some words to not

every once in a while you make a good purchase that you're really happy with for many years to come.

one of those for me was a pretty reasonably priced 200mm (8") kitchen knife from arcos, a spanish knife manufacturer. i've had it for about 10 years now, and it's still the best knife in my drawer.

as a german, i'll have to add the obligatory disclaimer that it's no zwilling or wüsthof, but still: it's a great knife for its price.

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copilot from fog creek software is their 'it-just-works' remote desktop implementation.

it's a tool marketed at people who have people who ask them to solve problems on their computer, while they're halfway around the globe, or the country.

smart in its user interface, it requires almost no knowledge from the person being helped, and honestly - very very little from the person helping out. and it also has a novel approach to software pricing, lifted straight from your favorite cell-phone service provider.

their $5 day pass is especially tempting with its impulse shopping price point, especially if you've ever tried to figure out what the hell the other person means when they say: 'i only see the internet button', or conversely, 'your control panel network settings, not your network places'.

also cleverly, both the helper or the helpee can choose to pay for the service.

and now with 2.0, there's a mac version - which earns this my official endorsement.

real men still use barebones vnc, though.

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normally i would never recommend a screensaver, but i'm so happy with this flip-clock one, that i've recommended it to a lot of people in the last few days.

now, whenever i come back to my office or room, i can immediately see the time full screen, and the design ... a classic. given that i don't have a large clock in either space, this saves me the incessant bending over the screen corner to see if i am early or late.

i also love the incredibly subtle shading of the bottom flap for 3d effect, as well as the two equally subtle rounded-corner backgrounds for the hour and minute panels.

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if you're in new york in the near future, make sure to check out the world trade center path station. amidst all the political debate that is stalling the construction of the new structure - the train station is already standing, and, well, thanks to the delay, it's now placed in the open foundations of the site.

it's nice that they left a lot of open views into the construction site, and for a limited time only (one can hope) you can stand right there in the middle of where it all happened.

i'd even recommend taking the train for one station into new jersey if you have the time, because for the first minute or so the train car snakes through ground zero, and the $1.50 fare and 10 minute detour is really not too much for a short historic ride, that will soon be impossible to take.

yeah yeah, everyone is raving about the dumpling man. but if - like me - you are put off by hipster cartoon-designed eateries that sell simple street food amidst primary colors and merchandise t-shirts, i'd recommend you try the chinatown alternative that has no name but only a 'fried dumpling' sign on 99 allen street. $2 buys you 10 tasty steamed veggie dumplings to dip in the soy and hot sauce mixture, and i think the meaty ones are similarly priced.

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so there it is, a new bus line from cambridge to new york, dahlia bus, leaving twice daily on weekends from both destinations.

read more...

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having spent the last few days writing a paper, i got increasingly annoyed by the fact that at a good zoom level i could only see either the top 70% of my page or the bottom 70%. so i finally took action and rotated my secondary display, which is possible thanks to a feature implemented on some tiger powerbooks, and a smart design decision by the makers of my ibm monitor.

having done this, i discovered several things: first, while i thought that this was a very straightforward alteration, most people seemed surprised that this was possible at all. only later did i realize that it's a new feature supported only on some graphics cards. i thought it was a standard thing. i mean how hard is it to rotate the display and have a shorter horizontal resolution?

seoond, my officemate was alsosurprised that the monitor allowed vertical installation at all, which i also thought was possible with most lcd monitors. this could date back to the time when i used vertical monitors during my military service. many, many years ago.

but my main discovery was that the vertical setup is also better for browsing, giving you more of each page (pages are usually not horizontally screen-filling). it's actually better for a lot of things (like html editing), which makes me wonder why we have horizontally skewed monitors anyway? is it a conspiracy to buy bigger monitors? bigger desks even?

probably not. someone suggested that probably it dates back to the time when we only had so much memory on the graphics card (80x24 characters to be precise), and that it was better to have the whole width of the page and scoll the length, than to have the whole length of the page and scroll the width every line you read.

but today, when most information is narrower than even the shorter dimension of the screen, i say it's time to move to vertical monitors! or at least one horizontal and one vertical.

although i gotta admit that the top of the page is still a little high up for me right now...

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also, since more and more people looking over my shoulder seem to ask me about this: meebo is a web-based multi network IM client. for those times when you're away. or those clients you don't want to install on your machine (yes, that's you - windows messenger).

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stumbled across a site called word origins. it seems a quite thoroughly researched and detailed resource for etymology geeks like me.

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this is news to me: craigslist has opened its tel aviv chapter. the earliest post i found was from may 2, so it's been around for over a month now.

that and google sniffing out our little pond...tel aviv is getting some internet love these days.

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since my mom claims that my blog entries have become 'detached from popular culture', 'incomprehensible', and 'obsessed with things nobody cares about', here are three simple things that took me out of my bad mood today:

1. dave's fresh pasta is an adorable italian-american pasta and sandwich store in somerville that has dozens of small sweet candies and a rosemary focaccia that really made my moody afternoon.

2. the dig, picked up and read at said dave's, as usual didn't fail to bring a smile to my face. i like the dig and its writers. once more, the editor was on the money:

3. amon tobin's nightlife, listened to at said dave's while reading said dig. i like music that's cinematic, and nightfire is like a short film. just add eye-closing.

damn. did i get intellectual again?!

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this simple yet important piece of information is surprisingly hard to find online, so i hope that this will finally put this question to rest:

how can you use a sony camcorder as a video input feeding directly to your firewire port without the damn thing going to 'sleep' after 5 minutes or inactivity?

the answer is simple: take out the tape. if the tape is not in, the auto-sleep behavior does not kick in.

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erstwhile super-popular israeli news site ynet has been virtually unread by most expats i know since they decided to charge a subscription fee from readers abroad about 2 years ago.

after they have been superceded by competing publisher maariv's site nrg, i guess they changed their mind, announcing that the website will once more be free of charge for readers everywhere.

for you non-hebrew readers you might be interested in the fact that in parallel ynet also opened an english-language version of their site. unfortunately they have decided to adopt the totally illogical american dating scheme, putting the day between the month and the year.

i also would take ynet news with a grain of salt. if you want a little more responsible journalism, you're better off referring to haaretz.

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have been playing with implementing some morphing algorithms recently. here's a jar file with the most recent version if you want to morph some things.

to use: just run the jar, or if you want to specify a directory where your images are, so you won't have to navigate every time, run it like this:

java -cp Morph.jar MorphUI <path>

you need to define anchor lines around which the warping occurs. this is done by clicking on the source and destination images.

to add a point, left click. to delete the last point, right click. to clear all the point, press space.

note that you need to match up both the order (number) and the direction of the anchor points between the two images.

this is still under development, and has some bugs and annoyances, which i'll fix when i get around to it.

in the meantime, here is a resulting video clip.

all photographs by orit zuckerman.

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two firefox extensions i found, liked, and installed today:

forecastfox displays weather information in an unintrusive and highly customizable way. it's also the only weather add-on i know of that allows you to view the much more interesting windchill ('feels like') temperature instead of the sorta hypothetical degree value.

auto copy copies selected text directly to the clipboard. it's one of the main reasons i use iterm instead of the regular terminal. 90% of the times when i select something, i want to copy it, so it only makes sense to save me the extra keystrokes.

of course, if you don't use adblock yet, run get that, too.

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alea has persisted in convincing me to try to learn salsa, so i keep trying.

last night, after a metldown of my dance systems we had to resort to some living-room practicing, and at some point we found this totally geeky salsa training site. it is just perfect for practice new moves in the living-room, eyes shuttling back and forth from the html to your feet, and yeah it's written for nerds like me and you.

the premise of the site already makes me identify with the writer:

some other good souls recommended that the only way to really learn is to take a concentrated weekend course. This way you can avoid the week-span amnesia persisting for months before you can actually venture to a publicly viewed dancefloor without having the indifference to failure of a zen master.

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mac os x has a unix base, and there's quite a lot of back-and-forth integration between the graphical o.s and the command-line one.

for example, you can type 'open -a <application> <file>' in the command line to launch any file into any application, or 'open -e <file>' to open something in the text editor, which is pretty convenient. 'opendiff <file1> <file2>' compares two text files in a gui and allows you to do merges using the FileMerge application.

one thing i couldn't find was a way to run these things in blocking mode. by default these launching programs return after having run the gui app in the background, but sometimes unix scripts want to know when a process ends, and you don't want the launcher to end before the gui program quits.

so i didn't find a general way to do it, but here's a script i endearingly call 'blocken-e' which can be used like 'open -e', but it's blocking, by waiting for TextEdit to finish:

#!/bin/sh
open -e $*
pid=`ps -ax | grep TextEdit | awk '{print $1}' | head -1`
nps=1
while [ $nps -ne 0 ]
do
nps=`ps ax | grep $pid | grep -v "grep" | wc -l`
done

with 'opendiff' its even easier. apparently if you backquote the launcher command it will block until FileMerge is quit, so you do this:

`opendiff file_a file_b -merge outputfile`

in some shells, the non-redirected output will cause trouble, so you can always do this instead:

echo `opendiff file_a file_b -merge outputfile` > /dev/null

if there's a more general way to do this, please let me know...

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google wants you to stop agonizing over the choice between mapquest and yahoo maps. google maps launched today(?).

read more...

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here's something that'll make your life just a tad easier.

you know how you get something delivered with u.p.s and they come while you're gone and leave that little note, and the note says they'll come back on monday, but that just means that they'll come back sometime between 7am and 9pm, and you better not move or you're in for a trip to the u.p.s place, and so much for home delivery.

a-ha! not so fast.

after a little inquiry i found out that if the delivery is just the regular 'sign here, sir' delivery and you don't care that they leave the package in the mailbox or somewhere else, you can just sign on the back of the info slip, and write down on the front 'please leave in mailbox' or 'on the porch' or wherever you fancy, and voilá! it's waiting right there for you when you come home from a rough day at the office, dear.

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in case you haven't heard yet, there's a pretty serious security hole in firefox and safari (and probably any other IDN-enabled browser). it's not really a bug, but rather the standard-compliance that creates this particular threat, so ironically IE is the only browser that's safe by default. mickey tipped me off.

the thing is that known URLs (in the exploit example paypal.com) are replaced by same looking URLs that have one letter replaced by an international letter that looks the same (in this case 'а' is used instead of 'a'). anyone can register these disguised domain names and subsequently hijack your connection.

for firefox there's an easy fix (via boingboing):

enter 'about:config' in your URL bar, and search for 'IDN'. change the default true to false - disabling international domain names in firefox.

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wget is a tremendously useful gnu program that is really missing from the default darwin (OS X) installation.

there are many complicated ways to get a wget binary on your machine, but i couldn't find a simple place to just d/l the binary. so i put one up myself.

please note that this is distributed under the gnu general public license, and should only be used as such. also, i do not support the program in any way, and this is probably not even the latest version, and i don't plan to update the version, and there's probably a hundred reasons i'm unaware of why i shouldn't even be distributing this binary to start with.

against all of these considerations, it's annoying that you can't just get a small binary of wget and start using it immediately.

here's a simple command-line way to install it (adapted from the gnu-darwin page):

# curl http://web.media.mit.edu/~guy/dropbox/wget -o wget
# chmod 755 wget
# sudo mv wget /usr/bin
# rehash

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under an array of cute slogans like 'wysiwyg asap', 'procrastinate faster', and 'a better mousetrap', quicksilver is the coolest thing to have happened to my mac in a while.

at the click of a keystroke, all your recent documents, your address book, a calculator, your applications, a dictionary, your mp3 library, your bookmarks, and whatever other information you want is available to you in 'find-as-you-type' fashion with super smart tab and arrow navigation.

it is almost as if the computer can read your mind. this is what personal computers should be like for hyper-obsessive efficiency freaks like me. and it also has a plugin architecture to make sure that it'll continue to grow.

if you're a mac os x user and you don't like to reach for the mouse, this is definitely an app for you.

on the downside, apple's own spotlight might make quicksilver obsolete soon.

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i'm a big fan of css. an avid latex user, i strongly support the separation of content from design. i personally don't really have the design know-how to make something really pretty, css or not, but even for me it makes life so much easier. it's the classic 'a little more effort in the beginning, a lot less work in the end' phenomenon. or, as someone once said: 'writing bad code takes just as long'.

the css zen garden has a nice demonstration of how versatile your design can be with the same content.

click on the links to the right to switch the css page rendering the same html, and then - please - stop using <font> and <center> tags forever.

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a friend asked me how to bake pita bread. i searched for a recipe, and found one that was pretty good. yesterday i baked some pitas, and everyone i talked to about it asked me the same question: how do you get the pocket in?

my intuition was that it has to do with the fact that you bake it very quickly in very high heat, which causes the crust to form immediately, and then when the center bloats it stretches, but doesn't rip the crust.

strangely enough, an israeli q&a site has just been asked to solve the same mystery. thanks to yoad for linking me up.

the link is in hebrew but you should at least go in there to see what real pita bread looks like. nothing like the stuff you buy in the stores here.

as for the solution to the problem, here's a rough translation of the central points (the author goes into gluten and yeast, which i think is mostly irrelevant to the point at hand):

pita bread, as opposed to normal bread is a flat disc and not a lump of dough. also, it is baked at high heat for 5 minutes, and not at medium heat for longer. the heat makes the water and carbon dioxide (generated by the yeast) expand. in bread there are often slits in the crust to allow the bread to expand slowly without ripping the crust randomly.

in pita bread, the high heat makes the crust stiffen immediately and preserves the flat shape right away. when the heat gets inside the pita bread, it starts evaporating the water and expanding the carbon dioxide generated by the yeast and tries to expand. this creates a 'baloon' of air that doesn't rip the crust but holds the two sides of the disk apaart, until those get baked too, preventing reattachment.

i'll refine the recipe a little and then post it here, too.

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it's that time of the year again. apple's new line of products this time around is aimed at all the people who look at dell and say 'but dell is so cheap and apple is so expensive' while looking only at the bright red "$500" icon without reading the specs. i've used my grandma's new super-cheap celeron and let me tell you, it's not a pretty sight. a one-year-old, clean computer that takes forever to boot and about 90 seconds to open a new i.e window.

so personally, i wouldn't touch a $500 desktop, but then again i'm with the odd people who think that waiting 2 minutes for every nontrivial action on your p.c is a dramatic decrease in quality of life.

having used other people's windows x.p and internet explorer for most of my trip, i realized however that most people don't care waiting that much.

in other news, the rumours that apple have a competing word processor in store that microsoft (who is the nr.1 software developer for mac o.s) doesn't like at all, and apple is just waiting for the right moment to release, was also true. apple and m.s have been playing nice for a while, but i guess that's over.

judging by keynote, which i've been using over powerpoint in the last few months, it may well be that i can finally stop using m.s word, the last crappy program on my applications menu, forever.

also there's a new cheap mp3 player from the company that taught the rest what an mp3 player should be like. here, i'm much less than excited. it looks like nothing more than a glorified cheap player building on the ipod brand. it doesn't even have the cool thumbwheel that's so convenient to use. and seriously, it's kind of scary how they play up the shuffle feature. i mean, what's the big deal? shuffling songs? are they just trying to hide the fact that their playes does not have a display?!?

i like the fact that you can have it download random 240 songs every time you plug it in to your computer for recharging. that's pretty minimalist right there. plug into your computer, then into your ears. repeat.

oh, and it's tiny.

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apparently even some of my more up-to-date friends haven't heard of google suggest, so there. now you know.

remember, you heard it here first.

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felt all 17 again today as i had to take my written learner's permit test. you have to answer 14 out of 20 questions right to get the permit.

here are two tips that might help you:

• if you're going for the regular and the motorcycle permit, it's best to do them together. first, if you're studying you don't have to study twice, and second - about half of the questions overlap, and they tell you the correct answer immediately, so you can use that when you're taking the second test. so instead of having to answer 28 questions right, you only have about 18 or so.
• always, but always, choose the most extreme answer. in all questions that i saw, the most extreme answer was the correct one. if they ask you how many feet clearance you need, 10, 20, 100, or 1000, it's always 1000. if they ask you how much alcohol is in something, 0.01, 0.05, 0.1 or 0.2, it's always 0.2, the one question where i violated that rule, was the one i got wrong. i could not believe that you can renew your licence a whole year before it expires. comes to show.

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if you have more than one computer and more than one monitor on your desk and want to get rid of all the keyboards and mice, you absolutely need synergy.

this will make you very happy. i kid you not.

it's one of those 'wow' moments.

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i've been starting to use my cellphone screen as a flashlight lately.

also i've been wondering whether people are writing retro emulators for old skool phones running on the funky new ones.

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another important one for fans of blogs (that means you) is that firefox 1.0 has 'live bookmarks' that are basically bookmarks to all the recent entries of your fav blog. pages that have an rss feed <link>ed on them get a cute icon to add the feed to their live bookmarks.

i even changed my code to make it work with that feature.

for solidarity with my main browser for the last 2 years or so, i even changed my motd to promote the fox.

read more...

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control freaks of the digital photography world unite: jalbum is here. sigh.

no more self coding of thumbnail pages, although i doubt i'll be able to make those fancy city separators on that app.

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didn't know you could do that, really.

and it was just one of those things where you make an on-the-spot decision, and just flow with it as your self confidence grows with your succeess.

i got my cellphone activated today, and i didn't like the area code they gave me, so in an uncharacteristic move, i called them and asked for the regular 617 code.

when they didn't have one, i decided to try my luck and asked the guy 'for a nicer number'. and yeah, he totally gave me one.

should have asked for an even nicer one but i didn't want to seem too greedy.

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