Better Pinboard enhances popular bookmarking site Pinboard.in.
Keyboard Shortcuts: By default, Pinboard allows you to jump around within the site, but doesn't give you a whole lot of bookmark navigation or manipulation options. This will also enable you to "leap" to a tag or combination of tags without ever using the mouse. See below for the keyboard shortcuts that this extension will give you.
Navigation
n or ] = next bookmark
p or [ = previous bookmark
g then * = go to starred
g then p = go to private
g then l = leap to a new tab (comma separated)
Selected Bookmark
e = edit bookmark
e = edit bookmark's tags
s = toggle star
# = delete bookmark
x = mark as read (done)
[enter] or o = open selected bookmark
[shift-enter] = open selected bookmark in new tab
v = open cached version
shift-v = open cached version in new tab
c (then cmd-c) = copy selected bookmark url
"To Read" becomes "To Do": We use Pinboard for lots of things. Not just articles, but videos, games, pictures. Not everything is something you "read." One thing that has always bothered me about Pinboard is that this section is titled "To Read." This extension also "renames" this section to "To do." Furthermore, instead of marking things as "read," you now mark things as "done." I just think it works a lot better.
I hope you find this helpful. Free free to leave comments or suggestions below.
2012-05-17: v1.2
Added auto-updating via manifest.
I would highly recommend upgrading to Better Pinboard. It rolls a couple of extensions that I developed for Pinboard in to one. I doubt I'll be managing updates on this one independently.
Pinboard.in: Better Keyboard enhances popular bookmarking site Pinboard.in's keyboard shortcuts. By default, Pinboard allows you to jump around within the site, but doesn't give you a whole lot of bookmark navigation or manipulation options. This will also enable you to "leap" to a tag or combination of tags without ever using the mouse. See below for the keyboard shortcuts that this extension will give you. This has been tested on Safari v5.2.
Full House, Season 4, opening titles, edited to the music of Sigur Ros (Með Suð Í Eyrum). Just testing a theory that anything becomes elevated when combined with Sigur Ros. More experiments to follow.
It's not every day that you can say you stumbled upon something that changed your life.
That's what The Standards Methodology has done for me, though. My friend @stephencelis told me about it, and quite simply, it's almost like a recurring, daily to-do list for healthy habits. It can be anything from "stop biting your nails" to "exercise a bit each morning." The standards you make are up to you. When you accomplish it, you check it off. Simple.
At the end of each week, you're supposed to reflect on the standards that you failed, and congratulate yourself for the things you're doing well. Then, if you like, you can refine your list going in to the next week. Drop one, add another, or keep it going.
Indeed it seems to be that the truly simple ideas are the ones that work, and this little self-practice in accountability has been a real game-changer for me.
Give it a try, and let me know if it works for you, too.
Benjamin Zander on Music and Passion: Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it -- and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections.
I usually post music-related posts at dep.fm, but since this is more of a "special event," and more of a personal release, I wanted to syndicate this here, as well. For posterity, if anything.
My favorite song of 2011 was, for sure, Bon Iver's Perth from his 2011 self-titled release. It's a beautiful piece. I decided it would be a fun experiment to, for the New Year, deconstruct the song and rebuild it for piano and electronica.
I recorded the percussive elements by tapping on various parts of the piano and then cut those in to individual drum samples. Then I sequenced the patterns in a tracker called Renoise. After just listening back and forth between the album track and my version to get the structure of the song duplicated, I continued on with various synthesized layers to produce some texture and atmosphere.
Finally, I started working on the piano part. It's worth mentioning that I'm not a pianist, but play well enough to be able to play songs I like and help me write my own new songs.
Once I had the piano part down, my brother (@revpictures) came over with the Canon 7D to help me video the song. I used a Tascam DP-008 digital 8-track to record the piano from two condenser mics located behind the piano, and then a Shure sm58 for the vocals. I had the laptop handy to play the pre-sequenced beats. Afterwards, I combined and mixed the recorded parts in Wavelab and final mixed them back in Renoise.
I edited the video footage together in iMovie and then sent back to my brother for final post processing. The project took around a week of sequencing, 3 days on the piano to get that part ready, then a day of shooting, editing, and final mixing.
You can download the mp3 here (You may have to right-click, and Save As).
The end is nigh. Another year is coming to a close.
I like to take a little bit of time at the end of the year to look both backwards and forwards. It's good to have a plan of attack going in to a clean slate. So let us begin!
2011
This year was a great year.
Work
Going in to 2011, I was living in North Carolina, gainfully employed with a company based out of Chicago. Things were going well for a while there, but I started to hear a narrative of disappointing quarters within the company. They just weren't doing the business they wanted to be doing, and as is life, began to make some changes. They refocused and trimmed the employee base down to on-siters only. I was left in the cold. No matter! I always try to look at things like this as being opportunities, and was sick of that job anyway.
So I began working as a 100% work-from-home freelancer. I was fortunate enough to still be plugged in to a network of amazing, bright people in Chicago, and they are always involved in several different Internet projects. I started to work with them, literally, the day after my full-time job ended. That was pretty fancy.
Fast-forward to today and my work with these great people continues. I've also expanded my network locally, partnering up with businesses around Asheville that need new site or site updates. To make things legit, I converted my little at-home business in to an LLC called Pecknology. I've only touched the tip of the iceberg as far as the work in town, here. I'm hoping that network continues to grow as I expand my portfolio. I have the unique advantage of being able to handle all aspects of site development and deployment, from the content to the user experience to the design to the development to the deployment. I'm even set up to handle web hosting, domain registration, online payments, and now that my business will be incorporated starting in 2012, I'll have the ability to bring in contractors to work underneath me if I need extra help.
I'm eternally grateful for my network of friends and colleagues in Chicago. I hope to continue work for them as long as they will have me, but being of sound business mind, I can't rely on a steady stream of work to be coming out of Chicago forever. It's important to establish those roots here in my permanent hometown. So that's where I'm headed.
Music
My music production continues this year in typical rapid fashion. Solo work as dep was fruitful and productive. I released four albums, organized a CD-release party, and was interviewed with the Mountain Xpress. In November I spoke at TEDx Katuah. I put together a presentation called The Anatomy of Electronic Music that included some original music and footage that deconstructed a piece of music and talked about the various elements that make up electronic songs. It was a very satisfying experience.
This spring I met a charming fellow by the name of Kie Cochran and after hearing each others' music, decided to get together to have a little improvisational jam session. It was delightful. We found that we had an artistic connection from the start and decided to pursue something structured, and The Night Lights was born. We worked together on an EP and released it online. The response was nothing short of amazing.
Within 15 days, the album was Bandcamp's #1 album in our hometown of Asheville as well as our state of NC. We also were within the top 10 "most popular" electronica and ambient genres as well. Our humble EP popped up on the front page of Lifehacker.com, a DIY and tech enthusiast blog that has really become quite popular over the years. We were featured in their "Work Sounds" series (music you can work to) along-side such notable acts like M83 and Boards of Canada. Very exciting indeed.
This year I also started a music label called Symmetrical Records and hope to continue adding independent musicians to this in 2012.
Oh yeah! There was also the Christmas Album, which received "critical acclaim" (haha).
Life
My personal life is going really well also. Kim and I have really been cultivating some great, healthy habits. I owe a lot of it to the implementation of Standards in our lives. A very simple methodology for living well. Check it out. I've also just been working on my own personality flaws. My impatience, my mood swings, my ability to "let things go." Through mindful breathing and Yoga, I have found a lot of inner peace. I hope this continues. I feel like I'm in the best shape of my life. It feels good to say that.
We've been doing a ton of hiking this year. We went to Table Rock, NC with our friends Ben and Monica over Thanksgiving weekend and did some hiking and camping. We had our first experience with bouldering as well. Think low-altitude rock climbing. Really fun, and a full body work-out to boot.
2012
So what's next? I think my running theme for 2012 will center around focus. More efficient use of idle time. Building on the good things that are already in motion. As a friend once told me: Do more.
The first time I fell in love I was 15 years old, and it was the worst experience of my life.
It's funny to think back to those days, though. As I sit here, all of the most exhausted clichés rush through my brain, but the funny thing is, if I were right back there at that very moment right now, I probably would've done the same damned thing. It's embarrassing.
I did a lot of stupid things as a kid. They say you should live life without regrets, but if you are an adult without regrets, I would argue you haven't really tried a whole lot of things. I have definitely done things that I wouldn't do again if I had the choice. Did those dastardly deeds help craft me in to the person that I am today? Sure they did. If you're not learning from your mistakes, you're just going to make newer and bigger ones. I'd love to share some of these experiences, and I started this blog as an experiment to sort of attempt to "open up" about my life, my past, and some of my more buried thoughts on things, but at the same time, I'm a little bit afraid to do that. Maybe I just need to ease in to it. Start small. The fire hose will come with time.
When I was in high school I started stealing things. In retrospect, I think it might've been good old fashioned boredom. My efforts were focused on a department store in my home town of Weaverville, NC, where I was employed. There were other places, but this was the only place where I got caught.
Okay, lets back up for a second. I didn't actually get caught in the act. Moreover, a security audit team was doing a sweep of the staff under the assumption that there was probably theft happening in the store. After all, a bunch of other high school kids worked at this particular place. They held employee interviews in a locked room under the threat of video surveillance, and someone, to save their own skin, rolled over on me.
I ignored the first rule of breaking the law: don't talk about breaking the law.
That was a very scary couple of days as the interviews happened one after the next. I knew mine was coming as I went through my workday stricken with guilt. Then it was my turn. So there I was, stomach in knots, sitting in that little locked room. "We know you've been stealing merchandise. One of your friends told us. We have video of you doing it. You have to tell us everything you stole or we're going to prosecute you." They even went so far as to say, "if what you tell us doesn't match the footage exactly, we're going to prosecute you."
Oh Danny, you naive, stupid boy. Looking back at myself, I scream, "Deny everything! They have no proof. It's good old fashioned scare tactic and hearsay." I caved, though. I wrote down everything. Actually, it was worse. I wrote down what I could remember, and then I was escorted around the store to visually recall everything I took (since there were some things I couldn't recall).
What a terrible day. Walking around that store with a cart full of stolen merchandise. The grand total was somewhere around $850 of CDs, video games, toys, clothes, stupid this's and that's that I got no real joy out of, truth be told. Worse than the bill was the disappointment in the faces of my managers and parents. Yes, I had to call my parents to get picked up at the end of the whole ordeal. Yes I was crying. They didn't have to tell me I was fired. It just went without saying. I spent the following summer paying it off, working at the local grocery store, bagging groceries.
Nobody likes you when you're 16 (and I don't blame them).
As I write this, I'm sitting here with a smile on my face, though. Would I do that again? Definitely not. Do I regret it? Yes. Yes I do. I regret the whole terrible ordeal. I feel sorry for the whole experience. What an idiot.
Still, lessons were learned. Character is forged in the darkest of places. It always bothers me when people say, "If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing." There are lots of things I would've changed. There are lots of stupid things I wouldn't have done (though to be fair, there are lots and lots of stupid things that I would've done again). Some experiences you do grow from, but that doesn't mean that your life wouldn't have been better had it never happened in the first place.
I've maintained a blog here and there. Some were good. Some were not good. Some I wrote during a crippling depression. Others I just kept up to date with stuff I found interesting. An anthology.
You're at the latest and greatest. This is my focus moving in to 2012.
