Status-Q

[Original Link] Notational Velocity is a very simple Mac app for taking and retrieving notes. It’s getting a fair bit of attention for something which, when started, presents you with little more than a blank windows. You can find more detailed descriptions here and here, or just do a Google search for it. There’s no shortage of references.

[Original Link] It might be part of Greenland. If not now, then soon.

On one of the occasions in my youth when I was dragged onto the school sports field, I was made to take part in a 100m race. At the end of it, the games master looked at me and said, with genuine puzzlement, “Quentin, what on earth were you doing with your feet?”

From that moment on, I’ve known that I was not a natural runner. And since almost everyone I know who has done any serious running, including my father, has ended up with knee or ankle problems later on, it’s not something I’ve had much inclination to take up.

Recently, though, I’ve been doing a little bit of it again. Actually, to give the name ‘running’ to what I’ve been doing is a bit like describing Christopher Robin’s hoppity-hop as ‘flying’. I’ve sort of given myself permission to get out of bed and put on some sporty clothes and go outside before breakfast as a way of waking up. In fact, this normally translates into a pleasant tour of the nearby meadows consisting of about two-thirds jogging and one-third walking. No Olympic aspirations here. But you know what? I come back feeling good, heart racing, and feel much more awake for the rest of the day.

And so I’m proposing a new fitness activity, which I predict will take the world by storm.

• Do you feel you ought to take some form of exercise but are too embarrassed to be seen pretending to do anything seriously sportif?
• Do you feel that you probably couldn’t run more than 50 yards in one stretch anyway?
• Do you find all that messing about with changes of clothes in the middle of the day to be a bit too time-consuming?

Well, rejoice! Your solution is here! When you get up, instead of jumping straight into the shower, put on an old tee-shirt, shorts and trainers and go for a joglet. It can be as long or short as you like. 10 minutes is just fine. The running/walking proportion is up to you – it’ll probably change over time and depending on your energy levels. No pressure, no embarrassment.

Tell your doctor, with pride, that you go for a joglet twice a week. By naming this new activity, we give it respectability. By not pretending that you’re running, you don’t need to feel ashamed of your initial level of stamina. In fact, be proud that you’re doing something much more energetic than all those walkers. If this catches on, you can come back to Status-Q for all your joglet merchandise in future…

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GMail is very cute, though I would never use it seriously until it has a supported way to export my email to somewhere else. I keep almost all my email, and I’m not going to put it into a system from which I might never be able to extract it. And that may take a while – they wouldn’t want you reading your mail via IMAP and so avoiding the web-based advertisements.

On the other hand, there are various utilities which do let you interact with it other than simply through the web interface. Here are some for Mac users.

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SpaceShipOne has successfully been into space and back for the second time in a week, and has won the Ansari ‘X Prize’.

I think this is fabulous. Since most governments no longer have the adventurous spirit that lets them do manned space missions, or since the people who elect them don’t, we have to rely on individuals. One of the participants, (Burt Rutan, I think), said something along the following lines (from memory):

The way space travel has been done in the past makes people think that only governments could do it. Part of the importance of the Wright Brothers’ flight was that they were just in a bike shed, and people thought, ‘Hey, if he can do it, so can I!’.

Wilbur and Orville didn’t have $20M of Paul Allen’s money behind them, but the concept is right. This is still a completely different ball game from the Space Shuttle and I think it does mark the start of a new era.

[Original Link] If you have a car stereo from Alpine, you may be able to plug in your iPod and control it directly through the stereo.

[Original Link] Google not finding what you want? There are, of course, various competitors out there, but one that’s had quite a lot of attention recently is Clusty, which emphasizes the clusters of pages around the topic you search for, as well as just ranking the pages found.
If you want to find out more about a person, when you don’t know much about them, for example, it can be a good thing to try.

[Original Link] Aerial photography in the 1900s, from Engadget.

[Original Link] An interesting observation on Engadget about the filenames that cameras use for their photos.