Cortados on the Beach with CoffeeGeek Mark Prince
Mark Prince, founder of CoffeeGeek.com, made cortados for my wife and I at a beach in Victoria, BC using portable espresso equipment.
M
More Netflix Love: Bonus Discs
I’ve been a subscriber of Netflix since its early days, and I’m sure the company loves me: I typically have one or two (or even sometimes all three) DVDs out for more than a month, depending on how busy I am. If I counted every penny, I should probably cancel my subscription and save some ...
i
iMovie 4.0.1 & QuickTime 6.5.1
Apple is on an update spree today. In addition to iTunes 4.5, the company has posted iMovie for Mac OS X 4.0.1, which fixes a host of issues that people have been running into with iMovie 4: This update provides increased performance when working with large projects, such as editing video clips and audio volume. ...
U
US Army Logistics
Fascinating article in Slate about how the U.S. occupation in Iraq has strained the military in terms of raw spare parts and the logistics of sending more equipment and troops: Hollow Force – Has Iraq stretched the U.S. military to its breaking point? By Phillip Carter
T
Toby Young’s Slate Diary
This week I’ve enjoyed A weeklong�journal from�a writer in Los Angeles, a series of dispatches in Slate written by British writer Toby Young. I was surprised to learn that the Cheescake Factory rates highly among restaurants (this coming from a former food critic), and that good Hollywood paprazzi work more surreptitiously than what we expect. ...
K
Ken Burns Zoom Out Speed
Fellow author Jim Heid is working on his Macintosh iLife ’04 book and wondered if I’d encountered the following problem: when you zoom out in a photo, the zoom affect starts slow and then ends quickly and abruptly. He writes: There seems to be a problem with the Ken Burns effect in iMovie 4: If ...
N
New iBooks & PowerBooks
Apple released new iBooks and PowerBooks today, with faster specs and, nicely, a faster SuperDrive (4x vs. 2x).
B
Ballistic Nylon
One of the joys of working for TidBITS is that we learn more about the words we use. In last week’s issue, I wrote an article about what to look for when buying a laptop bag. So tonight I received an email from one of our translators asking, “I see the term ‘ballistic nylon’ everywhere, ...
H
How to Build a $14 Steadicam
Dori points to a page on how to build a $14 Steadycam.
W
Writerspeak
I printed out a cartoon years ago that still hangs outside my office door. I thought about it tonight and wanted to see if it was still online, and it is (even though the online mag that published it, Suck, folded long ago): Translating Writerspeak into English. Here’s another one on the same theme: Writerspeak!
H
How a New Coffee Grinder Makes All the Difference
I’ve been a coffee fan for a while, but I’ve gotten more serious about it since my wife bought me a La Pavoni Europicola for our ten-year wedding anniversary. Since I had moved up to a better machine than my trustworthy Krups Mini, I decided it was time to buy a burr grinder to go ...
