On the Radar: It’s not you, it’s me

* ??Alissa Clark??: “New York Blessings”:http://www.relevantmagazine.com/life_article.php?id=7212. On love letters for cities.
* “WeatherIcon”:http://www.viper007bond.com/wordpress-plugins/weathericon/. I wanted to use a widget for weather on “Everything Newark”:http://blog.newarker.info, but I realized that my theme, “K2″:http://getk2.com, disappointingly, still doesn’t support plugins.
* ??John Gruber??: “Macworld Expo 2006 in Review”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/01/mwsf_2006. John mentions in passing that you can mount a WebDAV drive in Mac OS X. Seeing that I have 26 GB (!) available on my web-hosting account (“Dreamhost rocks, people”), I thought I might try to investigate that as a backup strategy.
* Play anything on any operating system with “VLC Player”:http://www.videolan.org/vlc/. This thing is awesome. Schmoo and I were set to watch a movie on the Thinkpad-from-work (the lappy is in the shop right now), and I realized that my computer didn’t have software to play it. A quick Google search for “open source watch DVD” led me to this player, which I have also installed on the Mac. A quick download, slapped the DVD back in the drive, and it just worked. Brilliant.
* ??Hugh MacLeod??: “A man’s heart”:http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/002913.html. So true.
* ??Jeffrey Zeldman??: “Silent phone, secret phone”:http://www.zeldman.com/2006/06/12/silent-phone-secret-phone/. Best snarky Verizon complaint, ever. As far as I can tell, the problem involves phone lines, so you can see why it would take one of America’s largest phone companies five days to tackle a brain teaser like that.
* ??Matt Mullenweg??: “Beeping”:http://photomatt.net/2006/06/13/beeping/ Your assignment today is to take a walk around your blog, application, website, whatever you work with on a daily basis, and allow yourself to be supremely annoyed with the beeping smoke detector in the corner.
* ??Wired Magazine??: “Judging Apple Sweatshop Charge”:http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71138-0.html?tw=wn_index_3. Steve Jobs’ Think Different campaign celebrated labor leaders like Gandhi, who used strikes as a form of civil protest, and Ceasar Chavez, who organized poor, migrant farm workers. But a British newspaper at the weekend published a rather shocking report about the factories in China that make his company’s iPods.
* “Quinn Tetris for the Mac”:http://www.simonhaertel.de/quinn/home (“via John”:http://daringfireball.net/linked/2006/june#mon-12-quinn). Free, open source, and oh-so-pretty version of Tetris for the Mac.
* ??Angela Wu??: “How I got here: blogger break-up”:http://hereisangela.com/2006/06/15/how-i-got-here/ All those times you had “outages,” you never explained yourself, and I started to feel insecure. I know you didn’t mean it to be like that, and I still think you’re a good bloghost. You’ll be great for someone after me, I just know it. Maybe I’ve just outgrown you. Maybe it’s me, not you… Reset your bookmarks to hereisangela.com.
* Breitbart: “Microsoft’s Gates to Leave Daily Role”:http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/06/15/D8I8SD100.html (“via Jason”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/gates_plans_his_exit_from_microsoft_whats_next.php) Bill Gates is stepping down from Microsoft. WOW.
* ??John Gruber??: counterpoint, “And Oranges”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/06/and_oranges. ??Mark Pilgrim??: counter-counterpoint, “Juggling oranges”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/16/juggling-oranges. The tennis ball has been bouncing between two of my favorite bloggers over this matter of open formats. Pilgrim’s argument — proprietary and DRM formats will, one day, trap _everything you’ve ever enjoyed about your computer_ (music, video, photos, email, documents, etc.) if you let them — has been compelling and got me playing with Linux again. Gruber’s responses to this have been frustrating — he still won’t address the point of lock-in head-on. I wonder if Mark’s ultimate statement about DRM hasn’t already been best stated in his 2001 blog entry, “My crush on Spyro, what Flash animations remind me of, and what the past will look like someday”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2001/07/29/my_crush_on_spyro_what_flash_animations_remind_me_of_and_what_the_past_will_look_like_someday.