leŭksman

This week marked a full year since my fiancée and I sold our cars and moved to San Francisco, and we still haven’t felt the need to buy a new one.

That’s a full year without taking a car in for expensive, mysteriously-described maintenance… a year without worrying about the price of gas or parking… a year without ever-rising insurance premiums… a year without a designated driver.

For the most part we just haven’t felt the need to go driving around much. Our daily commutes to work are pretty straightforward by the subway, and most of our day-to-day shopping is within comfortable walking distance (groceries, pharmacy, etc). There’s plenty of restaurants, theaters, and clubs accessible by walking or public transit… and those that aren’t, we mostly just don’t go to.

Google Maps has added public transit and walking directions, now both on the web and on the iPhone application, making it as easy to look up directions to unfamiliar locations as it was when we lived in the Florida suburbs.

We have made use of ZipCar hourly rentals, but really not that often; just for a bulk shopping trip here, an out-of-town event there. For a couple trips all the way down to Southern California to visit family we’ve done traditional daily/weekly rentals… After our grueling Thanksgiving drive, though, for Christmas/New Years we’re going to try flying and borrowing a car down there.

We finally replaced my fiancée’s ancient PC with a shiny new Dell laptop. While ordering, I couldn’t help myself and tossed in a Inspiron Mini 9 for myself:

This little cutie weighs in at just 2.26 pounds, less than half of my MacBook’s hefty 5 pounds. I’ve found that the Mini is much more back-friendly than my MacBook; I can painlessly lug it to the office with my laptop bag slung over my shoulder (easier for getting on and off the subway) instead of nerding it up in backpack mode.

The top-end model I picked packs 16GB storage and 1GB RAM running on a 1.6 GHz Atom processor — far more powerful than the computer I took with me to college in 1997. Admittedly, my iPhone also beats that computer at 8GB/128MB/300MHz vs 6.4GB/64MB/266MHz.

The compact form factor does have some impact on usability, though. The 1024×600 screen sometimes feels too tight for vertical space, but they include a handy full-screen zoom hotkey for the window manager which opens things up.

The keyboard feels a bit cramped, and some of the keys are in surprising places (the apostrophe and hyphen are frequent offenders), but it’s still a lot easier to type serious notes or emails on than the iPhone. I had to disable the trackpad’s click and scrolling options to keep from accidentally pasting random text with my palms while typing…

The machine shipped with a customized Ubuntu distribution which is fully functional; they include a “friendly” launcher app which can be easily disabled, and even the launcher doesn’t interfere too badly. The desktop launch bar that’s crept into Gnome nicely handles my “I need Spotlight to launch stuff with the keyboard” fix. Firefox works fine (after uninstalling lots of Yahoo! extensions), Thunderbird installed easily enough, and I even got Skype to work with my USB headset! (AT&T’s international roaming charges can bite me…)

The biggest obstacle for me to use this machine every day is my Yojimbo addiction. I use Yojimbo for darn near everything — random notes, travel plans, budgeting, grocery lists, recipes, encrypted password stores, saving articles and documentation for future references. It’s insanely easy to use, the search works, I don’t have to remember where I saved anything, and it syncs across all my Macs. But… it’s Mac-only.

I’m trying out WebJimbo, which provides an AJAX-y web interface for remotely accessing your Yojimbo notes. It’s very impressive for what it does, but I’m hitting some nasty brick walls: editing a note with formatting drops all the formatting, but I use embedded screen shots and coloring extensively in my notes.

I’ve seen some reports of people hacking Mac OS X onto the Dell Mini — very tempting to avoid OS switching overhead. But I think if I really want that, eventually I should just suck it up and buy a MacBook Air. The form factor is the same as my MacBook (full keyboard, roomier 1280×800 screen), but at 3 pounds it’s much closer to the Mini than to my regular MacBook in weight, so should be about as back-friendly for the subway commute and air travel.

Of course, the Air costs $1799 and I got my tricked-out Mini for about $400, so… I’ll save my pennies and see.

After ruminating about the elevated expressways around Taipei and Cairo, much more rarely seen in American cities today, I went Googling about for more background on that sort of road and stumbled on this awesome site with things like a map of past and never-were freeways in San Francisco which have been torn down or never got built in the first place.

I can always toss on a light jacket here in San Francisco… if they make air-conditioned suits, I sure missed them when I lived in Tampa Bay…

A few months ago I whined about the Google Maps transit planner not working very well.

Well somewhere since I last looked, they fixed it!

Transit directions now include San Francisco MUNI bus and train routes and walking to/from stations, so you can actually put in start and end points and get something useful! The alternate route selection is a little different from the driving directions (you get a short list of a few options, rather than being able to click and drag waypoints to whatever route you like), but still quite useful; it comes up with pretty close facsimiles to the three alternate commute routes I use in reality.

Goodbye, 511.org!

Now if they can just integrate the transit lookups into the iPhone Google Maps widget… d’oh!

California’s primary election comes up in the morning, as are those of a buttload of other states. These combine selections of the various per-party presidential candidates in preparation for the November election, as well as various vital local and state ballot measures — parks, cops, and of course Indian gaming agreements.

Unlike everybody else with a blog, I’m not going to presume to tell y’all who to vote for.

But I have to admit I’ve been pleasantly surprised poking about Obama’s web site. I stumbled on this speech he gave on religion in politics, which is probably the first thing a mainstream American politician’s said about religion that hasn’t made me cringe and want to run away to Canada.

Fun election fact: California has a “modified open primary“, allowing voters who haven’t registered a party affiliation to cast their votes in the primary nomination process for a party of their choice… but only among those parties which have opted into it. We briefly had a completely open primary (so you could pick *any* party), but this got shut down on constitutional issues. Currently only the American Independent and Democratic parties are opted in to the system.

One of the great joys of my life is Google Maps. It’s attractive, fast, easy to use, usually gives workable directions, and lets you do cute things like customize your route with a simple drag-and-drop (ooooh).

Plus it’s built in to iPhones now.

But… When you’ve gone carless in the big city, the driving directions aren’t always helpful — you want to find the best metro or bus route to take.

There’s a fairly complete online trip planner for Bay Area transit at 511.org, but it fails in every way that Google Maps succeeds — it’s ugly, slow, confusing, and if you want to adjust to an alternate route it’s almost impossible to figure out how.

Google keeps taunting me with a little link on Maps to “take public transit” which never ever is able to find any directions from anywhere to anywhere.

Eventually I discovered that it does give you directions… but only if you put in exact train stations as your start and end points. If I already know which stations I need, I hardly need a transit planner now do I?

Even if it did work, here in San Francisco it includes BART but not MUNI, which has more in-town rail lines and about a hojillion buses and thus is far more likely to be what I’d take.

Update 2008-05-08: It actually works now!

Like every other Apple fanboy, of *course* I have to post my reactions to the MacWorld announcements…

iPhone updates: Firmware updates are welcome, but nothing earth-shattering.

AppleTV movie rentals: Potentially very cool… The price point is about even with going to a BlockBuster store without having to get off your ass. I will say though I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with Netflix’s flat monthly fee and huge selection.

Limited selection for TV is the reason I haven’t used my AppleTV much in months except for playing music in the living room… My shows are available on iTunes, but half of my lady’s aren’t, so we ended up getting cable.

If the selection’s decent and downloads actually *do* start “in seconds”, the new AppleTV software should be perfect for spur of the moment rentals, but if we’re already paying a flat fee for Netflix I don’t have much incentive to use it frequently… unless I have to see something *now* I can put it on my queue and wait.

I’m assuming of course that the software update will come for older AppleTV units…

MacBook AIR: A year or two ago this would have been the answer to my prayers — the fairly compact form factor of the MacBook, while thinner and lighter than my first love, the PowerBook G4 12″. I’m a bit leery of the lack of an optical drive and losing some of the wired ports, but it’d make a great travel / conference / meeting machine and everything but the FireWire can be replaced with USB extras for “what do you mean, there’s no WiFi?” emergencies.

I have the suspicion though that the iPhone’s going to eat up a lot of my computer-on-the-go requirements; it’s already got mail and web, and an official SDK should let us see extra apps come in (chat, organizers, games that lessen the need to lug a laptop around town.

Seeing Apple lurch towards solid-state drives is verrrrrrrrry exciting, but the cost is still high and the capacities too small for a primary-use computer (my iPhoto or iTunes libraries *each* would fill the optional 64GB SSD, and they’re only going to get bigger).

Now if we can just get the pervasive connectivity that the iPhone delivers built in to the laptops…

Hadn’t noticed this before… on Leopard, when you do a window screenshot (command-shift-4, space) it now captures the window’s drop shadow over a transparent background.

That’s pretty cool for demo screenshots; I used to use temporary white backgrounds and capture an area around the window manually, but this is way prettier.

So my fiancée and I recently moved into a cute little Victorian flat in San Francisco. Not the fanciest place, but it was a great price for the neighborhood and it’s got character.

One element of character in an older building is, naturally, batshit-insane electrical wiring.

The flat has a pretty classic linear layout: living room out front, den behind it, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and a hallway going all along the side. You’d think this would give a natural way to partition the electrical circuits by part of the house — in case of overload, one room at a time should go, right?

But no. For some mysterious reason, about 90% of the wall sockets are on the same circuit. That means my computer in the den, the microwave in the kitchen, and the space heater in the bathroom.

So if I’m so foolish as to try to fire up the computer to check my e-mail while my oatmeal’s in the micro and my lady’s in the shower, *boom*. It all goes out.

Nice.