Daily Archives:August 9th, 2006

Where the hell is Matt?

Amidst the chaff, there’s some really interesting stuff available on YouTube.
I think this is great, for example, and keep asking myself why it’s so compelling:

Matt became quite a celebrity as a result of this trip; see him on Good Morning America, for example. More info on his site.

Thanks to Garr Reynolds for the link.

Back on Safari


In June I tried switching browsers. Since then I’ve been using Firefox for the web and Vienna for reading RSS feeds. It’s a good combination, but I never quite liked it as much as Safari, which shows me the RSS counts on my bookmarks bar. And having to start up or switch to a different application to read RSS stuff meant that I was never quite as up-to-date with news as I was in the old days.

It’s true that Firefox is more capable when it comes to AJAX-based sites, or WISIWYG editing of blog posts. The Web Developer Toolbar is invaluable when developing web sites. You can even use themes to make it more Mac-like, but it’s never felt quite as smooth as Apple’s offering.

So for now, I’m back to Safari as my main browser with Firefox as a backup. The good news is that I haven’t touched Internet Explorer in years…

Firefly Press

At my high school, we had a small, old-fashioned printing press. I was allowed to use it once – but under careful supervision, because it was deadly.

It had a big flywheel which was gradually spun up to speed by a treadle, and which regulated the rhythm of the ink rollers picking up the ink, rolling it over the type, and the type coming up and being pressed onto the paper. You had to put the successive sheets of paper in by hand, but you didn’t want to leave your hand there too long because the flywheel had a lot of momentum, and it wouldn’t have stopped simply because there was a hand between the type and the paper…

But I loved it, and that brief half-hour experience made quite an impression on me, fortunately only metaphorically!

So I loved this 6-minute documentary about a small press in Massachusetts, which celebrates all aspects of printing the old-fashioned way.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser