Henrik Carlsson's Blog

All things me.

Byword — Shawn Blanc

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This review was written and edited exclusively in Byword.

I began this article on a Tuesday night from my iPhone around 11:30 pm while my son, Noah, was up for his late-night feeding. On Wednesday morning I picked up where I left off by opening Byword on my MacBook Air while in my office. After lunch, I grabbed my iPad and a Bluetooth keyboard and visited my favorite local coffee shop where a latte accompanied me as I finished the article.

This is exactly the sort of writing workflow that I’m looking to adopt.1

This workflow appeals to me as well. I like being able to work device agnostically. Especially I’d like to be able to seamlessly work on blog posts from my computer(s), iPhone and iPad.

Since the blogs publishing interface is web based it’s possible, but that is not the way I’d like to write. I find myself being much more productive in something like Byword than in the WordPress Admin panel. Therefore I think I need to bolt some hacks together to be able to write in whatever application that I want, save the result in Dropbox and have the blog itself pick up the articles from a certain Dropbox folder and publish them. I’d like it to be like the post workflow in Marco Arment’s Second Crack2, but still using WordPress as the CMS.

  1. Byword — Shawn Blanc ↩
  2. Marco.org – Second Crack ↩
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Interview with sir Jonathan Ive

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Our goal is simple objects, objects that you can’t imagine any other way. Simplicity is not the absence of clutter. Get it right, and you become closer and more focused on the object.1

  1. Sir Jonathan Ive: The iMan cometh – London Life – Life & Style – Evening Standard ↩
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Bruce Lawson’s personal site : In praise of Internet Explorer 6

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It’s impossible to imagine a world now in which developers proudly browser-sniff to check that the customer is using the “right” browser on the “right” operating system, while they race to code applications that revolve around non-standard “extensions” thereby locking themselves and their users to one browser because it temporarily has the shiniest proprietary extras. That’s absolutely unthinkable as we approach 2011.1

  1. Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : In praise of Internet Explorer 6 ↩
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AirPlay in Mountain Lion

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Could the AirPlay mirroring in Mountain Lion1 maybe be Apple’s idea of the future in video editing? Instant wireless previewing on the HDMI-input-enabled monitor of your choice?

  1. OS X Mountain Lion Sneak Pak ↩
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A small but important piece of UI design in OS X Mountain Lion

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It looks like Apple nailed an important thing in “Notification Center” in OS X Mountain Lion (see 28 seconds into the video on their product page). The desktop slides away and reveals Notification Center underneath the regular UI, as opposed to the iOS model where NC drops down on top of whatever you’re currently doing.

Revealing underneath is much more consistent with Apple’s previous use of the fake linen texture.

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John Gruber on Walter Isaacson’s ’Steve Jobs’

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With just five words, “Design is how it works” expresses succinctly and accurately that engineering should and can be part of the art of design.1

John Gruber writes a great article about Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs Biography, and about five simple words that could easily be used as a replacement for Apple’s “Think different”-tagline.

  1. Daring Fireball: Walter Isaacson's 'Steve Jobs' ↩
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Why I think DVDs suck (and how I solve the problem)

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DVDs suck! They really do. The basic idea was great and when they were news they were actually good news but today DVDs (and Blurays as well) suck.

Why?

The main reason in my opinion is their reliability, or lack thereof. The optical media is extremely delicate. If you are obsessively anal retentive about your discs – like me – and always take them straight out of the player, put them back in their casing and make sure the print on the disc lines up with the print on the case then this is only occasionally a problem. However if this is not the case, or even if you are like me but rent movies from time to time, the brittleness of the disc means the player will likely fail to read the content in a key scene of the movie, thereby forcing you to either restart the movie and try to fast-forward past the damaged section or forcing you to return to the video rental store with disappointment written all over your face.

Apart from this the disc format overall is very, very slow. For DVDs this means that it takes forever to transfer any data to and from them, which makes them pretty useless for anything other then movies. For Blurays it means that the time from the moment I put the disc in the player to the moment I can actually start interacting with the content is far too long.

Piracy is a crime!

Yes, I happen to agree to this. Piracy is a crime, that’s why I buy movies. But why should I, who do buy movies, be penalized by being forced to watch almost 2 minutes of propaganda declaring that I would have been a thief, if I had pirated the movie? (Incidentally, the simplest way of not having to watch this propaganda is to pirate the movie. )1

Time well spent?

Let me tell you a little story, and show you a little math. A couple of summers ago (3 I think) I bought a DVD box with The Complete X Files series (plus the first X Files movie). This meant 202 episodes of awesome TV magic. It also meant a lot of time spent watching ”Piracy is a crime” spots.

Let’s assume I watched one episode each time I put a disc into my DVD player. That means I watched ”Piracy is a crime” 202 times. That means I’ve spent almost 7 hours watching the damn infomercial, just for the X files watching. That’s almost a full work day! Now imagine how much time a person spends in his/her life watching this propaganda. And that is because you do buy movies.

(Also, let’s not forget the times that a microscopic dust particle managed to get onto a disc and interrupted the playback. In some players this actually mean you have to watch the damn thing all over again.)

Solution

Needless to say, these problems bothered me quite a lot. The solution was apparently to rip the content of the DVDs to video files and play them back from a computer. There are multiple tools to rip, convert and watch movies. I will just list and write about the ones I actually use.

Ripping

The ripping can be done two ways, either as a on-stop process where the source is the DVD and the result is a couple of movie files, or as a two part process where the DVD is first ripped to the computer, but still in DVD format, and then converted to movie files.

I generally prefer the second way since it means I can rip a lot of discs (which requires quite a bit of manual labour) during the day and then let the tedious (but very automated) converting be done in the night.

Mac the Ripper (rest in peace)

My tool for ripping discs has been Mac the Ripper. Unfortunately it’s a PowerPC application and with the discontinuation of Rosetta in OS X Lion, Mac the Ripper is now useless.

Handbrake

Handbrake is an awesome application that convert video files from one format to another. It is great for converting a DVD (or the ripped content of one) to H.264 video files that plays back smoothly on most modern computer hardware.

Playback

So ripping and converting things isn’t really a problem, which means the next question will be how to play back the video files in the best way. Playing it back in QuickTime and using folders to sort your library is one way. iTunes is another, slightly better but still not great, solution.

Plex

The solution that I’ve found to be the best is Plex Media Server. It’s a fork of XBMC, originally only for the Mac but nowadays compatible with Windows and various Linux flavors as well.

Plex is a two-piece solution with a media server and one or more clients. You can read all about it over at their web page, but the best way to really get to know about it is to download it (it’s free) and try using it.

What I’ve found to be great about Plex is mainly three thing:

Happily ever after?

So that’s that. A fairly long piece about the greatness of Plex. Apart from trying to convince all of you to try it, this article is also the first piece in a greater puzzle. The next piece in the puzzle is about clients for the media server, and that is maybe the more important piece but I felt that this introduction to why I hate optical media and love Plex was necessary.

  1. I will likely write a more lengthy piece about my opinions on copyright sometime in the future. ↩
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Replies and comments

How Peter Gabriel makes an album

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BneruaJqlsY

This is a great documentary about how Peter Gabriel wrote, recorded and produced the album Security, back in the early eighties. If you have even the slightest interest in music production, this is mandatory watching.1

All four parts can be found on YouTube:

  1. via Everything is a Remix ↩
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Storing Data the Simple HTML5 Way (and a few tricks you might not have known) | HTML5 Doctor

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This article1 has been lying around in my Instapaper cue for what feels like half an eternity. I while ago I finally read it and it contained som really good stuff on sessionStorage, localStorage and the storage event.

  1. Storing Data the Simple HTML5 Way (and a few tricks you might not have known) | HTML5 Doctor ↩
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New kent single – 999

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kent is probably my all time favorite band. Yesterday they released a new single called 9991. So far I think it’s a great song. It’s an unusually euphoric, almost Coldplay like, ”freedom rock” song. It’s definatly worth checking out.

There is also a video that you can watch:

  1. 999 in iTunes ↩
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