“tips”

This really won’t save you any work at all but it’s sure to baffle casual onlookers.

At heart is just the usual distributive^WP algorithm we all use when multiplying arabics^WP, rearranged and visually rewritten using the immediate correspondence of crisscrosses to multiplication: .

Turns out you can easily break DRM-ed LIT ebooks while as far as I know your PDF ones—if tightly DRM-ed, and these days they all are—are lost for good—leaving you as a sucker who can’t even copy paste and interesting quote; heck, a sucker who can’t even lend the ebook to a friend (hurrah for technology!).

Interesting how piracy can actually be a good thing for business: yesterday I bought a digital version of Peter Watson’s 800-paged Ideas^AM (to go with my paper version) only because it was available as a LIT. I then immediately broke the DRM (Microsoft Reader is a joke) and had the—again, 800-paged book—as an HTML mine to edit and tweak. This is just the encouragement I needed to start reading the book—just imagine, I can now tweak the format just like I want it (and as you may have noticed I am a format freak—I like my italics in a slightly more remarkable tone, my parenthetical text slightly subdued, my quotes highlighted), I can turn footnotes into sidenotes, I can 1-click-Answers.com every word, I can copy-paste to Evernote and Devonthink (these days I just can’t conceive of reading a book without highlighting, now it’s getting intolerable not being able to immediately save select quotes in a digital form¹), I can upload to my webserver and have it always some seconds away, I can read it in my berry, I can print it, I can find-as-I-type, I can link, annotate, or rewrite, I can…

Just found today that you can place the cursor over some editbox labels and slide away to change the editbox value. How neat! (This UI candy seems to date from Photoshop CS [link])

Most people don’t even know about it but right at the bottom of the left sidebar of every pedia there’s an in other languages section that turns out to be one of Wikipedia’s pearls.

It is wonderful for translating somewhat obscure nouns that you’d rarely find in a bilingual dictionary, like

• the mathematical concepts of an upper bound (mayorante in Spanish), a set (insiemi in Italian) or a tuple (n-uplet in French);
  


• computer concepts like scrollbar (Bildlauf in German; literally, imagecourse), web browser (navigateur web in French; literally, web navigator), hyperlink (collegamento ipertestuale in Italian), real-time (Echtzeit in German), multimedia (multimedialità in Italian), and operating system (système d’exploitation in French);
  


• relatively unknown Greek gods like Cybele (Cibeles^CB in Spanish) or Priapus (Priape in French);
  


• exotic (anything really)
  
  
  • animals like the civet (Schleichkatzen in German) and the platypus (ornitorinco in Spanish);
    
  
  
  • fruits like the passion fruit (maracujá in Portuguese) and the jackfruit (yaca in Spanish);
    
  
  
  • plants like the okra (gombo in French), the  spearmint (yerbabuena in Spanish; literally, goodgrass), the mandrake (mandragora in Spanish), and the  jimson weed (higuera del infierno in Spanish; literally, infernal fig);
    
  
  
  • flowers like the fuchsia (bellebloem in Nedersaksisch^WP), the medlar (níspero in Spanish), and the saffron (azafrán) in Spanish);
    
  
  


• neologisms like meme meme (mème in French), GM food (alimento transgénico in Spanish), and the long tail (longue traîne in French, sometimes longue queue);
  


• international phrases like to be, or not to be (Sein oder Nichtsein in German) and Land of the Rising Sun (La Tierra del Sol Naciente in Spanish);
  


• digital accoutrements like inkjet printer (Tintenstrahldrucker in German), touchpad (pavé tactile in French), or flatbed scanner (escáner plano in Spanish; literally, flat scanner);
  


• drug paraphernalia/jargon like chillum (chiloom in Italian), syringe driver (Spritzenpumpe in German), rolling machine (interpercolatrice in Italian), bong (pipe à eau in French), and withdrawal syndrome (síndrome de abstinencia in Spanish);
  


• translatable acronyms like NAFTA (TLC in Spanish), NATO (OTAN in French), USSR (CCCP in Russian), or GDP (BIP in German);
  


• or simply peculiar expressions like popular science (divulgación científica in Spanish; literally, scientific divulgation), conspicuous consumption (prangende forbruk in Norwegian), prince charming (príncipe azul in Spanish; literally, blue prince), intellectual property (immaterialrätt in Swedish; literally, immaterial rights), apple of discord (Zankapfel in German), or noble savage (buen salvaje in Spanish; literally, good savage).
  

And it proves a true lifesaver for translating media nouns you would never find in any bilingual dictionary—things like the Smurfs (Pitufos in Spanish), Woody Woodpecker (El Pájaro Loco in Spanish; literally, The Crazy Bird), Pinnocchio (Pinocho in Spanish), There’s Something About Mary (Mary à tout prix in French; literally, Mary at any price), Ghostbusters (Cazafantasmas in Spanish; literally, Ghosthunters), or Baywatch (Alerte à Malibu in French; literally, Alert in Malibu).

With surely hordes of brilliant interaction designers being paid top dog to scour Google’s interface beyond dizziness, it’s truly hard to point something in it that could be outright, unambiguously improved. And it’s a good thing they put so much effort in it—Google has such scale that even the tiniest improvement could, on aggregate, save millions of man hours. (A recent story made the point dramatically by calculating that if Google used a black background it would save some 750 megawatt-hours per year.)

With this frame of mind, it surprised me today to find out what I believe is a clear improvement—a tiny, puny, mini one, but still. You see, when you quote a phrase in Google (and in most any other search engine) you specify that you want results with only that exact phrase. This can easily be too stringent and so Google helpfully suggests you to remove the quotes whenever you get very few (or no) results. The problem is it only suggests with plain text…

...when it could easily suggest with hypertext (linking, of course, to the unquoted search; similar to the way spelling suggestions are linked to the search for the correct spelling).

I wish some Googler sees this…

Tab Mix Plus is simply a pretty good Firefox extension that adds a lot of extra, welcomed functionality to your tabs. Today, lost somewhere within its not so easy-to-use preference pane, I found a little tooltip that is a wonder of clarity, of communication^EEM.

It was interesting stumbling upon Jorge Wagensberg^ELZR in Daniel C. Dennett’s Freedom to Choose^AM. Interesting because Dennett quotes exactly that one aphorism^ELZR from Wagensberg’s book^ELZR I never could give any sense whatsoever—proof that you can never outrun your ignorance.

But also interesting because googling for the article where he coined the phrase I found out Wagensberg just published a new book of aphorisms: A mas como, menos por que. What is more, here’s an (Spanish) essay of his, selecting and commenting his 11 favorite aphorisms. Wonderful!

The article, btw, I found.. But it’s $32 and I’m currently bitching about the price. “Information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life…”^WP

Click a message checkbox, then, holding shift, click another one a couple of messages apart—all intermediate checkboxes are automatically checked.

One of the most universal uses of the Shift^WP key is to aid in selecting ranges (think how you use it to select text or several files) and yet it was only today that it occurred to me that it just might work for checkboxes. I blame years of crappy webmail for that. I checked Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail (the “standard version”, the cool beta version does implement something along these lines), and my university mail and it won’t work there—which is bollocks: it’s a tremendously useful feature that costs near nothing to implement.

I tried to cram myself with Stephen Wolfram trivia (there’s all you might want at his website) before seeing him live at the 2006 Summer Startup School but I wish I had read this brief correspondence he had with Feynman. I would have been in still more awe (which might had been counterproductive, I might no have had the courage to approach him and make a fool of myself).

Humanized, of which I’ve blogged before, has released a trailer of the product (or product line, it’s confusing) they’ve been hard at work for the last 18 months: Enso. The video is interesting though it dwells too much (the first 2/3s) on features (spell-checking, dictionary, and thesaurus) that are not that compelling. It looks a whole lot like Mac’s Quicksilver (of which I’ve become a zealot since I got my Macbook) and on reflection that’s just as it should be. I remember finishing Jef Raskin’s^WP The Humane Interface^AM (Jef Raskin is the late father of Humanized’s Aza Raskin) excited of the revolution he was prophesizing and sure that Quicksilver, the glimpses of it I’d been able to steal, was exactly what he was talking about. That became half the reason I bought the aforementioned Macbook (the other half is DevonThink).

So as far as I can tell it’s a Quicksilver for Windows. I can’t wait to try it. (And wish to hereby make a prophecy: The time and software ecosystem are right for a Cambrian explosion^WP of this kind of parasitic metaprograms.)