When I wrote last year about the first things I install on a new computer I forgot what seems now to be another important list… the things I don’t install on a new computer.

Appzapper Icon by Jasper Hauser

Things - I’m a GTD junkie and I thought Things was like the second coming of David Allen. I just find that, as tweaky and addled with features as it is, OmniFocus still wins.

Textmate - This one surprised me. I switched to Textmate early on, and like many developers, found it to be a flexible, refreshing change from whatever it was we were using previously. We got along just fine for quite a while. As I started doing less programming and more text editing and manipulation, I became less fond of the way Textmate went about things. Multi-file search is horrible. Character based undo is still the dumbest idea ever. Large files are not handled well. And so on. I’m also getting lazy, and I don’t want to keep everything my editor is capable of wedged in my head. I went back to BBEdit, where there are palettes and menus and icons all right there in plain sight. Seriously, if you try the multi-file search in BBEdit you’ll wonder how Textmate ever became so popular. I even like the ridiculous HTML palette.

LaTeX - It turns out that no matter how badly I want to need LaTeX for something, it just never comes up. I just don’t see myself writing a long academic paper with all sorts of end notes, references and complex math formulas. It’s just not worth the effort.

Quicksilver - Sorry, but LaunchBar is faster, simpler, and more stable than Quicksilver ever was.

MacVim - I’m a Vim lover from way back, and I still do a ton of quick editing in it, but there’s no longer a need for the full Mac-lovin’ version of it.

Aperture - Tried it, liked it, but Lightroom has all the momentum, resources and extras I’ll ever need for photo management.

Photoshop - I’ve always hated it. Now that Lightroom has local adjustments, and the Nik plugins are being developed for it, I just don’t need Photoshop.

Most of the Everything Buckets - I’ve left behind Curio, Journler, Notebook, Together, EagleFiler, Evernote and so on. My life is now in Tinderbox, Yojimbo and DEVONthink.

I’m sure there are more, but these are the things that at one time I felt I needed on a daily basis. Times change.

Watches are cool, but wearing a wristwatch seems to have fallen a bit out of fashion. I can understand why, since many of us are either sitting in front of a computer all day or are within arm’s reach of a cell phone and either can tell me what time it is. There are some occasions though in which just a quick glance at my wrist is faster and less annoying, so I decided it was time for a new watch.

I wore a watch for years. I can remember receiving my first digital watch as a birthday gift when I was quite young. I’m talking about the Pulsar with bright red LED numbers. After the Pulsar I went through a Timex and some other cheap digitals no one remembers. When my grandfather died he left me his retirement watch, which I wore for a few years. It’s a fine watch, but the face has yellowed with age it has become too hard to read.

I understand that good watches are expensive, but I had no idea how expensive. For example, I kind of like the Patek Philippe 5070 but at nearly $70,000 I’ll have to pass. What I wanted was a quality, fully mechanical watch that was just good enough to call a “timepiece.” It’s the “fully mechanical” part that gets you, but the idea of wearing a watch comprised of about a zillion finely-tuned springs and gears all working together is more interesting to me than something with a battery-powered Quartz movement on a computer chip. Besides, I’m on a bit of a no-battery kick these days anyway.

Long story short, I settled on a Tag Heuer Aquaracer Automatic. Not ridiculously expensive, looks nice and should last a lifetime. Oh, and it’s good in the water to 300m. That should come in handy.

Stumutilation:

“What if only people who had any idea what the fuck they’re talking about could speak or write about the economic catastrophe in which we find ourselves?

It’d be pretty quiet.”

(Via Davenetics.)

Neat.

Dolphin Play Bubble Rings - Click here for funny video clips

The New Yorker on David Foster Wallace

He conjured the world in two-hundred-word sentences that mixed formal diction and street slang, technicalese and plain speech; his prose slid forward with a controlled lack of control that mimed thought itself.

More here

Yes! I think.

The Pale King: “A long, unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace is scheduled for a posthumous release next year. ‘The Pale King’, excerpted in The New Yorker magazine edition coming out Monday, is set in an Internal Revenue Service office in Illinois in the 1980s.”

(Via Daring Fireball.)

hornby on recommending :

You think I’ll like it, do you? Well, it has taken me more than 50 years to get anywhere near an understanding of what I think I might like, and even then I get it wrong half the time, so what chance have you got?

(Via 3quarksdaily.)

Thought provoking short film about photography and the desire to transform, by Zach Arias

MacNN.com on Safari 4

As is likely self-evident by now, the chief criticism that can be leveled against Safari is its tendency to chase rather than lead. Apple says it’s “leading the way with innovation,” but its actual breakthrough is simply in uniting the better features from a number of different browser into a single package.

Isn’t that what Apple has always done?