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Using Photo Booth and Automator to print out a strip of three photos. Neat.

"Your Guide to Quackery, Health Fraud, and Intelligent Decisions"

"But there's a deeper question to ask: how far are we willing to go to prevent weapons or bombs from getting on airplanes? In the past decade, terrorists on airplanes have killed just about 3,000 people — all on one day. Even if the Christmas Day bomber had succeeded, the number would be under 3,500. Those are horrible deaths. But in that same period, more than 150,000 people have been murdered in the United States. We haven't put the entire U.S. on lockdown — or even murder capitals like Detroit, New Orleans and Baltimore."

"I felt like a fraud every day. Here I was, selling a wobbly, buggy tool and pawning myself off as an expert in a field that didn't exist. (My software was the first commercial tool for code review.) Every second I felt like I was putting one over on the world."

"So why hasn’t Gillis been hauled in front of a judge by the music industry? Probably because he’s the most unappealing defendant imaginable. Gillis would be a ready-made hero for copyright reformers; if he were sued, he’d have some of the best copyright lawyers in the country knocking on his door asking to take his case for free."

Powered by the WebKit engine, Safari offers leading performance, compatibility, and a great set of built-in web development tools.

"Overall, there seems to be a critical disconnect between the way the predominantly white, male critical establishment writes about violence and misogyny—especially as it’s primarily exhibited in hip-hop, i.e., music made predominantly by black artists. Critics such as these seem uncommonly drawn to violent, misogynistic music simply because it is shocking. This thrill of novelty seems to be nothing more than a fetishization of an alien culture."

"So why not look for constructive things to use the military for? Why not get some use out of our military resources—particularly if that use makes it less likely that we’ll need to use the military for more violent purposes?"

How to present and sell design: 1) Don't wing it — postpone until you're ready. 2) Really sell your design — the idea that 'good design speaks for itself' is a myth. 3) Don't get subjective or allow your feelings to get hurt — tell them to tell you when it doesn't work. 4) Don't embarrass the client — make them look good, be honest, listen to them.

How to figure out what a client's budget really is. "Don't be smarmy. Don't be curt. Be respectful, be honest, and inform your prospect during the sales process. If you do it right, right from the start, you'll build mutual respect and communication into the entire project."

A good overview of where music creation and criticism is in late 2010. At least in terms of the sorts of bands who are making music for the sorts of people who are reading these sorts of blog posts (a lot!).

On how *all* grains contain bio-chemical defense systems that cause an inflammatory reaction in your gut and lead to a host of health problems, and how the paleolithic diet is a cure for it. The comments section is very long and bewildering in its inevitable conflict. (I should be following this diet already, but I cheat too often. At the very least, I should do what the post suggests and try to go 100% for a month.)

"For every Vampire Weekend or Arcade Fire that goes beyond this point, spinning online buzz into big success, there's an M's, or a Thrills, or a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah — take your pick of any blog-hyped band that once generated copious heat only to cool off considerably, partly victims of a zippy online impatience that, as Matthew Johnson, founder of Fat Possum Records, put it, 'can devour bands whole, and be done with them.'"

"If somebody you care about is bleeding profusely, it’s not loving to insist that she’s flawless and has nothing to worry about. The loving thing is to stop the bleeding then get her to a doctor. If a guy is clearly suffering from blood poisoning, ignoring the problem isn’t loving. Instead, say, 'Dude. You need to get that looked at immediately.' Or, better yet, go with him. Do what you can to make things better."

What we (try to) do at FamilyID.

It can replace a lot.

Tips for effective sales management. Not particularly useful to me at the moment, since 90% of my work is long-term contracts, but good advice in general. "As my friend said, we are all selling at the end of the day. So, stop being afraid of the S-word. By finding a way to balance your creative role with giving sales the proper attention, you can improve the projects you’re working on and grow your business."

On the history of autism and the dramatic increase of diagnoses in Silicon Valley.

"What kind of noise are you feeling, and how far do you feel like sinking into it?"

"Have you ever started rapping along with some song on the radio and then realized that you don't know the lyrics? Now you don't have to worry about that embarrassing moment when it happens in front of your friends. OHHLA.com is your one stop shop for rap and hip-hop lyrics."

"It seems the message of this research for those seeking to establish a new habit is to repeat the behaviour every day if you can, but don't worry excessively if you miss a day or two. Also be prepared for the long haul — remember the average time to reach peak automaticity was 66 days." I wonder if it takes just as long to break a habit?

What to stop buying and what to replace those things with. A nice list.

Basic setup instructions.

On the difficulty of preserving and reissuing classical hip-hop records. "The job that falls to those seeking to preserve hip-hop's past remains complex. Those doing the work need to know as much about copyright and contract law as they do about old Pete Rock B-sides, while a grounding in clinical psychology might help in dealing with the artists. It's a combination of specialisms few individuals possess, and it raises the question: just whose responsibility is it to curate the history of a culture?"

While the Roma of Europe struggle against incredible hardship, the immigrant Romany population of the US is doing quite well.

Noticing a theme here? I'm having serious productivity troubles right now, and I'm trying to trick myself out of them. "The philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: 'Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing… Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.' In that sense, it might be useful to think about two kinds of procrastination: the kind that is genuinely akratic and the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point. The procrastinator’s challenge, and perhaps the philosopher’s, too, is to figure out which is which."

"If you want to work on big things, you seem to have to trick yourself into doing it. You have to work on small things that could grow into big things, or work on successively larger things, or split the moral load with collaborators. It's not a sign of weakness to depend on such tricks. The very best work has been done this way."

A pair of commands for stripping whitespace from a document and saving it so as to avoid diff cruft.

"Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more will power, more drive, but because they know productivity is a game of cat and mouse versus a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty which can never be excised from the soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push ups."

I own a Seskimo Crabble (http://www.seskimo.com/crabble.php), but if I lose it, this homemade matte board cut-out stand will do nicely.