Desktop Magic: The Art of David Lanham

There are two challenges I face when getting a new computer: what to "name" it^* and how to make it as artistically appealing as possible. This always means scouring different sites for a fair deal of different desktop backgrounds and trying them on, much in the same way you'd try on an outfit at a shop before buying it.

Someone or something had pointed me to the art of David Lanham a few years back and I had, in order, downloaded a coupe of his backgrounds and promptly forgotten his name, much to my disappointment. Last week, in my usual "make-computer-look-good-easy-to-use" quest, I found him again - tell me you can't love these:






Between the scary, the surreal, and the sublime, he has it all wrapped up - desktops and icons that keep me subtly stimulated while I'm doing the mundane computational tasks that take up my day-to-day.

*: Jury is still out on the Macbook host name - my past machines have been named, in order: ark, axalon, bismarck, eldridge, zion, puck, and deck. All of these are very masculine names and I'm considering diverging from that convention in the same manner I diverged from Linux and Windows this time around.

Quarterly Update

Gadget Update: Kindle

Last month, I took the plunge and bought a Kindle. I had held one at the office about six months before we released it, noticing all of the features that I had originally hated were fixed: faster page load, thinner form factor, and a slipcover integration built into the body.

It's nice, and not in a normal way. I've ready two different novels on it: Diamond Age and The Second Book of the Tao, with both being easy to read and, as far as my eyes are concerned, the same as paper. However, it's lighter and less bulky than carrying all of my books around with me and lets me read something that meets my mood.

The best feature, though, is the cost of magazines. I currently get the New Yorker and Reason, both of which cost me about fifty to seventy-five percent less than the print versions and I don't have to recycle the magazines when they're done.

In short, I'm glad I bought it.

Gadget Update: Macbook Pro

On 4/1/2009 I made two updates to my Twitter feed:
bdimmick: is quitting the Internet.
bdimmick: has decided to not quit internet. Bought MacBook Pro instead.

The first is a joke, the second was a joke on myself - I have never owned a Mac for more than five minutes. A few years back, a Mac Mini made it into my home and immediately had Ubuntu installed on it, which doesn't count. So, spending three grand for a machine that I had never used seemed like a stretch, right?

A lot of my coworkers and friends thought so, too. Some strange stares, some puzzled looks, and the only sympathy received was from current Mac owners. "It will change your life," someone told me.

It has. This is probably the best laptop I have ever owned, with the second place going to my ever-dependable IBM Thinkpad, which have not been the same since Lenovo took over the operation a few years back.

The Mac just works. That's the party line, right? The hardware is well-designed, the OS built for that hardware, and that tight coupling makes for a great user experience. For me, it's the little things - the base of the keyboard has an area that my wrists naturally rest, the touchpad sensitive enough to make it usable, and a backlit keyboard that makes it easy to use in the dimly-lit coffee shops and bars of Seattle.

Performance-wise, it's also a dream. The graphics are strong enough to run Second Life or any other 3d application, the memory enough to keep Second Life, GarageBand, Eclipse, Firefox, Skype, iChat, and Twitterific all running at the same time. Additionally, the sound quality has a sharpness in no other laptop I've ever owned - today, I had a small chat with a friend on the East Coast over Skype, over the speaker, and the quality is as good as my studio headphones. That's nice.

New Project: Merkabah

I've been working on a new open source project called "merkabah", named after the chariot from Ezekiel. Details are forthcoming, once Amazon clears me to give the clearance to release more code. Cross your fingers, SQS users!

Favorite New Tool: RescueTime

If you're looking for a great system to track what you do on your computer, check out RescueTime - it's a daemon that runs on your desktop, records everything you do, and at the end of the week, sends you a report detailing everything you did over the week. You can also tag things you do and set goals around those tags - such as my goal to send at least an hour a week writing on this blog and ten hours on an open source project.

Speaking of which - hour's up! That's all for now - with the new laptop, longer daylight in the summer, and a promise to myself to write more in the coming months, expect more substantiative updates.