Officially Lucky

Things have been moving extremely quickly in our run up to the week of Macworld over the past few days. Because I have so little time, I am proceeding to engage in a massive brain dump. In no specific order, here we go:

• I’ve secured a G4 Powerbook to use next week from our good friend Adam

  

• Received the Eye-Fi and discovered that it is extremely close to being able to perform the tasks I wished, but falls oh so short. I’ll talk about those in an upcoming article on the device on Infinite Loop.

• Besides not being able to help me out with live blogging, the Eye-Fi is a fantastic piece of technology, packaging, and exercise in user friendliness. It’s few and far between that you run across a product that makes you feel like magic is happening and is a joy to use from start to end.
• We’ve secured a few copies of Office 2008 for Mac to give away at our party this Monday. Office:Mac 2008 doesn’t officially go on sale until Tuesday so this is pretty special!

Finally, I thought I’d toss out a few of my most recently “starred” items from my Google Reader. These are links and articles I found especially interesting:

• Ben Gold has started an Interviews Tumblelog. His first victim is Marco Arment of Tumblr. Marco is Chief Scientist at Tumblr and does all the back end work: “I write the majority of Tumblr’s back-end code, design the architecture, and administer the servers. I generally don’t touch the design or front-end, since David is much better at that.”
• Jonathan Buchanan has released a new version of django-tagging. This is an excellent Django application that you can use in your projects to add bolt-on tagging support for just about anything. I use it here on my blog and in several work projects. Jonathan has added multi-word tags, a tag_cloud_for_model template tag and more.
• The Acid 3 test is entering it’s beta stages. The Acid tests are meant to coerce web browser developers like Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, Opera and others the support new and important standards. This helps web site developers build even more interesting and capable web applications. The tests stress edge cases and through the browser vendors fixing those cases, the hope is to shore up general support for new technology. Whereas the Acid 2 test stressed Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS), the third test emphasizes ECMAscript (javascript) and DOM support.
• After the Robert Scoble thing, everyone and their Mom joined the Data Portability working group. That includes Google, Facebook, LinkedIN, SixApart, Flickr, and Twitter. The whole Web 2.0 Illuminati! :) This could theoretically be a good thing, as long as they can work together and find common ground.

• VNGRD is selling this awesome shirt in their new collection, I would’ve bought it by now if their online store was working.

  

• Shelf is an interesting tool written by Tom Insam for OS X. It examines the content of your active application and attempts to extract metadata such as URL, hCard, vCard, email addresses, contact you’re chatting with, et cetera and present a useful set of context around an individual associated with that content. For a useful example, say that a work colleage opens up an AIM chat with me. This Shelf application will see that I’m chatting with that person, access their Address Book record and present to me any additional context on the shelf. Phone number, email address, and photo (if available). There are a million ways this could be tied into additional data sources and much more information to be pulled out of existing applications as well. It’s still a bit rough, but looks to be coming along nicely.

• The best of the wooden look is a compendium of really good looking websites that have used a “wooden” look to good results.

  

Finally, I’d like to point everyone to the blogs of some of my coworkers. Two of these are new and one has been around for well over a year and I’ve never had a chance to link it up here.

• Blake’s Thinktank is a blog by our Director of Public Affairs, Blake Rutherford. Blake is steeped in politics and covers the subject extensively on this site. I’ve advised him in the past on the subject of blogging. He’s needed little tutelage to hit the ground running and build a dedicated readership. His personal style and thoroughness have really begun to shine as this important political season has picked up pace over the past six months.

• Monkey Bulb is the blog of Chris Kindrick. He’s been called an Art Director, independent film actor, and a national commercial star. He can now add blogger to that list. Don’t miss out on Chris as he’s hilarious and sharp as a tack. I think he’ll do great on his new site.

• Last, but not least is the blog of Emily Reeves, Ms. Adverthinker. Emily is tacking the world of marketing on her brand new site and is still awaiting a new header image. Hopefully we can get that up over the next week ;) I wish her all the luck in the world, but I don’t think she’ll need it.

And with all of that out of my brain, I am shutting down until I reach San Fransisco. Keep your news readers and web browsers trained at Ars Technica, Infinite Loop, this blog, and our Ars Technica Macworld Twitter account for all the news from the conference next week.