Parade of Awesomeness

Quarter Share is the first in a series of excellent audiobooks by Nathan Lowell. The main character, Ishmael Wang, is forced by circumstance to join the crew of the Lois McKendrick, a “solar clipper” that carries cargo between star systems.

What’s fascinating about this story is that Ishmael isn’t some kind of Space Prince With A Heroic Ultimate Destiny. He’s not an action hero doing battle against the forces of evil; in fact, the series contains almost no violence at all. He’s just a guy trying to find himself, friends, and his fortune.

The stories remain interesting despite the fact that Ishmael isn’t changing the world. I listened to two of the books (Full Share and Double Share) over the weekend; I could hardly bear to turn off my MP3 player. These things kept me up until very late in the evening.

I can’t wait for the next book, Captain’s Share, which Lowell has promised will come out early this year.

Dropbox is a fantastically easy way to sync files across multiple computers, and to share them with your friends. It works like this: Install Dropbox on the computers, put in your name and password, then copy files into the dropbox folder. They appear on your other computers.

It works extremely well, though seems to hang up a bit on larger files. But: It also allows public folders, so you can share files as easily as dropping them into a folder on your computer. It also maintains revision control, so if you make a change you want to undo later or delete a file you wanted to keep, there are backups on the Dropbox website.

The first 2 GB are free, and a 50GB plan is available for $10/month or $100/year. I’m finding the free plan remarkably useful.

I can’t read Japanese, so I can’t tell of any of these are for sale, but somebody has made a bunch of Obama action figures. The link has him giving speeches, pulling weapons out of his jacket, and about to battle Darth Vader in a lightsaber duel. Someone put a lot of work into this.

I think this is a neat idea: Tom Taylor hooked up a receipt printer to a web server to make a physical notification system. He uses it for things like (as you can see) weather forecasts and reminders, but any short text-only message would work.

Taylor describes how he made this work on his website.

As much as I like computers, there are some things that paper is just better for. Computers are great for data storage, for searching vast volumes of information, and for instant communication, but paper is portable, flexible (as it is not constrained by programming), cheap, and physical. A paper to-do list is less easily forgotten than an electronic one.

Anyway, I like this idea of a physical data stream, and there’s some neat hardware hackery that went into setting this up. Worth taking a look at.