(via natsura)

Iowa Sen. Charles E. Grassley is one connected dude. Blah blah blah blah long NYT article but look at that Kindle DX. Compared to the piles and piles of printed pages surrounding him, I’d say he’s ahead of the curve here.

Canon SD960: Great Pictures, Great Video →

I think I just found my next digital camera. That example video is amazing.

Free word count services →

I tend to do a lot of plaintext writing in Mac OS X’s TextEdit, since it has all features I need to write things down. Unfortunately, it does not have a word count feature.

Enter Devon Technologies’ Word Service. A free download, Word Service lets you get a word count from any app that has a Services menu. Nice.

Cupertino, start your photocopiers

It looks like Safari 4 copies Chrome’s UI wholesale. Besides Safari’s separate “Address” and “Search” boxes, everything — including Top Sites — is the same. On Windows, the similarity is even more striking. For example, compare this image to this one. Notice that, in addition to the titlebar tabs’ position and the top sites grid, Apple has also copied the “page” and “gear” menus to the left of the location field.

Google Quick Search Like Quicksilver from Google →

I’ve been using the new Google Quick Search app for a few days now and I really like it. A few quick notes:

• It gives me instant access to my Google Docs. This is awesome.

• Google says that it’s a “prototype,” and they’re not kidding. The app runs smoothly for the most part, but every once in a while it starts hogging one of my CPUs and I need to kill it.

• The app attempts to integrate web and local searches, and the implementation is pretty good. For example, typing “height of mount everest” and hitting enter takes you immediately to the Google results page.

• Many Quicksilver features — such as being able to copy, move, or delete files on the fly, or drill down into folders — are not present. I’m not sure if Google plans to add them as the app matures, but fact that Quicksilver’s lead developer now works at Google is promising.

• Despite the lack of features, Google Quick Search’s interface makes much more sense than Quicksilver’s default. It’s even (slightly) customizable.

For the time being I’ll keep using it. Quicksilver was too huge and unwieldy for me — hopefully with some development time Google Quick Search will become a fantastic desktop tool.

Palm Pre: everything you ever wanted to know →

Engadget runs through all known information about the Palm Pre — hardware, software, user experience, and everything else. It’s a comprehensive look at the phone that has the promise to both

1. revitalize Palm and
2. give Apple a run for its money.

It’s a very exciting time. We’re right in the middle of the cell phone version of the personal computer revolution.

Forget the iPhone — as a long-time Palm fanboy, the Palm Pre is the phone I want.

Northwestern's Medill School is looking for a few good coders wanting to earn a master's degree in journalism →

This is pretty rad. Interactive media (like this NYT campaign contribution guide) are the future of journalism online. Good on Medill for pulling code nerds into j-schools. Journalism needs them.

Join character strings with Excel's concatenate function →

Sweet action. Saved for my own edification.

Via dailymeh, via dirty.ru.

I’ve been using Google Chrome to make a few internet radio station “applications.” Each gets its own window (Chrome remembers dimensions and location yay!) and taskbar button. So far I am so in love with this web browser.

Thinking about getting a new cell phone. I still prefer a candy bar-style phone to a flip phone, but the only good candy bars these days are sliders. The LG Shine is more stylish than most of them.

"The problem I am pointing to, however, is […] a simple problem that afflicts us all: people with any kind of technical knowledge of a domain tend to get hopelessly (and unwittingly) stuck in a frame of reference that relates to their view of the issue, and their trade’s technical parlance, not that of the ordinary humans with whom they so signally fail to engage."

Language Log’s Geoffrey Pullum on a phenomenon he calls “nerdview.” (via nostrich)

Using .htaccess Redirection to Standardize Web Server Addresses →

I feel like a Web guru now — using John Gruber’s .htaccess tricks, www.jessedarland.com now magically becomes jessedarland.com.