Robert Talbert's Tumbleblog

RSS
Jul 6
So long, Franklin College.  (Taken with Instagram at Franklin College)

So long, Franklin College. (Taken with Instagram at Franklin College)

Jul 5

New web-based GTD app: Facile Things

If you’re a GTD user and are looking for a cloud-based way to implement that system, you might check out Facile Things. This platform seems similar to Remember The Milk, but Facile Things is grounded in the GTD philosophy and uses an “orthodox” GTD setup to collect, process and manage tasks. By contrast, Remember The Milk is not really a GTD implementation but a list-making service that happens to work pretty well with GTD. 

Here’s a tour of Facile Things that shows what it does. It seems nice and intuitive, and it seems to do GTD in the right ways. GTD works only insofar as the trusted system you use lets you get things into the inbox very rapidly on the front end and allows for logical, systematic classification and management on the back end. Facile Things appears to do both. 

There will eventually be free, basic, and pro accounts available with the latter two at some level of pricing per month. The prices for the basic and pro accounts aren’t posted yet. Unfortunately you had better plan on getting at least the basic plan in the future, because the free plan only lets you have 5 projects going at a time and doesn’t let you submit items to the inbox via email. 

I’m an OmniFocus zealot, so I won’t be trying the service out, but Facile Things might hit some people in just the right ways when it comes to GTD. You can also follow them on Twitter at @FacileThings

Burn for Mac OS X

Burn is proving to be a very useful tool as I prepare my data for the big move. It is a free, open-source disc burning app for OS X that does several different things; for example, apparently it will auto-convert audio and video file formats to those that can be burned to a disc. But what makes it useful for me are just a couple of simple features: 

  • It automatically tallies up the size (both individual and total) of the files or folders you’ve added to the queue to be burned to disc, so there is no guesswork as to whether your list of files to burn is too long; and 
  • It does it without the “Burn Folder” nonsense that you have to put up with if you burn a disc straight from OS X. 

Also, again, it’s free. Very basic and easy to use. I am burning a LOT of data to disc right now — I have to turn in my beloved Macbook pro in two weeks, and I’m archiving our data on the home machine before we move it — and this is just what I needed. 

Whenever someone says, “I’m not book smart, but I’m street smart,” all I hear is, “I’m not real smart, but I’m imaginary smart.

-

Baltimore Ravens cornerback Domonique Foxworth, writing for Peter King’s Monday Morning QB - NFL - SI.com

Enhanced by Zemanta

There is a moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment.

- Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners

Using MathJax in Tumblr

Did you know you can use MathJax to typeset math in Tumblr? Here is an example: 

$$\cos x = \sum_{n = 0}^\infty \frac{(-1)^n}{(2n+1)!} x^{2n+1}$$

Inline formlas too, such as \(f: GL(2, \mathbb{R}) \rightarrow \mathbb{C}^*\). 

This is apparently not without bugs. For example, matrices don’t seem to render properly on Tumblr because when you use the double-backslash symbol used in \(\LaTeX\) to signal the end of a row, one of those backslashes gets interpreted as a line break. For example, the \(4 \times 4\) matrix at this post (on a non-Tumblr blog) ends up looking like this: 

$$\left( \begin{array}{cccc} 2&3&4&5 \ 0&-1&2&1 \ 0&0&2&4 \ 0&3&-6&0 \end{array} \right) $$

If you right click and view the source, you can see the double-backslashes have been redacted to single backslashes. Maybe I’m not doing it right, but I’ll look into it. 

Still, this is pretty cool, and you can learn how to do this yourself at this three-minute video

Enhanced by Zemanta

Jun 8

Like pornography, sentimentality corrupts the sight and the soul, because it is passion unearned. Whether it is Xerxes weeping at the morality of his unknown minions assembled at the Hellespont, or me being tempted to well up as the protagonist in Facing the Giants grips his Bible and whimpers in a glen, the rightful rejoinder is the same: you didn’t earn this emotion.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s warning against cheap grace comes to mind, a recognition that our redemption was bought with a price, as redemption always is. The writer who gives us sentimentality is akin to the painter Thomas Kinkade, who explicitly aims to paint the world without the Fall, which is not really the world at all, but a cheap, maudlin, knock-off of the world, a world without suffering and desperate faith and Christ Himself, which is not really a world worth painting, or writing about, or redeeming.

- Tony Woodlief, writing at Image magazine

(Source: geneveith.com)

Jun 7

Thriving at College

Got an email this morning from Alex Chediak, author of Thriving at College: Make Great Friends, Keep Your Faith, and Get Ready for the Real World!. He had read my old blog post on freshman orientation and sent me the link. I read the introduction online just now and it looks like a good book for kids starting college in the fall, parents of those kids, or — like me — professors who will be advising those kids. The Kindle version of it is just $1.99, so I think I’ll be downloading it before long for pre-semester reading. Go check out the intro and first chapter that are available at Amazon for free, and the table of contents, and see if it might be good for you. 

Another shot from Province Park in Franklin

Another shot from Province Park in Franklin

Lucy at Province Park, Franklin (Taken with instagram)

Lucy at Province Park, Franklin (Taken with instagram)