Part 43 of elf's Apple PowerBook G4 Journal
Product Review: Moleskine Notebook
notebook moleskine
Sat Nov 01 18:13:50 2008
It accompanies the creative professions and has
become a symbol of contemporary nomadism.
A few months ago, I replaced
my Hipster PDA (consisting
of a PostIt notepad and a large clamp) with
a Moleskine
notebook (unlined pages), because many of the leaves I collect
as subjects for drawing, kept falling out of the pad; the Moleskine
keeps them all secure. I bought mine at Indigo Books in the
Toronto Eaton Centre. I initially went to the Urban Connection
store on Yonge and Shuter, because I had read somewhere that they
carried them, but a helpful salesperson there, informed me that
they no longer carried them, but that Indigo had them.
The notebook is handmade with acid-free paper and the pages are
thread bound. It has an elastic band, cleverly attached to the
outside back cover, that keeps the notebook tightly closed. It has
a braided cloth ribbon placemark attached to the spine and an
expandable pocket inside the back cover. Both the pages and the
cover (covered with imitation oil-cloth and embossed with
"Moleskine" on the back) have rounded corners. I prefer the
hardcover notebooks to the softcover ones because it helps to brace
ones hand on the hard cover. The pamphlet that accompanies each
notebook has a brief history of the French notebook whose
production stopped 1986, but was restarted after a Milanese company
bought the rights and revived it two years later.
![](images/moleskine01_thumbnail.png)
The only complaint I have with the notebook, is that there is no
way to securely attach the pen to the notebook. Some people clip
their writing instrument to the spine; a technique works that
reasonably well if the clip is properly designed, otherwise it
tends to wear a groove in the spine covering (as the Pilot G-Tec C4
has done within a few days in my notebook; see the first notebook
photo). I had a Papermate mechanical pencil clipped there earlier,
with no ill effects.
The advantages of notebook over my PDA are numerous—
durability against rough handling (I carry it in the outside pocket
of my messenger bag; it can also survive a drop from any height),
ability to withstand harsh temperatures, no need for periodic
recharging, ability to cope with multimedia (drawing, sketches and
writing), storage of physical objects and the long-term archival
capability (no problems with dead batteries). I find that all these
advantages outweigh the advantage a PDA has of being able to
quickly search all the data.
Update Sat Nov 01 22:59:56 2008: The biggest advantage my
PDA has over the Moleskine, is the ability to securely encrypt all
my passwords. Additionally, any notes written into the notebook
have to be manually transcribed into the computer while they can
be copy and pasted from the PDA into the editor. I can use a PDA
in the dark, while a notebook needs light.
A note on the photographs: the first Moleskine photograph
illustrates the relative size of the pocket notebook, the pen and
the watercolour notebook and also shows the groove made by the
G-Tec pen, on the top of the spine; the writing in second
photograph was done with the Sakura 0.1 Pigma Micron marker, whose
use I am rationing due to its limited availability.
Update Sun Nov 02 15:47:25 2008: Jonathan sent along a link
to hand-made leather Moleskine journal covers from a company called Renaissance
Art. I do like the Traditional and Tie-wrap models, but the Snap
Closure seems hideous because of the disproportionate size of the
closure (but it does have a pen holder).
David sent along a couple of links to
Sakura's
website (and online store) and to Woolfitts, an art-supply store in Toronto. (It seems that my pen designated "01"
draws a line which is 0.25mm thin.)
The Apple Family
people
Fri Nov 07 20:18:25 2008
List of celebrities who use Macs (I was surprised to see Bill Gates listed there).
TUAW
had a
post mentioning that Obama and his family (and the rest of the
election team) are Mac users.
I think I could add a few just off the top of my head...Stephen
Fry, Steven Colbert (I have a screen cap from his show), John
Hodgeman ("I'm a PC"). I'll add mode if I think of any...
I was re-watching the first season of Big Bang Theory and
I managed to get screen-caps of the original Mac that Leonard has
in his closet. In the start of Monday's episode he was shown doing
a presentation with a Macbook Air (with the Apple logo partially
covered with a sticker; Koothrapali's Macbook Pro also has the logo
obscured). This is a first for Leonard as he has a Dell XPS on his
desk at home.
On Thursday, I saw a student with a Macbook Air for the first
time. Additionally, our Department Chair bought an iPhone; the
second faculty member in the department to do so. I have
photographs of my boss trying to configure it to talk to our
webmail servers.
Update Sat Nov 08 00:00:43 2008: My boss mentioned that
he's never seen an iPhone ad on TV, though he has seen the "I'm a
Mac". I said that there's an iPhone ad every week on Big Bang
Theory (which he doesn't watch). All this means is that Apple
is not courting his demographic, which makes sense as he's still
holding out on getting one for two reasons: the lack of onboard GPS
maps and no podcast downloads (which will be fixed in the 2.2
release). (He also feels the data plan is exorbitant but he's
accepted that it's part of the cost of ownership.)
Update Sat Nov 08 08:40:50 2008: The iPhone Enterprise Deployment Guide will probably be useful.
iPhone
Mon Nov 10 15:54:44 2008
My boss is getting an iPhone. He was hoping I wouldn't find
out; fat chance of that happening.
Update Mon Nov 10 19:01:27 2008: He should have it by
Friday. He denies that my photograph of him with an iPhone had any
influence on his decision to finally get one. o rly?
Amazon.ca Now Sells Electronics
Mon Nov 17 23:49:41 2008
I happened to visit Amazon.ca today and I was shocked to discover
an electronics section which includes cameras, MP3 players and
computer accessories.
iPhone App: Speak and Search
iphone
Tue Nov 18 08:10:04 2008
After Friday's mis-start (which Apple's completely ass AppStore
approval process was to blame and which caused Google a minor PR
fiasco), Google's Mobile Search App with voice recognition is
finally available.
I
sent an
article to my boss who has yet to get delivery of his
iPhone. He's expecting it today. He also said that (the re-branded)
Fido now sells iPhones without dataplans (but this is not
advertised). The re-branded Fido also sells phones without charging
the system access fee and 911 fees.
He Loves It!
iphone
Sat Nov 29 14:36:43 2008
My boss as admitted, with a grudging acceptance that he loves the
iPhone; his HP iPAQ is a distant, forgotten memory. He reads his
email via the iPhone every morning, and once performed some server
maintenance via ssh and vi. Surfing the web is a joy.
His only complaints so far are that he can't search his calendar
appointments— e.g. list all his doctor's appointments—
and the lack of a turn-by-turn GPS application with onboard
maps. (He does not have a data-plan on his iPhone. After some
research he found that (lately re-branded) Fido will sell you an
iPhone and allow you to cancel the dataplan within three days
without incurring a charge; the minimum monthly fee is CAD$25). One
minor complaint he had when importing his Outlook address book (you
have to save the db as a CSV file and import it into iTunes as a
Windows Address Book) from his iPAQ was that iTunes did not import
all the fields and he ended up losing many notes he had made.
Rosetta Disk Micro Etching
rosetta disk
Sun Nov 30 18:45:23 2008
According to an entry on the Long Now blog, the last technical
hurdle of microetching the first three chapters of the book of
Genesis on to
the Rosetta
Disk was overcome this month.
I think they should also make a human-eye readable version perhaps
etched in stone (as noted in the comments, it would need a slab
"about 100 feet long").
Calaboration
google calendatt ical
Wed Dec 03 07:21:32 2008
Calaboration
allows iCal to sync with Google Calendar. Will be testing this later.
Update Wed Dec 03 13:24:46 2008: It requires Leopard. Booo.
RED "Ché"
cinema
Sun Dec 07 09:37:54 2008
In an interview with Soderbergh about his movie Ché he
mentions that he used RED cameras:
One of the reasons that I was so hopped up to get the RED ready in
time for shooting was that I knew how much of a contribution that
detail would make to the movie, not just in the foliage, but in the
costumes and the makeup and everything... You're literally recording
on flashcards, so you're not hauling film magazines up a ravine and
the cameras were small and easy to use. I was able to get more and
better shots because of it. For me, it was a great case of good luck
that they showed up two days before we started shooting, which was
kind of scary.
Ebert on the Top 20 and Puzo on "The Godfather"
cinema
Mon Dec 08 07:46:58 2008
Roger Ebert lists his top 20 movies of 2008.
Mario
Puzo writes
about how his bestseller and the movie came about. It includes
great photography from the sets of the movie.
No Jobs at Macworld
macworld
Tue Dec 16 21:04:08 2008
Steve Jobs
will not
be doing the keynote at Macworld 2009 on January 6 and this
will be last year Apple will be an exhibitor at the conference.
To say that the blogs are abuzz, would be the understatement of the
year.
Oldtimers
japan technology
Mon Dec 22 12:29:50 2008
People yakking annoyingly on cellphones in public can now be
considered "oldtimers."
Until the eighties, when the word processor was introduced, the great
majority of Japanese was written longhand. (Japanese typewriters,
complicated and unwieldy because of all the kanji, were left to
specialists.) Even now, personal computers are not widespread: one
machine per family is common.
For young Japanese, and especially for girls, cell
phones-sophisticated, cheap, and, for the past decade, capable of
connecting to the Internet-have filled the gap. A government survey
conducted last year concluded that eighty-two per cent of those
between the ages of ten and twenty-nine use cell phones, and it is
hard to overstate the utter absorption of the populace in the
intimate portable worlds that these phones represent. A generation is
growing up using their phones to shop, surf, play video games, and
watch live TV, on Web sites specially designed for the mobile
phone. “It used to be you would get on the train with
junior-high-school girls and it would be noisy as hell with all their
chatting,” Yumiko Sugiura, a journalist who writes about Japanese
youth culture, told me. “Now it’s very quiet—just the little tapping
of thumbs.” (With the new iPhone and the advent of short-text
delivery services like Twitter, American cellular habits are becoming
increasingly Japanese; there are at least two U.S. sites, Quillpill
and Textnovel, both in the beta stage, that offer templates for
writing and reading fiction on cell phones.)
—Letter from Japan
Coraline Boxes
cinema
Tue Dec 23 05:33:59 2008
I don't know what to make of
this "campaign"—
is it marketing or is it truly love? To call it lavish would be
sacriligeous. To call it selfish would be cynical. The chosen 50
were artists that the Coraline artists respected, because
only artists could appreciate the effort that goes into making such
a film. It wasn't a 5,000 t-shirt giveaway to the first 5,000
random people who emailed in and after a few washes the t-shirts
would be discarded or would find their way to clothe a random
third-world child.
Visual Effects in "No Country for Old Men"
cinema cgi
Sat Dec 27 20:21:05 2008
Why do movies with visual effects that obviously look like visual
effects, win oscars for visual effects? Why didn't "No Country for
Old Men" win for visual effects? Perhaps because no one sat through
the credits and realized that the movie even had visual effects.
I had to get to the second page of Google results to find a few
hints of the visual effects:
As the sole visual effects facility for the newly released No Country
for Old Men, Venice-based Luma Pictures used Autodesk Maya to create
more than 60 shots. These included action sequences, photo-realistic
CG antelopes, a CG airplane and CG destruction and debris.
Update Sat Dec 27 22:00:12 2008: Found a site belonging to
a visual effects artist, Wendy Klein, who worked on the movie, and
who has before and after shots of some of her work.
Update Mon Dec 29 13:07:50
2008: Draft screenplay from 2005 (slight variations give a
different sense of sheriff Bell's motivations for returning to the
crime scene (which is a recurring theme in the movie))
and
an article
on the sound.