Category: Pursuits

  • How to use Twitter to promote your blog: go narrow

    In the beginning, the old-school media man is stuck to his ways. But over time, he evolves. When I first started blogging, I blogged about anything of interest to me — sports, books, gadgets, the weather, whatever. Eventually, I realized that was no way to build an online audience. I am not a personality of…

  • Free Kindle apps getting magazines, lending coming too

    I’m not sure what Kindle whiners are going to have left to whine about by next year (well, yes I do, DRM, but I digress…). Some big news emerged on Amazon’s Kindle discussion board the other day. First, the Kindle team revealed that you’re soon going to be able to read electronic newspapers and magazines…

  • Assembling a network storage server from spare bits

    I have a pile of old hard drives sitting in an attic closet gathering dust — but out of the hands of identity thieves, not polluting the water supply and generally staying out of trouble. So when I saw a diskless version of the Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ super-cheap, I decided to buy it and conduct…

  • Internet TV a long way off because that’s how they want it

    (updated 10/22) There’s a really important article semi-buried on page B3 of the New York Times today: Internet is a Weapon in Cable Fight. You should go read it but the short version is that the Fox network is fueding with cable provider Cablevision over payments for carrying regular TV stations on the cable system.…

  • Review: New York Times new iPad app is a step backwards

    The venerable gray lady, the New York Times, overhauled its iPad app this week. The original app, which supposedly annoyed Steve Jobs greatly, was called “Editor’s Choice.” Instead of including all the stories in the paper, it included only a selection. And the stories were arranged in the app much as they wold be in…

  • Review: MarsEdit 3.0 useful for offline blogging and editing

    For the past few years, I’ve been composing and editing most blog entries directly on the web inside my browser via the WordPress installation that runs Gravitationalpull.net. Every now and then, I get burned when the browser crashes or loses web connectivity after I’ve written a big chunk of unsaved text. It also means that…

  • High-end pocket cameras still trail far behind low-end D-SLRs, sadly

    Everyone loves the gorgeous pictures that their digital SLR camera takes but no one likes carrying around the unwieldy, weighty cameras themselves. So we’re all on a perpetual quest. We want a much lighter camera that still takes great pictures and allows for the kind of fiddling and fixing — both in the camera settings…

  • One-star boycotts may be working

    There was a lot of debate over the past few years about consumers rating down books, movies and other products with one-star reviews because of issues not directly related to the quality of the entertainment. Rather, fans were upset about formatting, pricing, obnoxious digital rights management and other media deficiencies. Authors and producers whined but…

  • How to exclude some pages from your WordPress header menu

    I am planning to change my header image to something more fall-like and as I started mucking around with some image files in various dimensions, I got tired of tweaking the various settings and php files of the SubtleFlux theme. So I decided to investigate alternatives. Just on a lark, I clicked on the new…

  • Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated)

    (UPDATE in December 2014 — I guess it’s impressive that this debate is still going on and people are still adding comments to the blog post. I personally think it’s a little silly to criticize the post, which was written more than four years ago, over the many game features which have been updated or added since,…