If you do ANY research oriented writing projects (sermons, books, whatever) and you use a Mac, I HIGHLY recommend Scrivener. I don’t have time right now to tell you how I use it or how it could be useful, but it has become for me in my sermon prep one of those how-did-I-ever-work=without-it kind of tools. I mention it now because this program is a great deal at its normal $39.95 price. But from now until New Years Day, the publisher is offering a 25% discount.
Worth every penny!
In our house, we have two computers running Mac OSX 10.6, one running XP Professional, and two running XP Home. I win the job of being network administrator.
So, today, I was working on updating my daughters XP computer. The antivirus software updated without a hitch. (I was reminded, of course, that I do not need such on my Macs.) Then, Java wanted to update itself. I concurred, and it began to load in the background.
Before long there was a requester which, if I had not clicked the proper boxes, would have loaded the Yahoo! Toolbar as well as Java. I did not want the Yahoo! Toolbar.
After that, I downloaded Ad-Aware so that I could check her computer for all those nasty things that seem go be attracted to PCs. In the process, again, I had to click carefully, or the download would have installed in addition to what I asked for also Google Chrome web browser. I might have wanted Chrome, but when I want it, I’d like to go get it, thank you.
I have to conclude that this is simply one of those things which distinguishes Mac culture from PC culture. In nearly four years of using a Mac, and downloading and trying tons of shareware and freeware, I have not once run into a situation where a program tries to install something I did not ask for.
That is one of the reasons I use a Mac and have no desire to head back to PC-ville regardless of arguments about price or the slickness of Windows 7. Mac-ville is a much more pleasant – and courteous – place to live. No one tries to slip into your house uninvited.
I don’t own an iPhone, and can’t see in the budget room for that anytime soon.
However, this discussion of iPhone medical apps is, too me, anyway, fascinating.
Particularly, I had to chuckle at one called ‘Period Tracker’.
Being a husband whose wife had a hysterectomy over twenty years ago, my first response to this was, “What is a grammar app doing in this list?” But for guys whose life situation is different than mine, this could save a lot of angst, it seems to me!
This from Bishop N. T. Wright, who has endured much criticism from the blogosphere, not that he minds criticism, but he minds misrepresentations, gossip, and slander from those who hide behind the anonymity of the internet. I find his words worth pondering:
It really is high time we developed a Christian ethic of blogging. Bad temper is bad temper even in the apparent privacy of your own hard drive, and harsh and unjust words, when released into the wild, rampage around and do real damage. And as for the practice of saying mean and untrue things while hiding behind a pseudonym — well, if I get a letter like that it goes straight in the bin. (Justification pages 26, 27
It is too easy to type in a passion and hit ‘send’ or ‘post’ without thinking that what you have written impacts a person on the other end. I know. I’ve done it and regretted doing it. Bad temper is, indeed, bad temper, and it is ill fitting to human beings, much less to Christian human beings.
I can be bought. I confess it.
Some of you may be aware of something called ‘Mobile Me’ – an Apple online presence which offers for Mac owners seamless online back up and syncing capabilities. I’ve tried Mobile Me, and it works great. It’s really cool, but like Lauren in the Windows ads, it’s $100 price tag makes it too cool for me.
However…
I just discovered a site that allows me to do at least one of the more useful things that Mobile Me allowed – live syncing and sharing of files, particularly large ones.
I’m speaking of Dropbox. You can visit the site to get a full explanation, but here is how it is useful for me:
Last week, our family, located in various parts of the country, filmed a birthday greeting for our daughter-in-law Amy which then, on her birthday, we wanted to share with her. The best we could do in sharing it was to send a scaled down, low-resolution version of it to her via email, and post the same on Facebook.
Dropbox, however, installs a folder on my computer. Anything I drop into that folder is copied automatically to an online server. If it is a public folder, others can access the file there. Had we done this with the 200MB video, everyone could have accessed the full hi-res movie. That’s cool.
Dropbox offers users 2GB of storage space for $100 less than Apple’s Mobile Me. For those of you no good at math, that means that it is FREE. And it plays well with all – Mac, Windows, and Linux.
And here is the great (greedy) thing: if you sign up for Dropbox through the following link, I, and you, both get extra space! How’s that for a Labor Day deal?
It’s not that I don’t want an iPhone.
In fact, it’s not even the fact that iPhones only use AT&T (problems detailed here).
No, actually I DO want one, and would be willing to put up with AT&T to do so.
It’s rather this that keeps me using my trusty Samsung ‘dumbphone’:
“AT&T’s right to be the exclusive carrier for iPhone in the United States has been a golden ticket for the wireless company. The average iPhone owner pays AT&T $2,000 during his two-year contract — roughly twice the amount of the average mobile phone customer.“
Emphasis mine. Full article here.
My friend Chris was a blogger before I knew the word. But she admits to not knowing how to make a post that appears later than when she writes it. My friend Dwight believes that he has evidence of my early rising by the early times on the majority of my posts. And another friend and blogger Mike commended me on my diligence in posting (and he assumed writing) daily. So, let Toto pull back the curtain on me as I reveal the smoke and mirrors which makes it LOOK like I’m doing what I’m really not.
I blog when I get a chance. Between the cracks in my schedule. Most of my posts are written three, four, or more at a time, and only made to appear as if they are produced sequentially. My guess is that readers don’t want six posts at once followed by six silent days. So, I write when I get the chance, and space the posting magically over a period of days.
In the interest of full disclosure, I sketched the idea of this post on the morning of Monday, July 20. I am typing it on Tuesday night, July 21. And since it is not date specific (unlike this or this) it is slated now to appear no sooner than July 31, ten days from now.
How’s he do that?
My happy secret is a little helper called MarsEdit. MarsEdit allows me to write drafts, date them, edit them, preview them, and post them, without ever having to actually go to the blog site itself.
Why is this helpful?
From the purely aesthetic point of view, using this software insures a consistent visual style on the blog. Though that can be accomplished through other means, with this I don’t have to think about it anymore.
This guy earns his keep as a time saver and organizer.
When I get an idea for a post, and I’m not near my computer, I scribble it down on a piece of paper and put it in a folder. When I am near the computer, or if the idea comes to me when the computer is open in front of me, I open a draft post in MarsEdit. I need not be anywhere near an internet connection at this point. I only need to open the draft window and jot a few notes down. I can go on doing what I was doing, so that I’m not interrupted in whatever the main thing is at the point.
Later, when I have the occasion to do so (often on Tuesdays when I bring my son and grandson to Chick-fil-A, like tonight) I open MarsEdit and will find a few drafts that are in need of development. Some sit for a long time. Currently there are 23 undeveloped drafts, some of which will NEVER be developed.
Though I am writing this at Chik-fil-A, it will probably be finished between innings of the upcoming Rays game. The point is, I try to not have blogging interfere with other things that I’m supposed to be doing.
Posts which demand more care, thought, and even research, may be developed in Scrivener, NovaMind, or Microsoft Word. These are topics which may require development across several posts and demand more careful preparation. (I have half dozen potential posts in that form at present.) But they will all end up passing through MarsEdit before hitting the web.
In MarsEdit I can add links, emphasis, or whatever else I want. I can also add media, but I prefer to do that on line.
Plus, and this is the real magic, I can specify the date and time of publication. I have set this post to publish on July 31, 2009, at 5:46:08 AM. That may change, but for now that is what we have set. I could just as easily set it for October 13, 2120, but I rather doubt that Somber and Dull will be in existence then.
By the way I set posts to go live early in the morning in order to great early morning readers.
When I’m generally satisfied with the post, I simply click a button which posts it to Blogger, though I’m told it works with other blogging sites as well. I can set the post to be published immediately or to be posted online as a draft.
It is from within blogger that I add pictures or video, make any necessary final edits and, if I have not set the publication time, I do that. (Chris, you select ‘post options’ at the bottom of the post editor. Pretty simple.)
That is all there is to it.
Okay, back to the Rays game.
I hate to pile posts upon posts, and it seems I’ve been posting a ton recently, but I can’t let this one go without linking it.
Forty years ago today, men walked on the moon for the very first time. I woke up this morning pondering the amazing image seen last night replayed on TV of an engineer working on the original design of the F1 engine, five of which were used to launch the Saturn V rocket into space. He was sitting there with a pile of papers and a slide rule.
That’s how this magnificent machine was built.
With that in mind, I just read this post which expands upon the wonder of this accomplishment of a dream. It’s a fascinating (and short) read.
It contains a link to a site where NASA is streaming in real time, forty years delayed, the actual continuous audio between Mission Control in Houston and the Apollo crew. Fascinating, though, as I type, I think the astronauts are sleeping. Not a lot being said!
So, sorry for all the chatter here at Somber and Dull lately. But I couldn’t leave this one be. I’d like to grow reflective on this, and speak of the passion and creativity involved in pursuing dreams, and of not letting one’s dreams die… but I’ve said enough.
For a long time I have used Ecto as my blog writing software. It served me well though it was plain and unattractive. It allowed me to write posts when I was offline, to post them when I had the chance, and to keep track of what I had done.
I recently updated Ecto to its newest version which, as noted here, has trouble talking to Blogger. I wrote to the ‘support’ address of the publisher but received no response. They no where acknowledge the existence of this problem or indicated any intention of doing anything to fix it. Okay. Goodbye, Ecto.
I then tried a trial version of a competing offline editor, MarsEdit. It lacks a WYSISYG interface, but that has proven to be a minor difficulty. I have found it to be a useful tool for writing and keeping track of my posts regardless of whether I’m in the presence of an internet connection or not. It’s a great help in maintaining as well the illusion of daily posting!
So, last week I bit the bullet and bought the thing.
These are Mac-only programs, I believe. I’m sure there are many similar tools for the PC. I don’t know how anyone blogs without them.
Yes, apart from the fact that most of the family is with Verizon, and the cost is way out of our budget, there is this.
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