However did I miss this?
[ tags: urbanism, psychogeography, spatiality, space ]
September 2006 Archives
I kinda painted myself into a corner with this blog — there’s been such a backlog of interesting stuff (which I haven’t been in the mood to write about) that I seriously considered giving the whole thing up earlier this week. So perhaps a change of pace is in order.
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I’ve lately been in the throes of a total Veronica Mars addiction, and am geeky enough to be thoroughly enjoying the prominence that Mac OS X enjoys in the show, down to the girl called “Mac” who has arguments at school about why she prefers OS X over Ubuntu — a couple of years before that rivalry became truly prominent in the blogosphere.
My dream job: doing all the on-screen design for Veronica Mars. Mmmm…
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I noticed that NeoOffice 2.0 beta 3 is out, so I gave it a whirl and am suitably impressed — it’s a workable OpenOffice port for the Mac that feels native enough. Now, I follow these things because I help with Mac administration at a community Mac lab that has been trying to get away with not buying Microsoft Office; I’d never actually use NeoOffice myself. Why not? Because the whole classical office suite paradigm is completely irrelevant to me.
I might have touched on my preference for lightweight tools over office bloatware a couple of years ago when I was looking for alternatives to Microsoft Word, but now I don’t even use a word processor that much. For writing, I’m using the latest beta of Scrivener, which emphatically isn’t a word processor (in the contemporary sense) — it’s more closely related to apps like Ulysses, which doesn’t even display italics, let alone fancy formatting. Being a blogger and advocate of structural standards, I’m familiar with using different kinds of plain-text markup syntax for writing, but I’m also a typographic nerd with an occasional hankering to see properly rendered italics, so this is where Scrivener comes in — it’s another minimalist, distraction-free, full-screen capable writing app, but with rich text support.
The features Scrivener does have are fantastic: concatenated editing of multiple, arbitrary fragments, the sexiest full-screen mode ever, integrated outlining, version control, etc. It suits a methodology of growing stuff from fragments, in an environment that’s somehow both lush (making writing a pleasure) and austere (without too many bells and whistles, thus encouraging focus). I don’t think I can do it justice, so if you use a Mac and do a lot of writing, download the latest beta and give it a go.
[ tags: macintosh, osx, pop-culture, software, veronica-mars ]
Breaking radio silence to note the passing of Peter Brock, the racing legend known for his bizarre links to psychoanalytic Marxism. Yep, I’m talking about the “Energy Polariser” used in his modified Holdens, which apparently ran on Wilhelm Reich’s “orgone energy” — the subject of Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting”. (Yeah, and it’s the same Wilhelm Reich who wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism.) We love ya, Brockie.
