QuickSilver is back!

It has been years since I last used QuickSilver, a quick launch (and so much more) utility for Mac OS X. Despite that, I still keep the icon in my Dock. Well, I accidentally clicked it just now, and before I could quit it, it popped up with a window saying it was downloading an update. And then proceeded to also update several of the base plugins.

I hadn’t even noticed that it had been open sourced in 2006. It was created in June 2003 by Blacktree Software, and received rave reviews. It was quick, unobtrusive, and extensible. Apparently, the project languished between 2006 and 2010. Then, development picked up again last year. I’m not sure when the current version was released.

If you have never used QuickSilver, LifeHacker has a brief tutorial. And here is another one with a list of common tasks that can be performed with QuickSilver.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - The Royal Ballet

 

La teoria delle stringhe - La Badini (collettivo perforante)

Performance piece from La Badini entitled La teoria delle stringhe (String theory). Winner of the 2010/11 Arte Laguna Prize, Performing Art section.

 

1-bit Flickr

Flickr goes B&W for April Fool's. Click the icon in the lower right hand corner.

A little tango - Skyscrapers, by OK Go.

How to watch some Flash-based videos on YouTube without Flash

One of the larger annoyances of YouTube video producers is that they may restrict their video to Flash only. Even if you turn on HTML5 support, videos do not play. Here is a quick fix for some of those types videos if you use Safari.

 

The basic idea is that you change the user agent to "Safari for iPad". This makes YouTube think that you are browsing from an iPad, and it will serve up a non-Flash video.

First, you have to turn on the Develop menu. Go to the Advanced tab of Safari Preferences. At the bottom, check on “Show Develop menu in menu bar”. You will now have a Develop menu (between Bookmarks and Window).

Go to that menu, and pick User Agent. A submenu will show various browser types. Select “Safari iOS 4.3.3 – iPad”. The YouTube page will immediately reload, and in most cases, you will be able to watch the video.

I haven’t tried this trick in Chrome, yet, but will update once I do.

UPDATE: This also works to play music without Flash on Tumblr, except that you will have to select Safari iOS for iPhone.

UPDATE 2: Well, YouTube seems to have started blocking this work-around for Safari. It does seem to still work in Chrome: use the User-Agent Switcher extension.

Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier

In Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire, there is a character named Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier.

She had a profile of classical perfection: straight nose, full lips, broad brow; the haute couture sister of the Statue of Liberty.

I immediately thought of Christy Turlington. 

 

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)

When I heard that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was to be remade as a feature movie, I was intrigued. I had picked up A Perfect Spy years ago, but could not really get into it. At the time, I was more into the Tom Clancy style of spy-thriller.

Reading all the hype surrounding the new movie, and the talk about the book and the old TV series with Alec Guinness, I decided would see what the fuss was about. I read the three books of the Karla Trilogy in quick succession. And then watched the TV series, and its sequel Smiley’s People, in a week.

One of the defining qualities of the TV series was how ordinary everything was. There was hardly any background music to give emotional cues, cinematography was plain, giving a pedestrian’s eye view, no big explosions, no fancy technology. And the Circus, the spy headquarters where Smiley worked, was a dull, poorly lit bureaucracy. Guinness' Smiley was placid. There were no "fireworks" to demonstrate his genius to the audience. I thought this was very faithful to the books. One never got a sense of the complexity of Smiley's thought until close to the end.

The books and the corresponding TV series were brilliant. For someone who loves puzzles and mysteries, the slow exposition of the plot built up tension perfectly. As the pieces came together, I found my heart racing towards the end of the books. The TV series, mini-series really, worked as well.

Coming from that, I found the new movie a little disappointing. Of course, many changes had to be made given the length of the film. Small side plots had to be pruned, or simplified. I think all that was done very well. It was the feel that I did not like as much, especially the depiction of the Circus. The devil was, as usual, in the details. The Circus felt too slick, though I did very much like the isolated meeting room. It felt "modern retro", the deliberate work of a designer, rather than a bureacracy accreting bits and pieces after WWII into the Cold War.

My biggest beef was Control's use of the chess pieces. It was hokey. No organized investigator would do that sort of thing: it's pointless. It doesn't serve the purpose of organizing information to aid discovery.

I didn't mind as much the sweeping exterior shots. Very picturesque. I did mind the very modern way of filming, where the camera is always moving, giving action even when all the characters are doing are standing around talking.

Another minor point was the change of Peter Guillam into a gay character. It seemed a calculated point to accentuate the gay characters: Gerald himself, Jim Prideaux, and Peter Guillam. There were also incidental bits of action in the party scenes to, what, show how many gay spies there were in the Circus? It didn't affect the plot, but it felt forced, to me. And it also means that should there be sequels, there would have to be adjustments made to Guillam.

A larger point is that given the amount of time available, we never got a good feel for the suspects, Alleline et al. One got glances of their faces, and a few words from each.

As for Gary Oldman, he was a very different Smiley. Still calm, though a little less meek, and giving off a hint of a threat of violence. A little menace under the surface. I liked his performance, though he hardly felt like a central character in the movie. There was less of a sense of the milieu revolving around him than there was in the books and TV series.

 

 

Time Machine on a network drive

Instructions on setting up a non-Apple network drive to work with Time Machine.

Time Machine on a network drive

Stephen Morley has provided instructions on setting up a non-Apple network drive to work with Time Machine.

Apple’s Time Machine software made it easy to setting up incremental back-ups, with one exception: network drives (more formally called network-attached storage, or NAS). Time Machine only directly supports drives formatted with Apple’s HFS+J file system, and will eventually use all disk space on the drive. This page provides an illustrated guide showing how to set up Time Machine on a network drive, using a sparse bundle to emulate a smaller HFS+J drive.

Pre-Rat Pack Sammy Davis, Jr.

I had not seen Sammy Davis, Jr. before his Rat Pack days. He was a hell of a dancer.

 

And here’s one of him way pre-Rat Pack, at age 6:

 

Vim on iOS

Your favorite text editor is now on iOS. You know you want it.