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Alex Jones

I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).

Technology

Austin Blogs

Wired spreads word (Where The Bloggers Live: Austin?) of a new report from Scarborough Research stating that Austin has the “highest percentage of residents who read or write blogs.” About 15% of adult Austinites “had read or contributed to a blog in the past 30 days”, edging out Portland and other tech-heavy cities. According to the report (PDF),

The top cities for bloggers have tech savvy and youth in common. Thirty-seven percent of Austin adults are between the ages of 18-34; they are 20 percent more likely than the national average to be within this age range. Adults in Austin and Portland are attracted to new technology. Austin adults are 17 percent more likely than adults nationally to be a part of a household that owns a DVR and 51 percent more likely to be a part of a household that owns a PDA.

As an active member of the local tech community, I’m not surprised. Austin loves technology and as a whole, has an insane amount of energy, curiosity and love for life on the bleeding edge.

Simply put, Austin and its bloggers rock.

Google Coming to Austin

According to the Austin Business Journal, Google is set to open an office here in Austin. Apparently they are about to lease the entire second floor of the Scarbrough building at 6th and Congress, which is a sweet spot. Having worked for three different companies downtown, I can tell you that it beats the hell out of locations in North Austin or elsewhere.

While Google hasn’t announced what the satellite will work on, this move is guaranteed to heat up an already hot market for engineers and Web folken.

A Reminder – QuickSilver Style

So, I ran across a little QuickSilver tip which may be old news for the QS power users, but was new to me: QuickSilver is a a great timer for reminders. So, say you need to call someone in 30 minutes, but you don’t want to have to keep monitoring the clock as you are working on a project, writing e-mails etc. You could use a dashboard widget, or a kitchen timer, but why not use QuickSilver? It’s pretty damned easy:

  1. Open QuickSilver (cmd-space) and type a period (.) to open the QS text box
  2. Type your message (Call the restaurant to confirm tonight’s reservation) and hit the tab key to move to the commands pane
  3. The first option is to display as large text, make sure its highlighted and hit ctrl-enterto save that command to be used in conjunction with the next command:
  4. Choose ‘Run after Delay’ or ‘Run at Time’
  5. To have your message appear on screen in half an hour, type ’30m’ (30 minutes) in the box and hit enter.

It take about five seconds to do, and in half an hour, you’ll see a large box reminding you to “Call the restaurant to confirm tonight’s reservation”. Give it a shot, it’s a very useful feature! You can of course use other time options, seconds, hours etc.

Thanks to David Hayes for publishing the tip on his site, where I stumbled across it.

Rockin the Lap

iLap 1 - Small - Snagged from Rain Design’s Site I love my MacBok Pro, but it gets far too hot far too quickly when I have it sitting in my lap, and as I got this machine specifically to have the flexibility to use it when and where I want. At the moment, that means writing this post as I sit on the couch, next to Sarah as she makes a couple of giant pillows for the floor. The only reason I’m able to do this is the iLap Laptop Stand from Rain Design. After reading the reviews on Amazon I ordered it and it arrived in two days. Since then I’ve used it while lounging in a couple of chairs and on my desk as a replacement for the old laptop stand. It has been a tremendously satisfying experience so far and I highly recommend that you check them out, especially if you are using an MBP, or other laptop that runs hot.

They have a couple of models (15” for the MacBook Pro, 13.3” for the MacBook ), so the bases are covered if you have something other than a MacBook Pro. Anyway, I thought I’d share the info in the hopes that others may find it useful too. Hopefully this will lead to me posting more often as it won’t require that I set up the comp at my desk!

Debugging Safari

Check out this post by rakaz, which provides a quick walk-through on enabling the debug menu in Safari for Windows, which provides the ability to access JavaScript exceptions, show the JS console, enable a runaway JavaScript timer and turn off “Site-Specific Hacks”. This should make life a bit easier.

Safari's Font Rendering on Windows

I just ran across an interesting feature of the Safari 3 Beta for Windows. Apple has included a copy of Lucida Grande and Lucida Grande bold. But instead of dropping them into the main Windows font directory, where all apps could make use of it, the fonts are under the \Program Files\Safari\Safari.resources\. So, sites that set Lucida Grande as the first font in their styles will look different in Safari than the other browsers in a Windows environment. Add the font smoothing capabilities built into Safari, and you can see some visible differences in text rendering on many sites across the Web when comparing IE, Firefox and Safari on Windows.