This is the error message Safari will show you if you try to open a file://-uri in it. Interestingly, it does nothing to check whether that file exists. (Because the one I tried with didn’t.)

So, I got laid off from Print2People. They found it difficult to work with me, with my being in Odense and their being in Køge. No hard feelings they ensured me, but they just didn’t think it worked out.

And thus I’m looking for a new job. If you have any freelance work, preferably in web development or relevant to a student of English, feel free to drop me a line at jonathan at holst.biz. I have a resume if you don’t know much about my skills.

I’m available for about 10 hours a week, with my being a full-time student. For limited periods of time, more hours will likely be possible – drop me a line, and we’ll discuss it.

Matt Haughey has Marimba as his wake-up tune. I personally have a shortened version of ‘Good Morning’ from Singin’ in the Rain. Which is also a quite nice way to start the day.

Via John Gruber I got to know of Attic, an iPhone app that finds the music you haven’t played in a while. From what I can read, it has all sorts of nifty features.

I personally don’t have much use for it, because my iPhone only contains music I listen to regularly (ie. the music I really like). However, for some time I’ve had a smart playlist in iTunes that does something similar:

Of course, the magic is really with iTunes, but it is interesting nonetheless. (I have music in my library I haven’t played since 2007. Until recently I believe some of it stretched all the way back to 2006.)

A long time ago, I tweeted about how uncomfortable the unread badges on email programmes and other software make me feel. That there is something I have to attend to.

When I got Reeder for the iPhone (which, by the way, is a great Google Reader synchronisation app for the iPhone), and discovered that the settings allowed for an unread badge, I quickly turned it on. I reasoned something along the lines of ‘well, I have to know how many unread items I have, because that’s what one does with these sort of applications’. I quickly turned it off, however.

The thing is, the unread badge hangs as a symbol of guilty conscience, there is something I should attend to, which I haven’t.

Marco Arment published an article on the side effects of writing software for oneself, in this case Instapaper, because one gets to make the decisions. He makes explicit mention of an unread count on the folders. It just so happened that the evening before, I had sent an email to Marco requesting this very feature — Marco assures me it wasn’t directly spurred by my email, despite my initial belief, but I was nonetheless one of the requesters.

This time, my reasoning wasn’t to do with ‘unread count’ per se, it was more of a convenience issue for me, I didn’t want to browse through all the folders I had, to see where I had some reading material stored. Marco’s response was well argued, though — Instapaper generally doesn’t store material that you urgently have to respond to. And that’s what the unread badge signifies: urgency.

And so very little of what we do at a computer is really urgent. A co-worker might think some email is urgent, but it is rarely really urgent. We pollute our views and realities if we think that every email, every new item in our feed reader, and every new tweet really need attention within five minutes.

When we sit at our computers (at least on our personal time), it should be a pleasant experience. Connecting with friends, reading interesting stuff, playing games, all that jazz. But if we make the illusion that any of these (specifically the second point of reading) are urgent, don’t we remove the feeling of enjoyment?

I think so, and that’s why I’ve disabled the unread badge in and automatic synchronisation of NetNewsWire and Mail.app. Reclaiming my computer, letting it act on my premises.

Now, if only I could get Tweetie to stop synchronising automatically, and stop reminding me that I have unread tweets.

And, speaking of screenshots, following my own tweet, I took this screenshot as proof of my claim:

I don’t know when they changed this, or if it was in fact part of iTunes DJ from the start, but I love this:

Then choosing the ‘Play in iTunes DJ’ option from the right-click menu will start the number in iTunes DJ, at the same time in the track:

That is very clever.

I just spent 80 DKK on buying April March’s Chick Habit album, although I could have purchased the songs one by one, and only having had to pay 56 DKK, because I already have the Chick Habit song.

But then, the real stupid in this is obviously me, because I didn’t look properly into this. But still. (It’s a great album, though.)

I’m a Dropbox user. (That link is a referral link, which will earn me 250 MB of additional space if you register.) Not a power user, and I currently only use .9% of my 2GB free plan, but a user nonetheless.

I have, however, found a very useful use case for the service. In my Documents folder, I have a Writings/DRAFTS folder. This is where I store drafts for posts on Simply Jonathan.

Now, Dropbox works this way: you have a folder called “My Dropbox”. You can choose the location of this for yourself, but the default location on Mac OS X is ~/Dropbox.

The important thing to notice is that these are not identical. And only stuff you put in your Dropbox gets synced.

Not to worry, though, because a little UNIX style magic is all it takes. Using the power of symbolic links (symlink), I was a able to achieve exactly what I wanted: having Dropbox sync an out-of-scope folder or file.

Now, symlinks are nothing new, and this was not a matter of whether a symlink could live in the Dropbox — it was merely a pleasant discovery that it also synced the contents of it.

How come I end up where I started?
How come I end up where I went wrong?