textual metanoia

I use Instapaper all the time, and I love it. It is beautiful and simple and elegant and wonderful.

All Instapaper needs is some options for alternative, elegant fonts, to add a little spice to an other repetitive reading experience. There are lots of ways of loading in your own CSS on most browsers (user specified CSS through preferences, Greasemonkey, etc.), but I like the ease and flexibility of bookmarklets. It is especially handy to have your bookmarklets follow you around if you use multiple computers: sync with either XMarks or Mozilla Weave.

Given this need, I’ve made a very simple bookmarklet that uses jQuery (hosted on Google’s CDN) to swap the HTML body font-family for Lucida Bright (although any font available on your system is possible). The jQuery is added using the “jQuerify” bookmarklet suggested by Resig himself, and the jQuery command is dead-easy.

To install simply drag System Font to your bookmark toolbar.

To customize simply click on the properties of the bookmarklet and change ‘Lucida Bright’ to any font name you have available on your system

Even thought I’ve never even seen it, I’m going to purchase the Apple iPad. I’m just that kind of guy. But, rather than just another example of my technolust, I think this latest purchase will begin to mark a change in my computing patterns.

Over the last few year I’ve become increasingly busy (or perhaps less willing to have my idle time infringed upon by less-than-productive matters), and I’ve become increasingly technical. I always had something of a silicon thumb, but I’ve been getting paid for this one-time hobby for the last two years and this means I do semi-professional web development and very professional information and process management daily. Further, with the advent of easier development tools I now build the thing I need, instead of merely wish for them (the rise of interpreted languages has been a boon to my tweak-and-iterate non-professional development style). One trajectory of my computing experience is increasingly technical, and increasingly powerful. I may still not allocate memory blocks or worry about pass-by-reference versus pass-by-value, but I typically can make the computer do what I need, albeit often in a rather rudimentary fashion.

The other trajectory of my computing experience is in many ways opposite. Instead of working in that last 10%, I let the Pareto ratio sort most matters out for me, and simply get by with what is in front of me. This computing pattern is not concerned with cutting out new methods, it is only concerned with form, and to a much lesser degree, content. Form is vitally important to me because I am busier and I am less willing to waste time. These computing patterns are becoming habitual—even if they do not always use the same vendors or websites, they do take the same path. For me, Facebook and Twitter are essentially the same (although Facebook is more private, and Twitter more public), and my interactions require the same strategies (notifications, platform independence, mobile). Content is important simply because in this trajectory I am looking for inputs, not outputs. Social sites, news, and the occasional idle distraction are inputs, and the only outputs are basic replies and comments, with the occasional post.

This brings me to the iPad, and actually, KDE. My computing pattern is now thoroughly bifurcated: on the one hand I want an appliance (my iPhone currently performs this duty). All it needs to do is parse content and create paths that shape a latent form. On the other hand, I need a “development” platform, and for this the new KDE looks like a champ. I still want to be able to root my operating system and fill out that custom, last 10% of my life, but much of what I do will be of a simpler form, on the iPad and iPhone.