This is a perfect example of a company that should have announced their new “exciting” opportunity and allowed people to opt in, but they didn’t do that, they just started squirting ads into my blog. I understand that opt-in cuts heavily into uptake, but it is just impolite to interact with people this way.

The names are links to the iTunes store (not affiliate links), the prices are as of the moment I looked the app up while writing this post.

YouVersion – free
Solid Bible app that allows you to access to tons of translations in multiple languages. It integrates with the youversion website. One thing that could be improved is navigating to a particular passage, although I can’t imagine a better way than they offer they seem to have added verse lookup in the search box which I don’t think worked before, but I may have just missed it.

Instagram – free
The best feature of this app is the simple sharing of photos. They also offer some fun hipster color filters which can make some borderline shots feel more artsy.
I no longer use Instagram. Now I use:

Flickr – free ($25/yr for flickr pro)
I’ve been using Flickr for a long time, they recently made a real effort to make their iOS app useful. I really like the app except for one issue: I never really use the camera built into flickr, but to upload pictures from your library you have to load the camera portion of the app and it seems to take more time than necessary to open the photo library. I’d prefer to be able to go there directly.

MLB.com At Bat – $15
This is a free download but for $15 you can get live audio feeds of the games from the 2012 season. ($100 gives you video with some blackouts, which I haven’t sprung for, so I don’t know if it is worth the price.) I bought the audio before spending any time with the app so I’m not sure what features are disabled if you opt not to pay.
I haven’t been using this recently, but that’s because baseball has been in the offseason. I still love the app

DuckDuckGo – free
This app provides an excellent interface for searching via DuckDuckGo. I found I had to intentionally break my habit of going to the browser to search for this app become useful.

Lose It! – free
This is the calorie counting & weight journaling app I settled on upon getting my iPhone in November. Since then I’ve lost 38 pounds. This app is not entirely responsible for my weight loss but it has provided that little bit of motivation that I need to avoid some needless calories. Your milage may vary.

Tweetbot – $3
After trying the official Twitter client and Twitterific (which I still use on my mac) I splurged and bought Tweetbot. It is worth buying if you use twitter as much as I do. The search feature could be a little less prominent, I’ve only used it once or twice but I occasionally find myself tapping it when I want to compose a tweet.

Instapaper – $3
This app is simply the best reading experience available on iOS, but I might be biased since I was already using Instapaper before getting my iPhone. My favorite feature is tilt-to-scroll which lets you read without having to constantly flick the screen to scroll; I wish more apps offered this. If you read lots of articles from the web, Instapaper is a great way to save them later and consume them even when you have no internet access.
One funny thing with tilt-to-scroll: sometimes when I get to the end of a longer article, there is an optical illusion that the text is scrolling the opposite direction. I have to confirm multiple times that I’ve turned it off and the display is not scrolling.

Reeder – $3
I recently switched to Reeder from NetNewsWire, but only because NNW’s development has stagnated. This is a solid RSS reading app.
Slightly annoying bug: the built in browser sometimes never realizes it has finished loading a page, which means you can’t use the sharing menu without going back and following the link again.

Yummy – $2
I never launch this app by itself. I use it to post links from instapaper to delicious.com (also works with pinboard.in). My general workflow is to bookmark articles to read from reeder (or netnewswire on my mac) to instapaper, and if I read the article in instapaper on my iPhone, bookmark the link as read using Yummy.
I started using pinboard.in instead of delicious.com and the built-in support for pinboard is good enough in instapaper and reeder that I don’t need another app.

Flipboard – free
Since I don’t keep many news sources in my rss feeds, flipboard is good at filling in that gap. I’m a little concerned about how many of the links in Flipboard contain very tangentially related photos. I think their sources feel a pressure to have a picture and when one isn’t around they pick stock images. This may not be Flipboard’s fault but I think the prominence given to images in Flipboard’s UI can’t be helping this trend.

Sparrow – $3
I got this email app despite its lack of push notifications for new messages but now I’m actually that feature is missing. My brain compulsively wants to reduce all new message notifications to zero, and doesn’t seem to care if I’ve actually read the messages. Now when I open my email I know that I have time to read my messages. I can’t remember what feature made me decide to pay for it (the Mail app that comes with iOS is fine) I just know it seamlessly handles my gmail and dwightk.com email addresses.
I still use sparrow even though they were bought by google because it easily handles the delete/archive dichotomy that I like to use for messages.

CarTunes – $5
I must have obtained this app during a special as I got it for free a couple weeks ago. Within that day it had supplanted the default Music app on my dock. It uses gestures to allow you to play/pause and skip tracks forward or backward (and other things). Perfect for use while driving. I would buy this for $5 if I were about to go on a road trip.

Flixster – free
I wish they offered a pro version of this app because it is awesome for getting movie times and reviews but the ads are pretty obnoxious. *Update: If anyone knows of a movie times app that’s better, I’m looking for a replacement. The ads seem to be showing more often on flixster these days.*
Now I use:

Showings – $2
This isn’t a perfect solution, but it is at least free of obnoxious ads. Some theaters seem to not provide their showtimes, but then I just use Fandango.

Camera + – $1
Probably my first app purchase. It is clunky enough that I almost always use the built in Camera app or Instagram over Camera+. Camera+’s forte is taking macro shots: all of the other camera apps I’ve used have a ton of trouble getting the camera to focus on things closer than about 3 feet but Camera+ works like a charm. I really wouldn’t recommend getting it unless that sounds like a helpful feature.
Almost all camera apps are just too slow to launch compared to the built in app. I tend to use it all the time now.

W.E.L.D.E.R. – $1
A mashup of Boggle and Bejeweled, I got it for free, but it is worth a buck.

Puzzlejuice – $2
A mashup of Boggle and Tetris, I got it for less than $2 ( can’t remember if it was free or $1).

Mathemagics – $1
Fun mental math training program. I kinda hate mental math, but have always wanted to learn. This app does a good job teaching and training. There is a second app subtitled “Easy Algebra” which I have purchased but not tried since I’m not through with the first app. They are both on sale currently. I think they are $2 each usually.

All still worthwhile, but I haven’t used them much recently. I’ve mostly been playing chess:

Shredder – free
Good chess app, there is a pro version too.

Google just released a voice search update to their iOS app. I thought I’d give it a try in the various ways I use Siri to see how the two apps matched up.

1. “What is the number for the Container Store in Raleigh”
Google search was very quick to translate my voice into words. Unfortunately they just couldn’t follow me after “for the”. After 10 tries, usually getting “what is the number for the kids” or “what is the number for the children” (among others), I finally got “what is the number for the container.” After that I gave up.

Siri took about a second to think and then asked me if I wanted to call the container store on creedmoor road in Raleigh.

2. “Send a text to Mom, What’s up, question-mark”
Google was able to parse this phrase, but as it is a search app, it was not able to do anything useful for me.

Siri asked if I wanted to send a text to my mom with the contents: “What’s up?”

3. “Add an event to my calendar, Derek Webb show this Thursday”

Google parsed this phrase, but on the first try I hesitated before Derek, so I just got “add an event to my calendar”. Again, since it is just search, it can’t do anything more than give me Derek Webb’s website.

Siri finally stumbled… It heard “Erik Wedding show”. But it recognized that I wanted to create an event and asked what time.

4. “Write a tweet, I think I’ll stick with Siri for now”
Again, Google did a good job parsing the phrase and wasn’t able to help me do what I wanted to do.

Siri parsed the phrase perfectly and asked if I wanted to send the tweet.

Conclusion
After the initial issues I wasn’t holding out much hope for Google. It was very infuriating for the app to decide I was done with a voice command while in the middle. I’ve experienced Siri doing this from time to time, but not nearly as quickly, and usually by the third time I can get my cadence quick enough to make it past the cut-off spot; Ten times in a row was awful.

After that google seemed to settle in and do a great job figuring out what I wanted to say. Unfortunately for them I don’t really use Siri for search, I use it for speech to text, calendaring, and looking up phone numbers (which I realize is search, but I wasn’t able to get a result from them for that test.)

The names are links to the iTunes store (not affiliate links), the prices are as of the moment I looked the app up while writing this post.

YouVersion – free
Solid Bible app that allows you to access to tons of translations in multiple languages. It integrates with the youversion website. One thing that could be improved is navigating to a particular passage, although I can’t imagine a better way than they offer.

Instagram – free
The best feature of this app is the simple sharing of photos. They also offer some fun hipster color filters which can make some borderline shots feel more artsy.

MLB.com At Bat – $15
This is a free download but for $15 you can get live audio feeds of the games from the 2012 season. ($100 gives you video with some blackouts, which I haven’t sprung for, so I don’t know if it is worth the price.) I bought the audio before spending any time with the app so I’m not sure what features are disabled if you opt not to pay.

DuckDuckGo – free
This app provides an excellent interface for searching via DuckDuckGo. I found I had to intentionally break my habit of going to the browser to search for this app become useful.

Lose It! – free
This is the calorie counting & weight journaling app I settled on upon getting my iPhone in November. Since then I’ve lost 38 pounds. This app is not entirely responsible for my weight loss but it has provided that little bit of motivation that I need to avoid some needless calories. Your milage may vary.

Tweetbot – $3
After trying the official Twitter client and Twitterific (which I still use on my mac) I splurged and bought Tweetbot. It is worth buying if you use twitter as much as I do. The search feature could be a little less prominent, I’ve only used it once or twice but I occasionally find myself tapping it when I want to compose a tweet.

Instapaper – $3
This app is simply the best reading experience available on iOS, but I might be biased since I was already using Instapaper before getting my iPhone. My favorite feature is tilt-to-scroll which lets you read without having to constantly flick the screen to scroll; I wish more apps offered this. If you read lots of articles from the web, Instapaper is a great way to save them later and consume them even when you have no internet access.

Reeder – $3
I recently switched to Reeder from NetNewsWire, but only because NNW’s development has stagnated. This is a solid RSS reading app.

Yummy – $2
I never launch this app by itself. I use it to post links from instapaper to delicious.com (also works with pinboard.in). My general workflow is to bookmark articles to read from reeder (or netnewswire on my mac) to instapaper, and if I read the article in instapaper on my iPhone, bookmark the link as read using Yummy.

Flipboard – free
Since I don’t keep many news sources in my rss feeds, flipboard is good at filling in that gap. I’m a little concerned about how many of the links in Flipboard contain very tangentially related photos. I think their sources feel a pressure to have a picture and when one isn’t around they pick stock images. This may not be Flipboard’s fault but I think the prominence given to images in Flipboard’s UI can’t be helping this trend.

Sparrow – $3
I got this email app despite its lack of push notifications for new messages but now I’m actually that feature is missing. My brain compulsively wants to reduce all new message notifications to zero, and doesn’t seem to care if I’ve actually read the messages. Now when I open my email I know that I have time to read my messages. I can’t remember what feature made me decide to pay for it (the Mail app that comes with iOS is fine) I just know it seamlessly handles my gmail and dwightk.com email addresses.

CarTunes – $5
I must have obtained this app during a special as I got it for free a couple weeks ago. Within that day it had supplanted the default Music app on my dock. It uses gestures to allow you to play/pause and skip tracks forward or backward (and other things). Perfect for use while driving. I would buy this for $5 if I were about to go on a road trip.

Flixster – free
I wish they offered a pro version of this app because it is awesome for getting movie times and reviews but the ads are pretty obnoxious. *Update: If anyone knows of a movie times app that’s better, I’m looking for a replacement. The ads seem to be showing more often on flixster these days.*

Camera + – $1
Probably my first app purchase. It is clunky enough that I almost always use the built in Camera app or Instagram over Camera+. Camera+’s forte is taking macro shots: all of the other camera apps I’ve used have a ton of trouble getting the camera to focus on things closer than about 3 feet but Camera+ works like a charm. I really wouldn’t recommend getting it unless that sounds like a helpful feature.

W.E.L.D.E.R. – $1
A mashup of Boggle and Bejeweled, I got it for free, but it is worth a buck.

Puzzlejuice – $2
A mashup of Boggle and Tetris, I got it for less than $2 ( can’t remember if it was free or $1).

Mathemagics – $1
Fun mental math training program. I kinda hate mental math, but have always wanted to learn. This app does a good job teaching and training. There is a second app subtitled “Easy Algebra” which I have purchased but not tried since I’m not through with the first app. They are both on sale currently. I think they are $2 each usually.

Immediately after graduating from St. John’s College, I began a re-read of all the seminar works (according to a list I scribbled down in 2005, so not necessarily the exact works I read, or the works they are reading now, but close). I just finished reading the Freshman year yesterday. Here are a few reflections:

People commonly say at SJC that you are either a Plato or Aristotle person and I tended to think of myself as the latter, but this time through I engaged better with Plato (most of the time.)

The two books that took the longest were the first volume of Plutarch’s Lives and Aristotle’s Metaphysics. I decided to read the entire book rather than trying to do the excerpts we used in seminar, so Plutarch was much longer. In both cases if I had stuck to my plan of reading a little each day they wouldn’t have taken as long. I would occasionally get frustrated in how much was left and leave off reading for months at a time.

I really warmed up to the dramatic works, which is making me excited to read Shakespeare in the near future, I’ve never quite resonated with him as much as others seem to. My decision to try to read the entire work is making me a little nervous about finishing Sophomore year since it ends with the Summa Theologiœ.

Another reason I took a while longer to read through was I did quite a bit of other reading interleaved with the seminar works. I really enjoy when some other book interacts with a seminar book in a cool new way. Aristotle and C.S. Lewis have a habit of dialoging when I read them.

You can see a schedule of my reading here

…over at FAQautism.com after a 2 year hiatus. If you are one of the people who reads this blog and are not my mom (who makes all the content over there), you should go over and check it out. We’re planning on posting once a week instead of 5x a week in hopes that that is a little more sustainable.

If you know anyone who has an interest in autism, please pass this site on. It is very practical and helpful.

In my first comparison post Acorn got the edge mostly because their demo saved files with no watermark which meant one could actually use it before biting the bullet and spending $50.

Because of the various updates (i.e. heal tool) promised in Pixelmator 2 I bought Pixelmator 1.whatever and started using it as my go to editor.

As of January 2012 however, there is a weird bug that does not let me arbitrarily set the width and height pixels when cropping an image. Strangely both programs have a bug in this tool although they have different symptoms. My version of Acorn is behind since the Acorn 3 update is another $20 (I thought it was $50, but the author corrected me), so it may not have this issue, but I’m stuck using other programs to work around this bug which is annoying (we’ll see if it is $20 annoying soon).

I can’t speak to Acorn 3 vs Pixelmator 2, but in Acorn 2 vs Pixelmator 2, the latter wins handily.

how did you grow past hating helping people and enjoying it?

Not that this is something with which I’m finished.

My response:

I’m not certain.

It is mostly an offshoot of being less self-centered. I am at times still self-centered, so I try not to let myself stew in the thoughts (e.g. I really hate this… this is stupid… why do I have to do this) because they seem to start a vicious cycle.

A practical idea I’ve used to rein in my thought-life is just to think of myself in the same situation and what I’d like people to do. A place Satan can attack in that thought process is that it is easy to leap to “Next time I’m in a situation like this they are going to owe me.” Like I’m going to build up a bunch of chits that I can call in when I need help.

The final little hurdle to clear is the “Kristian Karma” idea. “I’m going to do this to get points in heaven.” The more mundane thought is just “good stuff will happen later because of this” but I’ve even, with the wrong heart, coveted an eternal reward. This last one is subtle because it’s pretty clear there is some sort of credit system, but as usual my heart loves to grab on to things that are good and turn them evil.

Matthew 5:11-12

11 “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

(Obviously helping someone isn’t quite persecution.)

Matthew 6:1-4

1 “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. 2 “Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,4 so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

which is always an interesting juxtaposition to:

Matthew 5:14-15

14 “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.15 Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house.16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

Pointing pretty clearly to the heart of the matter being the heart itself.

If only three out of four legs of the ladder are touching the ground
climb the side of the ladder farthest from the leg that’s not.

If only two out of four legs of the ladder are touching the ground
make sure the two that are touching the ground aren’t
on the same side and then climb the side above the leg that isn’t
touching the ground so that it is.

If only one out of four legs of the ladder is touching the ground
you are on your own.

Symptoms:

1. The content of my posts were not editable. When I pushed “update” wordpress returned a “post edited” message, but the content did not change. I could change categories, tags, publish date, etc. but not the content of the post.

Later:

2. All the posts disappeared. The home page displayed a 404 error and when I went into wp-admin, it showed that I had 0 posts.

Solution:

Open up phpmyadmin and run “repair table wp_posts”

Then you just select your files in Finder and activate the service from Finder>Services>”print multiple files”

print multiple files.workflow (32KB)

My mom sent me a link to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center’s photo contest, so I entered this picture. The contest is judged, but they also have a “people’s choice”, so if you want to vote for me, you can go here. (Let me know if that doesn’t work. It does for me.)

Here you can see how many tries it took to get a good shot. Click on the image to see the final product at higher resolution.

Because Garageband only lets you have one project open at a time, it can be frustrating to pull together a series of projects into a single project.

This is only useful if you want to combine the raw audio. I’m pretty sure none of the effects travel with the audio. Also, if your project has a lot of separate audio instead of one chunk, it’s probably better to go through the process of copying the audio from one project and pasting it in another.

A shortcut if you are combining multiple garageband recordings into a single project:

1. Open the project you want everything combined into.
2. Right-click on the project you want to add
3. Select “Show Package Contents”
4. Open “Media”
5. Grab the .aif file and drag it to the project in step 1
   (If there are multiple .aif s you can use QuickLook to make sure you get the right one)
6. Repeat 2-5 for each project you want to combine.

I saw on CNN today that Rahm Emanuel put down Democrats who oppose Obama’s health plan by calling them “f******* retarded”. This caused quite a bit of outcry from all sorts of people including the head of the Special Olympics and Mr. Emanuel signed a pledge to stop using the “r-word” as a derogatory name.

While I understand the desire to get people to stop using certain words in ways that are derogatory, we cannot just make a list of “bad words” and “bad usages”. For any real change to occur we must change the heart behind the words that we find so offensive.

Especially in the context of Matthew 5:39: “But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”I would not be surprised to learn that there were leaders in the black community at the time who pointed to this verse as a reason to avoid confrontation.

I’m also sure that there were many in the civil rights movement who were entirely uninterested in loving their racist oppressors, but King saw a more perfect way. In order to love a racist you must resist the racist in his racism.

So Matthew 5:39 most likely falls under the purview of Ecclesiastes 3:1: “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven”

1. I’m surprised at the low price. I was expecting entry level to be around $800 at the lowest. I’m guessing they are selling these without as much margin as most Apple products, they probably can make it back on AppStore sales.

2. $30 a month for unlimited 3G data is pretty good. Especially since that is “pay as you go” with no contract. Surprised it is with AT&T (isn’t this going to kill their network even more than the iphone?), but it isn’t exclusive (as far as I can tell).

3. iWork Apps are selling for $10 each. Sets a slightly higher bar for “premium” apps than the iPhone, but it is much lower than the price they set on the Mac (iWork Apps would be $27 each if you could buy them separately).

4. Like that there is a keyboard easel (costs extra?) Hope this is open to third party development.

5. This seems to be the Apple entry into the “netbook” market. I would buy one of these before I’d buy a netbook.

6. Two apps I’d buy immediately: GarageBand (recording app) and Acorn (photo editing) or their equivalents.

7. Interesting that Apple is making their own chip. I wonder if Intel is happy about this.

8. Still pretty sure I won’t dive into the ebook side of this, so it is nice to see that isn’t the main focus of this device. That makes it much more desirable to me, which might help me to make the jump to ebooks. (I never thought I’d buy only mp3′s of music, but I’m doing that now.)

9. For my use, I could see this taking over all of the mobile use of my laptop if I had a real desktop. I mostly use my laptop as a moveable desktop anyway.

10. Interesting to see Jonathan Ive is now going by Jony Ive: http://www.apple.com/ipad/#video

11. Kindle DX is $10 cheaper than the entry level iPad. It has better battery life and no fee 3G access, but is only B&W and more book focused.

Sidewalk from Dwight Knoll on Vimeo.

More and bigger pictures in this flickr set

I think I have three options: Google Picasa (free), Apple Aperture ($199), or Adobe Lightroom ($299).

Picasa is nice because it is free. I’ve fiddled with it a little bit and it should be able to handle multiple volumes. Does anyone know if it has performance issues with large volumes? (I’ve only loaded a few pictures at a time.) It seems to have most of the image editing capabilities that I use often, however, I would like to have more. I can open the photos in an external editor, but it would be nice to simplify my workflow.

From the product pages it looks like both Aperture and Lightroom let you use multiple volumes. Beyond that I don’t know the strengths and weaknesses of each. How difficult is it to migrate from iPhoto? What about from Picasa? Does Lightroom have the performance issues that other Adobe products have on the Mac? Is Lightroom $100 better than Aperture?

They both offer free trials, but I’d like to get some feedback before jumping in on one or the other.

When I forget this, it is easy to do things for the wrong reason. An example is imbibing in media simply for the sake of distraction. If I think the cool thing I’m going to do tomorrow is “real life” and I just need to get there so I can live, it becomes much easier to do things I don’t really want to do in order to pass the time until tomorrow gets here.

Growing up, we didn’t run our heater very often. Some years, despite it being very cold in the house, we would only run it when guests were over, usually around Thanksgiving and Christmas. There was always a distinct odor when the heater first came on and Mom always said it was burning dust.

Some of the references can be interesting, e.g. each president’s inauguration verse is noted as you come to it in the text. While it is convenient to have the notations directly in the bible, it seems the utility would only slightly be lessened by separating this into a separate bible study.

It is, however, as far as I can tell, completely non-critical, choosing to pick only supporting bullet-points for the culture-war’s battle over the role of Christianity in government. I for one would have preferred to see an honest discussion of the positives and the negatives rather than the party-line listing of the various rhetoric used to whip christians into a frenzy.

But perhaps that is a better topic for a separate book. And perhaps interleaving the bible with rhetoric isn’t the best idea in the first place.

There are a few issues I have with it, but overall it does 9 out of 10 things I need to do, and most projects I set out to do have fewer than 10 steps, so no problem there.

I do recommend two enhancements:

If you want to be able to pick colors using their hex code:

http://wafflesoftware.net/hexpicker/

If you want to see a preview of the font in the font menu:

http://flyingmeat.com/wikka/AcornHIddenPrefs

Unfortunately this really slows down opening the font list. But it is worth it to me.