to Twitter, which is lots of fun, but also kinda cheesy because every post has their URL slapped on the end of it.
I had a jailbroken iPhone 3GS till its cell receiver died making it a very thick and expensive iPod, so now I've got a Motorola XT 860 because I wanted a physical keyboard. Guess what, it's kinda sucky too!
It's being replaced with a Lenovo T520 with a "Thinkpad Mini Doc Plus Series 3 170W" dock (that's what they call it!) that supports 3 external monitors.
I would be suspicious of anything like 100% - it would smell of someone writing tests to make the coverage numbers happy, but not thinking about what they are doing.
If you make a certain level of coverage a target, people will try to attain it. The trouble is that high coverage numbers are too easy to reach with low quality testing.
However, the real kicker here is that the images presented aren't just the single 'selected' iconic ones, but also the ones before and after – i.e. a contact sheet of that entire roll of film.
I use Arq for backups, LastPass for passwords, Chrome for my browser and have four users set up inside Chrome to handle business and personal account separation.
I use Arq for backups, LastPass for passwords, Chrome for my browser and have four users set up inside Chrome to handle business and personal account separation.
For communication, I'm logged into several IRC networks and use bitlbee inside of irssi inside of a screen session on a slice of a VM a friend loans me.
Editing for the books usually happens in either Word or Pages; I have no love for either, but Word plays nicely with InDesign, so we're a little but stuck with it for now.
I use Propane to connect to Typekit's Campfire account; we're virtual, with folks spread out between San Francisco and Berlin, so this is where much of our work happens.
He is important to read because he's simultaneously critical of his characters and sympathetic to them. It's very difficult, now, to think back into that time, when people had very limited choices. If you chose to oppose the regime, that might mean you couldn't get medicine for your sick mother, your children couldn't go to school and you might get kicked out of your apartment. We don't have to face those choices. Miłosz is very good at explaining them.
He wasn't in the Gulag for long – only a couple of years, until 1941 – but what I like about his book is that, unlike many memoirs, it's not just about his story or what happened to him. It's more like a series of short stories, of the kind written by [Varlam] Shalamov or one of the Gulag novelists. Each chapter is a story about a different person or situation, together with an accompanying set of thoughts or meditations.
Sándor Márai is one of the great Hungarian novelists. He was in Hungary during the war, and left in 1948. This book is about a neutral intellectual's encounter with communism, and it records what he saw as it happened.
I really like the fullscreen text editor Dark Room for taking notes, and I've found I find it a lot easier to get to sleep since I started using F.lux.
I think the real verdict is that I'm now using the M9-P as my primary camera, even for things that it was not designed for, even when I have the choice to use something else.
Somehow, just in the past few days, I've finally moved from Monaco to Consolas. I never thought I'd switch from Monaco. (I would have gone with Menlo, but it's a bit too blurry for me.)
Inside of these bags, my air lives in its own Pack and Smooch Hampshire pouch. It is felt and leather and was designed to not scratch up your air. Looks great too.
I also use Terminal, Mail.app (though I mostly check email on my phone these days), TextMate, iTunes (cannot get into Spotify or Rdio for whatever reason), Photoshop (grudgingly), Sequel Pro, and very little else.
I also use Terminal, Mail.app (though I mostly check email on my phone these days), TextMate, iTunes (cannot get into Spotify or Rdio for whatever reason), Photoshop (grudgingly), Sequel Pro, and very little else.
My white desk doesn't work so well with the optical mouse, so for some dumb reason I'm using a 242-page book called Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer as a mousepad.
Outside the dynamic interactive one-big-process environments I'm a big fan of simple orthogonal tools that work well together, so I use xbindkeys for all my launchers and mpd for my tunes.
Debian's installer is less polished, but I appreciate their conservative get-it-right-at-all-costs approach a lot more these days than when I was in college and had a lot of time to mess around with goofed-up packages.
I've also just switched away from stock GNOME to XMonad since I just kept hearing how it's become the canonical implementation of tiling done right. Now I'm wishing I had switched sooner; it makes the classic paradigm just seem so cumbersome in comparison.
The reason why I am so fond of Homage to Catalonia, and see it as an even more relevant precursor to dissent, is that in it you can see a man of the Left learning to make the distinction that breaks down the Left with a big L into lots of little lefts.
In The Church and the Left Michnik argues for an untraditional alliance. He says that the left has to talk to the Polish Catholic Church, especially after the Vatican's internal reform [in 1965].
In the end I think Havel will be remembered as the outstanding East European dissident writer, and he will be remembered as such above all for this essay.
It is Bob’s job to get you signed with the company as cheaply as possible, but Bob is not super motivated to do so, because Bob is not spending Bob’s money to hire you. Bob is spending Bob’s budget.
They are all using your previous anomalously low salary — a salary which did not reflect your true market worth, because you were young or inexperienced or unskilled at negotiation or working at a different firm or in another line of work entirely — to justify paying you an anomalously low salary in the future.
This is a roundabout way of telling you that companies are not sensitive to small differences in employee wages because employees are so darned expensive anyhow.
Close to 100% is subject to the results of salary negotiations. Thus, your salary negotiations are probably going to be the most important financial decisions you will ever make. We socialize middle class Americans to go into them unprepared, demotivated, and fearful of success.
Fission for lossless sound editing (trimming live concerts into separate songs, etc.). Max for converting between audio-file formats. Caffeine for easy control over when my laptop can and can't go to sleep.
Other software I use almost daily: Dropbox for commonly accessed files. Git for my work and personal projects. Audacity for quick clean up of audio files. 1password for password management.
I can't afford time off work to exercise, so I attached a Table Mate II couch desk to a Marcy Recumbent Mag Cycle, and moved it next to the desk in my home office. Honestly, I'm more productive on the bike than off.
In the meantime, below are a few of my favorite books from 2012: Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power – Gordon (my favorite, though it was published in 2005) Jackass Investing: Don’t do it. Profit from it – Dever (unfortunate title, good book) What Works on Wall Street, Fourth Edition: The Classic Guide to the Best-Performing Investment Strategies of All Time – O’Shaughnessy (good update and review of quant stock screens)
In the meantime, below are a few of my favorite books from 2012: Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power – Gordon (my favorite, though it was published in 2005) Jackass Investing: Don’t do it. Profit from it – Dever (unfortunate title, good book) What Works on Wall Street, Fourth Edition: The Classic Guide to the Best-Performing Investment Strategies of All Time – O’Shaughnessy (good update and review of quant stock screens)
In the meantime, below are a few of my favorite books from 2012: Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power – Gordon (my favorite, though it was published in 2005) Jackass Investing: Don’t do it. Profit from it – Dever (unfortunate title, good book) What Works on Wall Street, Fourth Edition: The Classic Guide to the Best-Performing Investment Strategies of All Time – O’Shaughnessy (good update and review of quant stock screens)
My main desktop at home is 2005 Mac Mini running Linux. I upgraded the RAM and added an Intel SSD to it. It's very old and slow but it's pretty quiet and I'm too lazy to replace it.
My main desktop at home is 2005 Mac Mini running Linux. I upgraded the RAM and added an Intel SSD to it. It's very old and slow but it's pretty quiet and I'm too lazy to replace it.
The book is well written, though not very inspired, and the scientific explanations are well referenced and, for all I can tell, flawless. I'd give four out of five stars if I had stars to give.
When I get home all of my documents automatically upload to Flickr on private mode, so that I can choose which ones to reveal or delete with a minimum of work. I use an EyeFi Connect 4G SD card for this.
For everyday computing I use a 11" MacBook Air. It fits in a tiny bag. I used to carry a MacBook Pro 15" and a MacBook 13" in the same Timbuktoo bag. It was rather unpleasant. The Air is good for planes and has great battery life and speed. It multitasks like a pro and handles lots of large files.
The point of the giant setup is that in my freetime I like running giant network visualizations using NetDraw, a free program written by Steve Borgatti for visualizing both 1-mode and 2-mode social network data.
The most important thing to realize about the future is that it's a choice. People choose which visions to pursue, people choose which research gets funded, people choose how they will spend their careers.
Hands do two things. They are two utterly amazing things, and you rely on them every moment of the day, and most Future Interaction Concepts completely ignore both of them.
To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.
The person who has decided to bring on one more engineer is not doing it because they love having a geek around the room, they are doing it because adding the geek allows them to complete a project (or projects) which will add revenue or decrease costs.
Articles happen in Word, but I'm leaving it behind more and more, and just writing in Textedit to save myself all the time and energy associated with Microsoft.
The most powerful tools I wield continue to be: grep, awk, sed, tcpdump, and strace/ktrace/truss. Call me old, but they've never failed me and feel like comfortable and familiar tools.
The most powerful tools I wield continue to be: grep, awk, sed, tcpdump, and strace/ktrace/truss. Call me old, but they've never failed me and feel like comfortable and familiar tools.
A dream setup for me is a 27" monitor (anything bigger is a pain for me), a well-designed chair, and an internet connection. The entire Ashgate Resilience Engineering series. Anything else is ancillary.
I use all the Web browsers a lot since I'm constantly chasing browser bugs, and don't currently really like any of them though I lean towards Chrome (but currently am annoyed at it because it keeps crashing on me).
All auxiliary tasks can help move you in the right direction, but will not ultimately help you speak unless you find a native, put yourself in front of them and force yourself to start to communicate.
Another book I would like to mention is Josiah Thompson's Six Seconds in Dallas [about the Kennedy footage]. It's an early example of an attempt to do just what we're talking about – piecing together reality through photography, or in this case film.
These images answer certain people's hopes and dreams – that they can reconnect with those that are lost, that the deceased are always with us. One example is William H Mumler, the famous spirit photographer who created a picture of Mary Lincoln with the ghost of her deceased husband hovering in the background.
It's an obvious precursor to what I've been trying to do. It's also a great book in its own right. Unfortunately, Klüver died just a couple of years before I started working on my own book. I would have loved to talk to him.
There's this wonderful photograph of Lee Miller in Hitler's bathtub, taken by her boyfriend at the time – a Life photographer she had teamed up with, David Scherman.
I feel the pull of The Auschwitz Album very powerfully. We're looking at something that is indecent, it's cruel beyond imagination and yet it's real. It concerns real people and real historical events.
This is a general introduction to the history of probability and the way it comes into everyday life. It intersperses the historical development with modern applications, and looks at finance, sport, gambling, lotteries and coincidences.
This book is somewhat similar to The Drunkard's Walk in that it covers the history of probability. But since Stephen's background is in medical statistics, he looks at clinical trials and other medical studies.
Yes, this is a completely non-technical book, which is looking at things from the point of view of psychology. It is essentially a review of the recent research on risk perception.
I like this book because one of the things that really irritates me as a statistician is when numbers are bandied around as though they are God-given truths and can't be argued with.
This is part of the Murderous Maths series, and is my favourite book. It is great. It is a book for secondary school kids full of cartoons and lovely characters like this filthy boy called Pongo McWhiffy, or the one I like best is an upper-class idiot called Binky Smallbrains who falls for every trick. It is a book about chance, luck and probability, and these are difficult things that people have to learn about at school. This book really cracks through it. It starts with probability trees
I create Fluid installs for each of my major web applications (Mail, Google Reader, Slashdot, Google Docs, we use Jira for bug tracking internally, etc).
Suetonius's work is a collection of biographies of the first 12 Roman rulers, from Julius Caesar through to Domitian. And it really had a crucial sense of shaping our understanding of Imperial Rome as a place of vice and savagery and sexual depravity and violent, brutal, bawdy splendour.
But the truth is that it remains incredibly readable. As I said before, it takes Tacitus as its model, who was famous for his waspish style, and a careful balancing and modulating of the sentences so that irony would be generated. This is what Gibbon does as well, and it means that not only is it an incredible work of scholarship but it is also compulsively entertaining. I really think that anyone who is prepared to give it a chance will find themselves smiling at the very least throughout it.
But there is also a deep pleasure in looking at some of the things that we think we know about Rome, or the myths that we know are not actually true, taking the mystery to pieces and examining the works and seeing what is there. This is what Mary Beard does in her book.
Yet it seems that when people are valuing one action far above others, based on thin information, this is the time when skeptical inquiry is needed most.
In such a world, it seems that nearly all altruists would put nearly all of their resources toward helping people they knew little about, rather than helping themselves, their families and their communities. I believe that the world would be worse off if people behaved in this way, or at least if they took it to an extreme.
EEV doesn’t seem to allow rewarding charities for transparency or penalizing them for opacity: it simply recommends giving to the charity with the highest estimated expected value, regardless of how well-grounded the estimate is.
And we generally prefer to give where we have strong evidence that donations can do a lot of good rather than where we have weak evidence that donations can do far more good
I feel that any giving approach that relies only on estimated expected-value – and does not incorporate preferences for better-grounded estimates over shakier estimates – is flawed.
Of course, with the suburban model, it is physically impossible for a city of finite dimension to grow indefinitely, let alone at amounts that accelerate forever.
Put these two characteristics together and you have a key insight; Cities routinely trade near-term cash advantages associated with new growth for long-term financial obligations associated with maintenance of infrastructure.
Interestingly, the most-used new app I've started running on an almost-daily basis this year is Facetime, either on my laptop or more frequently on my phone.
I really love the Google Authenticator app, which is a token generator for Google's 2-factor authentication, but makes me feel very safe and high-tech every time I open it up.
For browsing the internet I use Google Chrome. The Chrome team is quickly demonstrating that they have the skill and courage to push the limits of what we expect a modern browser to do.
I have five different Google Mail accounts. Mailplane makes it easy to switch between these accounts and keeps my email separate from the rest of my browsing, just the way I like it.
I also use Skype for international calls, Preview for reading PDFs, iTunes for listening to music, and iStat Menus (displaying network activity, memory usage, and cpu usage) to keep me informed of what foolish things my Mac is doing.
I just bought a Panasonic Lumix GF1 a few months ago and I love it. It makes me feel skilled rather than like an idiot. That's what good technology does.
I like Muji notebooks and Muji pens because they work well, yet don't feel precious. In my case, the more I treasure a tool, the less likely I am to use it.
More recent additions include an Apple Time Capsule for backing up the Mac and running the home network, a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo (with mirrored disks) for networked storage, and a Fujitsu ScanSnap S510.
I try to live with what's already there, like using Spotlight instead of Alfred or Quicksilver which surely have more features, but are new tools to learn and master.
Other peripheral stuff I use include Droplr for sharing screenshots, MenuMeters for understanding "why the hell is my computer suddenly slow?", TotalFinder which provides tabbed Finder windows and a bunch of less visual stuff related to the shell.
GitHub is an amazing place, product and breeding ground for ideas revolving around software development, created by the ever so humble Chris Wanstrath (and Tom Preston-Werner).
Also, Windows XP in a number of VMware Fusion instances - one for each major IE release plus an extra "baseline" instance in case I have to build up a new one from scratch.
Adobe Photoshop gets some use, mostly when my business partner sends me designs and buttons and such to turn into markup and CSS, but also when I want to goof around a bit with images or process screenshots for my writing.
Meir Statman, one of my favorite behavioral economists, has written a great book on how investors can overcome their base urges and make better decisions:
I use Wordpress for my blog, Tumblr for my Daily Drop Cap site (though I will be switching to another format once the project is finished for better archiving).
I make most of my phone calls using my Skype number and use a Blue Ball microphone and a variety of headphones to make that happen (and not sound crappy and echoey).
On the go: An 11" MacBook Air with 4 gigs of RAM, which is perfect for client emergencies when I'm traveling, for working on small vector projects and for working on typefaces, which don't require a massive screen.
I have an iPad as well which I've found very useful for reading book manuscripts (which I must do when designing book covers) but don't use it as much as I thought I would for other things.
For reviewing purposes, I also have an Xbox 360. It was a gift; exact specifications I am therefore less sure about, but it has plenty of storage space.
I also have iSSH on the iPad (and iPhone, etc). That lets me ssh into a server and run Emacs over 3G. Yes, this is my greatest computer dream. Emacs anywhere!
The book is colorful and ludic which is a good idea for a "Beginner's Guide". The layout is attractive, there are many detailed examples. I like the pedagogy: the author wants you to learn by doing. However, the book is poor as a reference: the coverage is limited despite the 300 pages and the chapter summaries are strictly non-technical.
This work started out as a bit of a curiosity in the field of psychology, but we get a lot of insight from it, it is absolutely essential to understanding how humans think.
The book has a lot of things like that. He's looking at things that people take for granted, and saying, you can't just take these things for granted, these are amazing feats of engineering.
That's kind of the point – it's this lovable rogue, this guy who was never as successful as all that, but he would somehow just manage to stay afloat. To me it felt very statistical, the whole book.
Yes, perhaps the best book every written: How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk, by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. This was a book that I read years ago because it happened to be on my sister's bookshelf, and it really did change my life.
My laptop is a beat-up Dell Latitude D830. It's a wonderfully resilient bit of kit, and I managed to get it at the exact time that Dell's constantly changing menu of customisation options combined to create an overpowered but reasonably priced laptop, like some kind of unlikely stellar conjunction in a bad sci-fi film.
I also have a Sanyo Xacti FH1 for special shots. Despite a horrible rolling shutter that makes handheld footage almost unusable, it has a very long battery life, it fits nearly anywhere and it can do 600 frames per second at low resolutions.
My main graphics tool (the thing that I use for things like creating all the JavaOne t-shirts) is NewTek LightWave. It is a phenomenal tool. I've been using it for years.
I use the Mighty Mouse, which I don't particularly care for, and Apple's USB keyboard (the flat one, with the numeric keypad), which is tolerable but not great.
ESS is an add-on to Emacs that allows you to do your data analysis inside the editor. It works with several statistics packages, but I do all my data work using it together with R.
At home, I use Paradigm Atom Monitor speakers connected to an Onkyo stereo receiver, because I’ve never met a pair of “computer speakers” that I liked.
If you treat finishing like a skill, rather than simply a step in the process, you can acknowledge not only that it’s something you can get better at, but also what habits and thought processes get in your way.
Any effective monetary stimulus would be expected to raise long term rates.
Their words now
I predicted that aggressive QE would raise long term interest rates, a view which seemed to be refuted by the response on T-bond yields to the March 2009 Fed QE announcement.
These students recognize that they’ll ultimately be judged not by the sum of their contributions to diverse activities, but instead by the magnitude of their ability in the one thing they do best.
In other words, when you go through life thinking “if I can make it through this, things will be better later,” you eventually forget what “better” means.
Outside the house, I had been using a Lenovo ThinkPad X301 running Windows 7 with a cellular modem, but I'm now switching to a MacBook Air with a MiFi device.
These books are more specific and rigorous than your standard Malcolm Gladwell fare; things like Getting to Plan B, The New Business Road Test, and Business Model Generation.
These books are more specific and rigorous than your standard Malcolm Gladwell fare; things like Getting to Plan B, The New Business Road Test, and Business Model Generation.
These books are more specific and rigorous than your standard Malcolm Gladwell fare; things like Getting to Plan B, The New Business Road Test, and Business Model Generation.
But instead of spending hours reading the book, read a detailed review of the book, or listen to an interview about the book. Trust me, you will pick up all of the salient points in 30 minutes.
Let's say that if the Buddha had been born in the Midwest of the US he would have written Brim's book. Brim has a Midwesterner's work ethic, and Americans moralise work quite a lot...so Brim says don't drop out of the game, play it, but play it so you don't get trapped, play it wisely, so that you get to enjoy the fruits of your labour.
The Gilbert book is just so much fun to read. He's one of the funniest people, certainly in psychology – he's just endlessly witty, and reading it is like strapping yourself into a roller coaster.
That work was done especially by Barry Schwartz, in his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. That is just such a good book...if I'd had six books, I would have included that one.
The How of Happiness I would describe as the state of the art in evidence-based positive psychology. Sonja Lyubomirsky has done the best studies on how simple interventions, simple things you can do, on a daily or weekly basis, have measurable effects on your happiness. So if your goal is to actually raise your happiness level, then this is the best book to read – it has very concrete suggestions of what you can do.
Apache for web serving (I would probably not pick Apache if I cared about performance, but I don't do anything which needs fantastic HTTP serving performance);
I do all of my work from a Dell XPS M1530 laptop – Core 2 Duo T9300 (2.5 GHz) CPU, 3 GB of RAM, 250 GB hard drive. I don't really like this laptop: It runs quite hot, and all of its air intake is on the bottom, so it tends to overheat if I place it on a bed or carpeted floor.
At home we have a NEC 2690 display that I bought on James Duncan Davidson’s recommendation, carefully color-corrected; it makes our pictures and videos look much better than they really are.
I've read a ton of data-structures and algorithms books, and I've never found one like this one. Its unconventional approach is refreshing and keeps you interested.
As a product visionary, trying to describe the product on a piece of paper with paragraphs and bullet points is like trying to paint the Sistine Chapel with a whiteboard marker.
In making products, taste is not a matter of opinion, but an actual sense of sophistication that a person has. People who make new things need to practice taste and recognize beauty when they see it. Schools or education have very little to teach in the area of taste, you need to get involved in making something real.
For the soul, you need a person with a great taste to be the living and breathing aspect of the product. The one forging the blades. The person who thinks about the in and outs of the product and the business.
The sequel, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, is a terrific, short, concise, fun guide to running simple "hallway" usability tests to improve the usability of your software and websites. Highly recommended.
I am using a Lemote Yeelong, a netbook with a Loongson chip and a 9-inch display. This is my only computer, and I use it all the time. I chose it because I can run it with 100% free software even at the BIOS level.
I spend most of my time using Emacs. I run it on a text console, so that I don't have to worry about accidentally touching the mouse-pad and moving the pointer, which would be a nuisance.
NetNewsWire for RSS reading, SnapnDrag for taking screenshots of application windows, iShowU for taking screencasts, Keynote for presentations, SuperDuper! for creating mirrored backups,
I use it as my primary machine, and have been using Mac laptops that way for probably the last 5 years or so, starting with the fabled and wonderful aluminum 12" Powerbook.
On the iPhone I swear by Tweetie 2, MLB At Bat, Ego, The Weather Channel (a New England requirement), Ramp Champ, and recently the WordPress app for the iPhone (mostly for quickly moderating comments).
But if you examine the business impact of innovation, you will soon discover that the most frequent gains come from the small, incremental innovations, changes that lower costs, add some simple features, and smooth out the rough edges of a product.
I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs.
mIRC is for IRC, Miranda is for everything else. I used Trillian for a few years, but it became more and more bloated. Miranda starts quickly and uses very little memory.
I use Paint Shop Pro 5 from 1998 for working with graphics - it is still the best program ever made for dealing with images at the pixel level and converting between formats.
I have a 30" Cinema Display mounted on an aluminum monitor arm (from Space, but I can't find their online presence). I like the aesthetics of this arm as the mount is through a hole in the table instead of a clamp, so it takes up less desk space than the original holder (and allows greater degree of movement).
I'm also completely unimpressed by Apple Cinema Displays. They're way too pricey, and actually what I want out of a second monitor is color inconsistency.
Next to my main keyboard is my main mousing device: a four-button Kensington Expert Mouse. It's hard to believe but I've been using Kensington trackballs for over sixteen years now. It's my favorite mousing device by far.
I use a neoprene laptop sleeve from Incase to shuttle it around; it's actually a case sized for a regular MacBook which means it's a little bigger, but I need the extra room to tote along a Mini DisplayPort-to-VGA adapter and a USB-to-Ethernet adapter too.
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.