NOTES/★/COURTNEY.BOLTON

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Best OSx Error Message of the Day: Alert Title
Alert: Something happened.
[CANCEL] [OK]

|#crash|

Download a Copy of your Facebook Data.

Time Filtering: Graph is linked to the histogram which allows view filtering based on time ranges.

Palantir Technologies: A rigorous friction model for human-computer symbiosis.

Rands In Repose: “When it comes to working at your computer, there is only one rule: context switches are horrifically expensive.

There are two solutions for adding pixels to your desktop. You can buy more displays until you can see every gosh darned relevant pixel at once (which is awesome). Or, in the case of notebooks, prior to Lion, you could employ the bevy of Transition layer-based tools like Exposé and Spaces.

My preference is the sea of pixels provided by two massive displays featuring eight bajillion pixels. It’s efficient for one simple reason: my eyes move faster than my fingers. With two displays full of well-organized bits, I can instantly shift from Working-on-Code window to Looking-up-Syntax window simply by instantly visually shifting from one window to the next. Nothing moves, scrolls, or changes position or orientation. This is friction-free information consumption.

You need a clear mental map of your stuff. As I explained in the prior article, I found Exposé to be invasive and non-intuitive when it came to clean context switches. The feature, while pretty, increased mental friction when I fired it off. I’d forget where I was and when it comes to being in the Zone, context isn’t just the art of knowing where you are, but the illusory and friction-free belief that you know where everything is.

Questions like: “Where is that?”, “How do I find it?”, “Don’t I already know that?” are mental speed bumps that are context- and Zone-destroying distractions. Why do you get pissed off when the phone rings when you’re in the Zone? Because you know you will shortly forget where you are. This is why when I’m working on a project of size, I’m most confident and most productive when the complete set of what I currently know is sitting directly in front of me.

Mission Control integrates both Exposé and Spaces, and, more importantly, it simplifies them. Gone are the chaotic and useless views of Let’s-See-Every-Damned-Window in Exposé, and gone is the ability in Spaces to create a massive unknowable 8x8 grid of virtual desktops. Both have been replaced with the clean, linear list of Spaces where an Exposé-like view shows only active windows in the currently selected desktop.”

Sundialtone: Psyche: This weekend I hosted a sleepover hackathon at my apartment as hurricane Irene swept over New York City.

Scott, Bryan, and I participated in the Node.js Knockout, a 48-hour global competition to produce something cool with Node.js. Node.js is an up-and-coming web server which is particularly good at handling real-time interactivity. For example it’s very easy to make a web-based chat room or multiplayer game using Node.js.

Inspired by Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols, we decided to make a collaborative environment for exploring the collective unconscious. We spent a few days before the competition and Friday night discussing how best to do this in a way that we could accomplish in 48 hours. We settled on a collaboratively edited web of images.

On Friday night we play-tested using Google Docs to make sure the concept would work.

Worried that we’d lose power by Sunday morning, we worked extra hard all day Saturday. This pushed us to finish a working prototype by Saturday night.

But with Irene causing us little disruption, we were able to play-test and further polish the site all day Sunday. We were pushing features right up until the deadline at 8pm EST but it wasn’t as much of a last-minute scramble as these hackathons usually are.

Psyche is a web of serendipitously inter-related images reflecting participants’ whims. Participants collaboratively explore the collective unconscious, adding images and drawing relations, creating symbolic and aesthetic clusters. Check it out! If you enjoy it, please vote for us in the competition.

Years to Mainstream Adoption.

dawdlr - a twitter for the long now:

I’ve tried to make dawdlr way slower than twitter. I reckon most people I know twitter about twice a day, so dawdlr is going to update twice a year. To try and get people to say what they’re doing, you know, more generally.

To submit a dawdlr send a postcard to this address:

dawdlr
77 Beak Street
London
W1F 9DB

I’ll scan them in and upload and update them every 6 months. Regular as clockwork. I’m curious to see if something that slow can be ‘viral’ or will it just dwindle to nothing as everyone forgets last time around. Or if it’s not an immediate enough call to action to get people to participate, or if actually getting a postcard and writing on it is too much work. Or whether, maybe, it’ll all work and be rather nice.

Dawdlr is a tiny community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing, you know, more generally? Answers on a postcard please.

CloudApp: CloudApp allows you to share images, links, music, videos, and files. Here is how it works: choose a file, drag it to the menu-bar & let us take care of the rest. We provide you with a short link automatically copied to your clipboard that you can use to share your upload with co-workers and friends.

Additionally, you can view, track and delete files right from your menu-bar.