Brian Kerr

There’s something to be said for the social component of desktop computing. The code you’re running came from someplace and there are some people or organizations on the other side of it. Maybe it’s a bunch of usability marketroids. Maybe it’s a bunch of trendy, strenuous hipsters. Maybe it’s just this guy. One of the unexpected glories of running OS X is the proliferation of uppity individuals who wrangle XCode and/or the masses in order to come up with something really great: Michael McCracken’s BibDesk, Alcor’s Quicksilver, and Allan Odgaard’s Textmate are just a few examples. These are things you can’t get anywhere else. An iTunes-style PDF dumpster slash academic citation overmind. A weirdly elegant blackbox that takes your data apart and puts it back together again like a pile of Legos. A text editor that does everything you need without getting in the way, or too far out of the way. You can’t get this stuff anywhere else. So it’s with not a small amount of resistance that I’ve fallen for Ubuntu this summer. We’re using it as the userland for a largeish project, and it’s really remarkable how far things have come since I last ran Linux as my desktop (in 2001 and 2004). GNOME is getting these mature apps that are really worth attention: F-Spot, Nautilus, Metacity. What makes it so much fun is that whenever you find something particularly elegant, you can drill down just a bit, into the man pages, into the docs, and identify the person or organization who cared enough to make it that way. Not to mention the stuff that’s been streamlined past the point of visibility: it’s hard to appreciate what you don’t notice.

(tags: design)

One thing I hadn’t realized about mysociety.org’s HassleMe (a free web-based reminder annoyance tool): if you give it a list of e-mail addresses for a given reminder, it’ll randomly select just one address each time the reminder comes due.

This would be a fun way to coordinate who has to clean out the fridge or etc. annoying chore in your office. Rather than have somebody assemble a boring little schedule and post it, conserve the (admittedly slight) time and effort and let HassleMe be the decider.

Last week we relaunched Assistive Media: a nonprofit that provides audio recordings of cool magazine articles for the visually impaired. Articles are read by talented volunteers and then distributed online or in a podcast.

As George likes to say, perfect is the enemy of done. Certainly the case with this project, but fortunately David Erdody and Ed Vielmetti pushed to just launch the site, warts and all. We’ve been making small improvements since, and some parts of it still aren’t working quite right! (So please let me know if you happen to look and find anything surprising.)

I’m glad that I had the opportunity to work with David and everybody else, and to feel my way around the nonprofit. And it’s nice to see that many more people are using the site.

Now that I am working elsewhere in the local nonprofit scene, it’s nice to retain the perspective I got from Assistive Media. It’s just one of the many “micrononprofits” — organizations getting great results from part-time and volunteer labor on small budgets and smaller physical footprints — that are under-served by the traditional apparatus.

Disclaimer for SI students

I did most of the work on this project as DFE fieldwork through the School of Information. This consisted of trading a few hours of totally useless departmental paperwork and busywork for the ability to block off time in my schedule and earn a few credit hours for the project. While these DFEs are one of the dumbest aspects of a all-around brain-dead curriculum, I wouldn’t have had the time for such a time-intensive volunteer project otherwise. Nevertheless, the support or involvement we got from the department for the DFE was marginal. This seems like a pretty common hallway complaint, so I wanted to get it out here in blogland.

(tags: assistivemedia narratives umsi weather)