Do any of you folks use Evernote? What do you use it for? How do you, specifically, use it in your life?

And have any of you Evernote users also used Yojimbo at some point in the past? How do they compare? I’m using Yojimbo for all of my little notes (project ideas, notes to myself about Kim’s website and newsletter, quotes and obscure vocabulary words, installation notes, form letters, etc.) I’m also running a personal wiki for various how-to documents, config files, scripts, and other sorts of things that I don’t mind being public (and for which I might need access from any machine with a web browser.) It works, but I have to think about what is where. I also have to take into consideration that Yojimbo does not actually sync (without that $99/year dot-Mac/MobileMe subscription) and only runs on my laptop. Evernote looks like I can consolidate these AND have access to this stuff from my laptop, office computers, and iPhone.

Before I wholeheartedly jump in and try to make this work, I thought I’d solicit feedback from those that have used it. Have you used it?

I’ve been using Azureus as my bittorrent client of choice for years. It’s true that in the past year or so was bundled with some crazy, crappy, bloat-ware interface full of advertising and stuff. BUT! There was always an alternate download version that gave the original core functionality, leaving out the bloated front-end. It seems that the alternate version is no more. Azureus downloaded a core update last night and now the bloated “Vuze” interface is what you get. I guess there’s a UI-switcher plugin, but how long until that disappears?

So I’m looking for an alternative OS X bittorrent client. Transmission seems to be the popular one, but when I used it long ago, it was too simple for my needs. The website doesn’t say much about advanced features in the current version, either. Basically, the main features of Azureus I’m using and that I’d like to get in an alternative client are these:

* Web interface. There’s an Azureus plugin that offers up a simple web interface for starting, stopping, and changing the bandwidth cap. I use this from the iPhone. I’m not always at a real computer or a computer with access to my home network. The iPhone can always tunnel in over the EDGE network, so I can do this from work, out-and-about, in bed, etc.

* The ability to NOT download certain files in a group. If a *.torrent file contains a dozen individual files, for example episodes of a TV season, I may only want to download the first episode or two to get a taste without wasting bandwidth on the rest of the season. Extra points if I can dynamically change this on the fly without restarting the download. Lack of this feature is pretty much a deal-breaker.

* Automatically launching *.torrent files dropped in a folder. If I have Azureus running, I can drop files in a network-shared drive called “auto” and have it automatically grab the file and start downloading. If necessary, I can probably do this with AppleScript, if I took the time to learn how–but I’d rather have it an integrated feature instead of a duct-tape script.

* Bandwidth caps. I assume all bittorrent clients have this. If I only want to trickle in a file at 40K/s because I’m doing other stuff on the network, it should let me.

* Simultaneous download limits and reordering. I assume all bittorrent clients have this, too. I can tell it that I only want to download one *.torrent at a time (to get maximum bandwidth for the one file), but have three or four *.torrents in the window. When the first is done, the next starts. I should be able to rearrange the order of the inactive ones (e.g. promote the one in the third position up to the second position.)

So is anyone using an OS X bittorrent client that fits the bill?

How come there have been a ton of articles on Digg throughout the day that are all “ZOMG! Congress is preparing to impeach Bush!!!!1!” yet the NPR site still has nothing about it? Is this “impeachment” hearing/proposal/whatever really of any substance?

Dear LazyWeb,

Do any of you fine Mac folks know how to get the Command-Left-Arrow and Command-Right-Arrow keyboard shortcuts working when editing a message in Gmail? In every other application, and in fact in every other website under Firefox, they do the regular system “beginning of line” and “end of line” positioning. For some reason, with Gmail’s email editor, they do nothing at all. I assume it has something to do with it being a RichText editing box. Google searches for help don’t turn up much of anything useful.

The keyboard inconsistency is one of those things that isn’t a total deal-breaker because I can use the happy Unix ctrl-a and ctrl-e keystrokes to do the same thing, but it’s been bugging me for months.

Based on feedback, both online and off, I think I am going to go with a Flickr Pro account for my photo hosting. The Aperture integration is beautiful and the functionality is great. I’ll miss being able to pull up stats and the ability to mess with people who hot-link pictures from MySpace.

I’m waiting a week or two because the wildcard is Apple’s rumored upgrades to the .Mac service in a week. Their services and disk space have never warranted the $99/year price tag, but if they are able to significantly lower the price or significantly increase their service offering, then I might go that route. The rumors also point to better iPhone integration, which (depending on the feature set and price) would be nice, too. At the very least, I am waiting to see how this pans out.

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There was a bad TV show in the 80s. Well, there were a lot of bad TV shows in the 80s, but the theme song of one in particular has been stuck in my head for days. I wonder if you remember this particular show? The main character was a girl and she was either a young teen or pre-teen. She was half alien, living with her (human) mom in a fancy house in one of the “bay” towns in California (Morro Bay, Bodega Bay, something like that.) She had some kind of crystal cube, propped up on one corner, that (with the help of horrid 80s television special effects) she could use to talk to her dad, in outer space or whatever. I think she had some kind of powers, but I don’t remember what. Anyway, the theme song was this Frank Sinatra song “would you like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar?” I only saw it a few times, but either it was on all the time or my little sister really liked to watch it a lit–I don’t know which.

I do not think that knowing the name of the show will cause the theme song to exit my head, but it will be one less “on the top of my tongue” thing bugging me.

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Our house seems to be the hangout spot for all the cool cats in the neighborhood. And by cats, I mean cats. We are sort of next door to a concrete and asphalt apartment complex and the pointy-nose Siamese over there seems to find our yard much more fun and interesting than his place. Additionally, there’s a black and white fuzzy cat from a neighbor in the other direction that always wants to hang out at our place. There are several others, too, that we only catch glimpses of. The Siamese and black-and-white are the most chatty.

Exhibit One: There have been a few mornings where I wake up, stumble down the stairs, and glance over at the cat sitting on the kitchen windowsill. After a quick double-take, I look again at the cat sitting on the outside kitchen windowsill, looking in.

Exhibit Two: If we leave the door open and the screen door closed, throughout the day the Siamese and black-and-white will take turns coming to the door to talk to us. Yesterday, while doing work around the house, each one was at the door a dozen times throughout the day.

Exhibit Three: Bribery. While not intended to bribe cats to our house, we do happen to be growing (or maybe past-tense would be more correct) catnip in a little terra-cotta trough out front. This seems to have attracted the attention of all the neighborhood kitties. It is heavily grazed upon, often knocked over, and on a few occasions, has been uprooted and pulled from the pot, left several feet away. It’s dead enough at this point that it is no longer of much kitty interest.

Exhibit Four: The white picket fence separating the front yard and back yard has a very deliberate slat missing from it. We have dubbed this “the kitty highway” because of the number of cats that use it to get to and from the back yard.

Exhibit Five: The birdfeeder is similarly dubbed “kitty TV” because cats, both inside the house and out, spend hours staring at it.

The good news is that everyone is much less hissy now: our cats interactions with the neighbor cats and the neighbor cats amongst one another. One day, everyone will be living in peace.

The other good news is that I doubt we will ever have a rodent problem of any kind.

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I’d tell you to mark your calendars, but I don’t know a date yet. We will be having some kind of BBQ/potluck/housewarming party in a month or so. December, even though the white Christmas was nice, was not very conducive to a housewarming. In the intervening time, the state of (dis)repair of the house was not particularly conducive, either. But now, things are clean and stable enough that we can get away with having a housewarming we can be proud of. Keep an eye open for an email or phone call from Kim or I in the next week or so, as we figure out what weekend works best for her and her travels.

Currently, I keep all of my photos in Aperture. I then use a plugin to sync from there to my own photo site, running the Gallery PHP application. I also use the Flickr export plugin to sync to Flickr. This setup is getting increasingly problematic. The Gallery installation and integration is starting to fall apart. Gallery has enough photos (a little over 19,000) to now be pretty slow. The plugin is getting more and more clunky, often silently failing at random times.

I really like having control/ownership over my photos and photo site, but Gallery just is not cutting it anymore. I have a free Flickr account and really like the community there, but have fears that while its current intentions are good, it may eventually go the LiveJournal route of crappy service at some point in the future.

So that’s my situation. I’d like to hear from two sorts of people:

* Folks that have a paid Flickr account: Is it worth it? Are there weird limits or gotchas that are not apparent in the Flickr Pro account marketing material?
* Folks that are syncing Aperture to something besides Flickr or Gallery (is there anything else?) or folks that are using the Aperture web gallery with something other than the over-priced and under-featured dot-Mac.

The Oregon primary ballots are due soon. “Soon?” Yes, for those unfamiliar with our system up here, everything is done by mail or by drop-off. There’s no polling place and polling date, just a mail-in deadline. I think the government might think that the November weather might be too cold, wet, and dreary for people to traverse it to go vote–so we vote by mail, even in the primaries. We’re also not trusted to pump our own gasoline. Anyway, I have a gut feeling about who I’m voting for, but I’d really like to have a bit more rationality behind it.

And now a bit of a sidebar…

In my line of work, the sales and marketing folks use a particular style of comparison called a “feature matrix.” You might have seen these kinds of things before, as they’re not just relegated to the tech sector. You start with a grid or table with labels across the top and sides. One axis is a list of the competing products or services being compared–say a TechMaster SuperWidget 3000, a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain, and a Yoyodyne oscillation overthruster. The other axis is the set of features being compared–power source, number of serial ports, top spacial speed, top temporal speed, etc. The main content of the grid consists of checkmark boxes to say yes, this product has this feature or numbers to convey similar information (the widget has 2 serial ports, but the overthruster has 3.)

When feature matrices are used correctly, they present an impartial and objective comparison between products. When they’ve been giving a marketing department spin, eh… not so much with the fair-and-balanced. Categories–quite often entirely useless ones–might get chosen to make one product appear better and more feature-rich than the others. Oh, look, the overthruster is the only product with polarized filters over the display so that you can read it cleanly outdoors, even under direct sunlight. Wait, what? Who’s going to use any of these products outdoors? But it does give you a feature checkmark for one product that none of the others have. You get enough of those, and at first glance, it looks like one product is much better than others.

…and that’s then end of my sidebar.

So, dear inkernet, I ask you: where can I find a reasonably unbiased feature matrix of the candidates? Ideally, it would have Hillary and Obama (and perhaps others?) along one axis and issues (war, taxes, spending, abortion, death penalty, etc.) across the other. The main content of the table would then be brief descriptions of each candidate’s stance on each issue. Extra special super bonus if references are cited so that inquisitive readers can consult the primary sources of the summarized data.

Dear Internet,

I am not certain that I understand why people have both a blog (e.g. LiveJournal) and a microblog (e.g. Tumblr). Why not just make small posts in your regular blog?

Sincerely,
Brian

P.S. For the purposes of this post, I am considering Twitter to be less of a microblog and more of a communications medium (because everyone pretty much uses it with SMS anyway.)

Does anyone have a good resource (I’ve seen several bad ones, but not a great reference) that explains how to set up a free L2TP/PPTP VPN on a consumer-level OS X workstation? I’m not talking OS X server, because that ships with server out of the box with a nice GUI configuration tool. OS X workstation ships with the vpnd executable, but the manpage for it is a little sparse. It seems to require an undocumented XML plist configuration file.

The ultimate goal here is to get a VPN tunnel from the iPhone to a machine at home working. From the laptop to talk to home, I have a very hacky implementation of PPTP-over-SSH implemented. I’d like to have something less hacky, using the vpnd executable because I can reliably believe that it will get security updates with OS X dot-releases, and it just seems like “the right way to do it.”

I keep hearing murmurings of a LiveJournal content strike. I understand the reasons behind it (dropping the “Basic” accounts without really telling anyone), but have yet to see what the exact rules of the strike are. Can someone point me to the terms of the strike?

Is it “don’t post on the 21st?” If so, I see it working exactly the same as the gas station strikes you keep getting email about. There will just be double the emo on the 22nd, including overly dramatic complaints of how difficult it was to spend 24 hours away from the precious JiveUrinal.

Or is it more like the writers’ strike where people continue to not post until they get their $0.04 per DVD (or Basic accounts get reinstated or whatever.)

’cause, if it’s the former, then I laugh in your general direction. And if it’s the latter, it’ll be far more interesting. It’ll be nice to have less whining and less emo crying as immediate results. As people lose their self control and start posting to LJ anyway, it’ll be fun to see the drama arise in comments like “OMG, you posted and broke the strike!” and “OMG, you commented on a post–that’s like generating content, like making a new post, so YOU broke the strike, too!” Hilarity ensues. We all laugh. End scene.

Me? I don’t give a rat’s arse. They had two free account levels, the one without ads was losing them money (WTF, REALLY?!), which wasn’t being subsidized by the other account levels, so they dropped it. They’re a business. They are here primarily to make money, with the community as a secondary goal. If you want to blog for free, you can go to MySpace, wait no, that has ads… WordPress?, um, no…. Blogger?… not really… FaceBook? … nuh, uhu… Well, then, I guess you can scribble in your paper journal and pass it around detention hall, because that’s about the only place you can blog for free without ads. Sheesh. You’d think people hadn’t ever heard of ad blockers or something.

At any rate, can someone please link me to the terms of the strike? I’d like to know more.