bonaldi.me

After Metafilter’s 400th thread about saving journalism, I realised all my answers were saying the same thing. So I posted a new version of this Slashdot comment-turned-meme to speed up snarking:

Your blog advocates a technical/legislative/market-based/crowd-sourced approach to saving journalism. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws owing to the avaraciousness of modern publishers.)

( ) It does not provide an income stream to the working journalist
( ) Nobody will spend eight hours sitting in a dull council meeting to do it
( ) It is defenseless against copy-and-paste
( ) ...

The full thing looks crappy on this template, so read it in full here

“Peeling the onion, peeling the onion” he intones. “That’s what’s being lost. The vital stuff of placing things on the record, of challenging the official account. These monsters who have taken over papers in America today have lost sight of it. We have to keep doing it. Not in a partisan way – just let’s find out what the bloody facts are!” – Harold Evans

(It’s badged as an interview by Alan Rusbridger, but reads more like he swept in and owned the place.)

Is Instapaper. It works like this:
1. Sign up at Instapaper.com and install their bookmarklet in your browser.
2. Install Instapaper on the phone via the store
3. When you see something good on the web but don’t have time to read it, click the bookmarklet.
4. Open Instapaper on the phone: it downloads and converts the page and saves it locally so you can read it whenever you like, even offline.

It’s genius, really.

So much for my pledge not to start another link blog, but this is a top little essay on how to write:

Psychology no doubt makes us better men and women, more sympathetic and tolerant, but it doesn’t make writing any easier. Had Shakespeare been confronted with psychology, “To be or not to be” might have come out, “To continue as a social unit or not to do so. That is the personality problem. Whether ’tis a better sign of integration at the conscious level to display a psychic tolerance toward the maladjustments and repressions induced by one’s lack of orientation in one’s environment or — ” But Hamlet would never have finished the soliloquy.

(via the goddamn great Big Contrarian)

So build she did, around the clock for 38 years until her death on Sept. 5, 1922. The house now has 160 rooms, 47 fireplaces, 10,000 window panes, 17 chimneys, 950 doors, and 40 staircases. It is famous for its nonsensical architecture, with hidden rooms, staircases leading to nowhere, cupboard doors open to solid brick walls and secret passages.
–Winchester Mystery House

From the super cool places you should visit blog.

So, yes, it does kill your router, most usually after 5 and a bit minutes. BT know about it. (The Home Hub is the same horrible router branded by lots of people, including Be. It’s an Alcatel Speedtouch, I think. Awful. Avoid.

Tiny post: the new 3G iPhones don’t include a stand, which you’re really going to want. (They did the same box-stripping with the 2G iPods as well)