the Quillink annotated
Morrick's modern commonplace book.Quick notes, interesting bits, annotated leaves, sundry things found and picked up. – by Riccardo Mori
Rare Pictures: Scott’s South Pole Expedition, 100 Years Later
Amazing photos from the National Geographic. Here’s part of the description of this photo:
Moustache encrusted with ice, photographer Herbert Ponting stands on an iceberg near McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, in 1911. Ponting was part of the scientific staff on the 1910-1912 Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole.
British explorer and expedition leader Robert Falcon Scott reached the Pole on January 17, 1912. A hundred years later, Ponting’s photographs—including many rarely seen copies housed in the National Geographic archives—offer an “incredibly rich visual record” of the expedition, according to historian Max Jones.
Don’t miss the whole slideshow.
These last months I have been neglecting my vintage Mac hardware (with the notable exception of my Newton MessagePads, which I use daily), mostly because my job as a freelance translator kept me…
Stephen Hackett’s Hasty Review of the new Twitter iPhone app
After sharing a few UI-related impressions, Stephen concludes:
All in all, it’s clear to me that Twitter is trying to steer people toward areas of the service where things like promoted trends and stories can be seen easily. While that’s understandable, I really am not a fan of it taking up so much room in the iPhone app. With no way to re-arrange the default tabs across the bottom, I’m stuck with something I don’t want — Discovery — and am left with something I need — Direct Messages — too far away.
I’m sticking with Tweetbot on my iPhone.
I deleted the official Twitter app from my iPhone right before the QuickBar was introduced last March, and fully embraced the Twitterrific experience, both on my iPhone and on my main Mac. On one hand, I grew progressively tired of the ‘features’ and quirks of the official Twitter apps; on the other, Twitterrific just kept getting better. I never regretted that decision and I’m sticking with Twitterrific.
Looks can be deceiving.
(Click on the photos to read the captions)
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”.
Isaac Asimov - (via John Gruber)
Summary: SSDs live fast, die young, and pretend to be OK even while they’re dying. Don’t use one without awesome backups.
And sometimes, they come back from the dead.
Fascinating report. I find maddening that in this day and age — where it seems that everything must be digitalised otherwise it’s not progress — we’re still having to deal with fundamentally unreliable storage media. Backup is a pragmatic solution for the moment, but really, the real progress should be to design and manufacture truly reliable media to store digitalised content. Backup should be reduced to a remote, ‘just in case’, totally optional activity, not something you should worry about on a daily basis.
There were many reasons why a young man or woman might have turned to a life of crime and lewdness in eighteenth-century England. Heart-rending tales of orphaned children, abandoned lovers, destitution and failed ambitions fill the pages of contemporary memoirs, newspaper columns and court records. But for some, one of the prime suspects behind the nation’s idleness and vicious inclinations was quietly, steadily taking root in almost every street in the country. As it did, the nation as a whole risked become more and more debauched.
This terrible foreign invader encouraged young men to stay “a lurking in the bed” rather than earning an honest wage. It turned women to harlotry and insolence, caused atrocious child neglect, and was armed to carry everyone off to their grave a decade early. This enemy of virtue? Why, tea, of course.
Emily Brand’s Ms B—d’s School of Venus is one of my latest discoveries. I love her blog. Want to know what it’s about? The brief description she provides in the sidebar will give you a clear idea:
Take a seat. Have a mug of gin. Welcome to Ms B–d’s exploration of England’s underworld, the seemingly glamorous and the unspeakably grim, from the Restoration to the dawn of the Victorian era. Please, feel free to look around. But you might want to keep an eye on your pockets. All manner of devilish wretches come through my door.
(I have to thank Lee Jackson of victorianlondon.org for getting to discover Ms Brand and her work.)
Since I started this weblog back in 2008, it featured a page called My vintage Mac wishlist, where I list some selected vintage Apple hardware I’m after. I think it’s all quite self-explanatory, but the kind of feedback I received over the years, generated by that page, has been rather absurd and disappointing. I’ve asked myself many times what’s wrong with people.
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