Patrick Skinner

Certain things that once seemed cool when the blogging world was nascent I now consider trite unnecessary clutter.

Therefore, as of today:
Blogroll: gone.
Tag cloud: gone.
Post calendar: gone.

When you’ve got search, who uses a tag cloud? Or when you’ve got archives, who cares about a post calendar? And a blogroll seems spammy. Better replaced by posts linking to content on the sites you like and read.

This is step one of an effort to redesign onpaws.com with experience. Next up, individual pages need some overdue attention.

1. Despite buying Placebase in October 2009 the iPad still uses Google Maps. I was hoping we wouldn’t have to wait until June to see what that brings to the table.
2. Similarly to the original iPhone’s ugly chin, 3G connectivity requires an ugly plastic window that even wraps around to the front. Look for the 3G picture here.
3. ‘iPad’? Really? To me, that’s evidence not enough women work at Apple.

I’ll reserve final judgment until I’ve used one, but despite a certain appeal of an Apple-designed e-book reader, an LCD display seems far from ideal for reading (for photos/videos, sure). After years of reading text on an LCD screen I can say it’s OK at best. eInk or real paper is far better than another LCD screen.

While typically people work in a studio to accomplish most kinds of creative production, inspiration can certainly arrive at less than opportune times. In the case of music making, my two favorite DAWs (Logic and Ableton Live) both offer onscreen keyboards that simulate a real MIDI keyboard. Obviously you sacrifice velocity sensitivity, but this can be immensely useful when, say, waiting at an airport.

The keyboard is limited in that its only one octave at a time and starts at a. In Live you can change octaves with z and x, in Logic as the screenshot shows this adjusts volume.

In Logic 9, simply hit caps lock and an onscreen keyboard appears.

In Ableton 8, hit Cmd-Shift-K or click the little keyboard icon on the upper right.

The only thing left is mod wheel support, if you know any free solutions for Mac let me know in the comments!

Four years ago I installed some Cat5e cable throughout the house (that’s Ethernet cable for you non-network types). Last time it was for three upstairs rooms, and it went pretty well despite the sweltering heat in the attic.

Last week I finished installing another outlet in the den. This one was harder since the cable ran two stories and across the house, from one side of the attic to the far side of the basement up to the den, but the result is totally worth it. It was free since I used exactly the cable I had left from four years ago with 1′ of extra. The PS3 can now stream NetFlix and media from other computers to the TV, no stuttering or dropouts like I got on the wireless. And I can still crimp cables like nobody’s business.