Newley Purnell

Podcasts. Would life be worth living without them? Here’re some of my faves:

– NPR: Shuffle. A daily compilation of the best stories from Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and other shows.

– NPR’s World Story of the Day. Same concept, but limited to foreign dispatches.

– ESPN/Soccernet Extra: A bunch of English football journalists discussing the week’s news. Heavy emphasis on the English Premiership.

– 43 Folders Podcast. Thoughts on personal productivity from Merlin Mann. Centers on David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach. Lots of Apple-related geekiness.

– The Marketplace podcast. The daily business show from American Public Media.

– The Splendid Table podcast. Features “abundant information on food preparation, appreciation, and culture.” Thanks to A for turning me on to this one.

– KQED’s Pacific Time podcast. The show “explores the ideas, trends and cultural patterns that flow back and forth between Asia and America.”

– World View, from The New York Times (scroll down to the bottom). Discussions with the NYT’s international staff.

– This American Life. Obviously.

– Rojas Spanish Language Podcast. For intermediate to advanced Spanish speakers. I like the host’s Peruvian accent.

– On the Media. All media criticism, all the time.

Remember the article about the quest for an odorless durian? Well, NPR’s Michael Sullivan recently did a delightful radio story on the subject.

BBC News:

There is a scene in one of the Austin Powers films where Dr Evil unleashes a giant “tractor beam” of energy at Earth in order to extract a massive payment.

Well, the memory of it kept me chuckling as I toured the extraordinary scene of the new solar thermal power plant outside Seville in southern Spain.

From a distance, as we rounded a bend and first caught sight of it, I couldn’t believe the strange structure ahead of me was actually real.

A concrete tower - 40 storeys high - stood bathed in intense white light, a totally bizarre image in the depths of the Andalusian countryside.

I recently stumbled across this remarkably complex Wikipedia entry for “backronym”:

A backronym or bacronym is a portmanteau of backward and acronym[1] coined in 1983.[2][3] It usually refers to a phrase that is constructed backwards from the phrase’s abbreviation, the abbreviation being an initialism or acronym. Sometimes backronym refers to the initialism or acronym itself,[4] but usually in those cases, it is a “replacement” backronym, the abbreviation already having an associated phrase. When the backronym phrase becomes more popular than the original, the word becomes an anacronym.[5]

Got that?

Related: “I Must Take Issue With The Wikipedia Entry For ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic.”

You may recall my friends Lee and Sachi, who I met up with here in Bangkok last year. They’ve finished their year-long round-the-world trip and are back in Seattle working on social design and online community issues. And they’ve just created an informative video that explains RSS in plain English. Check it out.

And if you’re not already subscribed, grab my RSS feed! Paste this URL into your favorite RSS reader (I prefer Google Reader) or click the RSS feed button over there on the left, below the search box.

RSS has fundamentally changed my interaction with the Web, and I’m eager for more folks to take advantage of the technology, too.

Here’s another great IHT story, this one from Clifford J. Levy. It’s a playful look at the psychological complications involved in using an Internet phone service to forward local calls to your cell phone abroad. (I use Skype to receive calls dialed to a DC area code number; they’re sent straight to my cell phone here in Bangkok.)

I really love Skype; a few months back, I enjoyed a unique conference call between my brother Mechum and our hometown friend Hayes O. I was here in Bangkok, Mechum was at home in Seoul, and Hayes was chatting with us on his cell phone while riding his bike near his house in Beijing.

MetroNaps: pods that you can rent for naps. These are new to me. And they’re totally, totally awesome. (This one’s for you, Mike W.)

(Via.)

A few notes on personal technology, for all three of you out there who care about this stuff:

1. Though I’ve been a vocal proponent of Bloglines (the Web-based RSS feed reader) in the past, I switched to Google Reader a few months back. In short: Google Reader is to Bloglines as Gmail is to Yahoo Mail/Hotmail/AOL.

2. I really like the FireFox add-on called Download Statusbar.

3. CheckBook is an excellent personal finance management application. (Sorry, PC users — it’s Mac-only.) It’s not as robust as applications like Quicken, but that’s okay with me.

4. I’ve mentioned On the Job before, but let me just say it again: It’s an incredibly useful time tracking/invoicing application. (Again, this one’s only available to Mac geeks.)

5. I recently purchased an external hard drive so that I can start doing full-system backups in case my computer’s internal drive fails. (I’ve always done backups of my most critical files, but I want a full-system backup in case the unthinkable happens.)

Unfortunately, I didn’t know that SuperDuper, the (similarly Mac-only) backup program that folks in the know really like, only works with Firewire. My external hard drive only connects via USB. Nevertheless, I found Deja Vu, which seems pretty good so far.

6. Mac For Beginners offers a number of helpful, plain-English tutorials for folks who’re just getting used to OSX.

7. And finally, here’s an amusing rant for those of you who are sick of my Mac fixation. Charlie Brooker in The Guardian: “I hate Macs”:

I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.

PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people. You can build your own from scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to slap it to make it work properly, just like the Tardis (Doctor Who, incidentally, would definitely use a PC). PCs have charm; Macs ooze pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, “I hate Macs”, and then I think, “Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?” Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands. But then, if the ads were really honest, Webb would be dressed in unbelievably po-faced avant-garde clothing with a gigantic glowing apple on his back. And instead of conducting a proper conversation, he would be repeatedly congratulating himself for looking so cool, and banging on about how he was going to use his new laptop to write a novel, without ever getting round to doing it, like a mediocre idiot.

If there’s one indictment of Macs that resounds with me, it’s that Dr. Who would certainly be a WinTel man…

(Image via.)

The rai is a unit of land measurement here in Thailand. You’ll see references to land the size of so-and-so rai, etc. But exactly how much area, I was wondering yesterday, is one rai?

In researching the answer to that question, I stumbled upon this:

rai: a traditional unit of land area in Thailand. The rai is now considered to equal exactly 1600 square meters, which is 0.16 hectare or approximately 0.3954 acre. The rai is divided into 4 ngan. The unit is called the hai in northern Thailand and the lai in Laos. The word means “field,” that is, an upland field rather than a rice paddy.

The rest of the site — How Many? A Dictionary of Units of Measurement — is really worth checking out. It’s maintained by a guy named Russ Rowlett, who’s a math prof at UNC-Chapel Hill.

I especially like this:

What countries besides the U.S. have not adopted the metric system?
Many U.S. teachers think the answer is “Liberia and Burma” (make that Myanmar). Let’s give Liberia and Myanmar a break! All countries have adopted the metric system, including the U.S., and most countries (but not the U.S.) have taken steps to eliminate most uses of traditional measurements. However, in nearly all countries people still use traditional units sometimes, at least in colloquial expressions. Becoming metric is not a one-time event that has either happened or not. It is a process that happens over time. Every country is somewhere in this process of going metric, some much further along than others.

And:

Americans probably use a greater variety of units of measurement than anyone else in the world. Caught in a slow-moving transition from customary to metric units, we employ a fascinating and sometimes frustrating mixture of units in talking about the same things. We measure the length of a race in meters, but the length of the long jump event in feet and inches. We speak of an engine’s power in horsepower and its displacement in liters. In the same dispatch, we describe a hurricane’s wind speed in knots and its central pressure in millibars.

Furthermore, our English customary units do not form a consistent system. Reflecting their diverse roots in Celtic, Roman, Saxon, and Norse cultures, they are often confusing and contradictory. There are two systems for land measurement (one based on the yard and the other on the rod) and a third system for distances at sea. There are two systems (avoirdupois and troy) for small weights and two more (based on the long and short tons) for large weights. Americans use two systems for volumes (one for dry commodities and one for liquids) and the British use a third (British Imperial Measure).

Some other interesting units of land measurement include: the tatami (yes, like the mat — thanks for the heads up, Mech and K!), the olk, and the soendre.

Apple has unveiled the iPhone. More info from Apple here. Here’s how the iPhone stacks up against other smartphones. The price will be $499-599, which, yes, is steep — but perhaps not so bad when you consider it’s not only a phone, bus also a 2 MP camera, an MP3 player, a Web browsing device, and, as Richard Wanderman observes, essentially a computer.

Two entertaining New York Times articles of note:

1. William Safire on retronyms. This one goes out to my brother M, who scoffs when people talk about “digital cameras.” (Digital cameras are much more prevalent than film cameras these says, so the former should now simply be referred to as “cameras,” he argues.) Thanks to A for the link.

2. “Looking Forward to Looking Back,” Bruce Handy’s humorous take on upcoming anniversaries in 2007. Thanks to A for this link, as well.

Social bookmarking (i.e. Digg, del.icio.us popular, and the meta-site popurls) + editorial input from savvy people = a new site called BuzzFeed.

A buddy of mine recently bought a new Mac and asked me for some tips in getting started. As a passionate — though hopefully not obnoxious and only slightly dorky — Apple fan, I offered him much of the following common sense-centric advice. I’ve added a few items to the list I gave him and thought this might be helpful to others.

1. First things first: Purchase and register AppleCare. If you don’t want to spring for it, then at least be sure to register your machine for the standard warranty. Better safe than sorry and all that.

2. Read the user manual — obviously, OS X is easy to use, but it helps to read the book. Duh. The operating system contains some very useful features that might not be apparent.

3. Import your images into iPhoto — it’s super easy to use and very cool. Simply plug your camera’s memory card into your machine’s USB slot and iPhoto will open automatically and prompt you to import your pics. And it goes without saying that you should make the most of iTunes for your music.

4. Use iCal for scheduling. It’s extremely simple — a more elegant version of Outlook’s calendaring feature. Don’t forget that in iCal, you can import and subscribe to public calendars. With one click, I added all of the American and Thai public holidays, for instance.

5. Spotlight is perhaps OS X’s most powerful feature. Just click on that magnifying glass in the upper right corner of the screen to find stuff with Google-esque efficiency. Way faster than navigating through folders using the Finder.

6. Set up Google Notifier for Mac. You do have Gmail, right? Well, what’re you waiting for? Okay then. Get the notifier so you can be alerted when you get new email. Works great.

7. Buy an external hard drive (80 gig or so at least — bigger if you’re into downloading massive amounts of tunes or video.) An external drive, naturally, will allow you to back up all the stuff on your hard drive. It’s rare, but hard drives do fail, and as you begin storing more and more valuable stuff on your machine — documents, photos, music — over time, you’ll want to have a backup copy just in case. Lacie is a good brand.

8. Take advantage of Expose, a feature that allows you to access open windows quickly. For example, you can move your cursor to any corner of the screen and all open widows will displayed at once. Similarly, hitting F11 can be used to hide all of your open windows and display the desktop.

9. On the Job is an excellent Mac-only time tracking application. It’s free to try and $24.95 to purchase

10. And, finally, tinker! Don’t be afraid to poke around and open folders and try out utilities and play around with stuff. Hitting the wrong button will not cause your computer to explode.

Related articles elsewhere:

– 10 Things Every New Mac Owner Should Know

– “10 tips for new Mac users, switching from Windows…”

– Basic Tips for New Mac Users

Perhaps this has something to do with coup-related Western media censorship, but A and I saw this on TV recently here in Bangkok. The full text of this screen — which appears sporadically for 30 seconds or so during English-language commercials that feature non-political content on the cable provider UBC — reads:

Please be advised that there may be short disruptions to our satellite transmission due to sun outages from Tue 26 September to Wed 4 October from 06:00 to 15:00 due to a “sun outage”. This is a natural phenomenon that may affect our signal for a few minutes - after which normal transmission will resume. We apologise for any inconvenience.

And here’s the Thai version, for what it’s worth.

What in God’s name is a “sun outage”? Is UBC talking about solar flares? If this is a natural phenomenon, how the hell do they know when, precisely, it’ll occur? Am I going crazy here or what?

Apple continues to demonstrate that they just might have the most innovative consumer electronics product designers in the world. Check out the new iPod Shuffle. One gig of memory. 240 songs. 1.62 inches long. 78 bucks. A built-in clip. Wow.