Chuckwelch

Everyone has a favorite desktop music player. For some of us, it's the one that just plays our music fast, with no fuss or hassle. For others it's a tool that organizes your playlists, syncs with your smartphone, makes your music collection easy to dig through, and looks good while doing it. This week we're going to look at five of the best desktop music players, based on your nominations.

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Whether we like to admit it or not, many of us depend heavily on Google accounts to make our way around the web. If you got locked out, you'd be in a lot of trouble—so if you haven't already, here's everything you should do right now to make sure it's recoverable.

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YouTube makes embedding videos easy, but if you haven't uploaded something to YouTube, you can actually embed a video on a web page using Google Drive.

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We hear all the time about how national home sales are up, down, flat, bouncing like a rubber ball, or twirling like a ballerina, but we rarely get information that goes down to the local while also allowing you to instantly make comparisons to nationwide and regional trends. A new interactive tool from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau aims to put that ability at your fingertips.

Earlier today, the CFPB unveiled the new tool that uses data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, which requires thousands of financial institutions to maintain, report, and publicly disclose information about mortgages.

From this raw data, the CFPB has already created a handful of interactive maps and charts, and will be encouraging developers to use its API to make further use of the information made available by the HDMA.

For example, there is already a map that shows, county-by-county, the number of mortgage applications and originations between 2010 and 2012.

First, here’s the U.S. map of the change in mortgage originations between 2010 and 2011:

The reddish/brown areas indicate year-over-year declines in mortgage originations.
This next map shows the same changes, but between 2011 and 2012. As you can see, there is a general switch to bluer tones, indicating positive growth:

You can also zoom in and instantly see stats for any county in the nation, just by hovering over the location with your cursor:

Aside from just being a cool tool for people who love mapping data, CFPB believes this information can help show whether lenders are serving the housing needs of their communities.

“It gives public officials information that helps them make decisions and policies, and can shed light on lending patterns that could be discriminatory,” explains the agency.

CFPB will soon be releasing an API for developers to tinker around with, but the HDMA data is currently available here.

Android: Plenty of services promise that your messages will disappear when viewed, or that your conversations are private, but Surespot actually delivers. All of your messages are encrypted, you control whether images are sharable or not, and if you delete a message, it's deleted from the recipient's phone, too.

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We're all aware that every time you link to a web site, you inevitably push it up in search engine rankings. Over time, that means a site will appear at the top of a Google search result. Sometimes you want to link to those sites without helping them boost their search results. Do Not Link is a service for just that.

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When I bought a car from a family friend, I was delighted to open up the trunk and find a pair of gloves, tire-changing tools, and a can of Fix-A-Flat nestled on top of the spare tire. There were tissues in the center console, a stocked changepurse, maps, and even a disposable camera. Not everyone is so lucky…but what should you stock your car with when starting from scratch?

Lifehacker put together a list of basics, including items from the categories of “car emergencies and maintenance,” “survival items,” and “comfort items.”

• Tire-changing tools.
• Tire sealant/inflation tools. This can come in the form of products like Fix-A-Flat, or an electric pump. One commenter recommended a device that transfers air from your other tires to the soft one.
• Your car’s owner’s manual, which should be in the glove box or center console anyway.
• Duct Tape And WD-40. Between the two, you can fix anything.

Safety supplies include:

• First aid kit
• Bottled water and emergency food – even a box of granola bars will help in an emergency
• A weather radio (no, don’t depend on your smartphone)
• A flashlight: check it to make sure it works now and then

Lifehacker also offers advice for a winter/snow emergency kit, if you live in a wintery climate and might need one.

30 Essential Things You Should Keep in Your Car [Lifehacker]

This is a presentation and therefore missing a bunch of key context, but Michael Dearing's The Five Cognitive Distortions of People Who Get Stuff Done is interesting reading nonetheless. The five distortions are:

1. Personal exceptionalism
2. Dichotomous thinking
3. Correct overgeneralization
4. Blank canvas thinking
5. Schumpeterianism

That last one is likely a head-scratcher to those of us without economics backgrounds; here's what Dearing has to say about it:

Definition - sees creative destruction as natural, necessary, and as their vocation

Benefits - fearlessness, tolerance for destruction and pain

Deadly risk - heartless ambition, alienation

(via ★interesting)

Tags: economics   lists   Michael Dearing

Paul Bogard recently published a book on darkness called The End of Night. Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh interviewed Bogard about the book, the night sky, astronomy, security, cities, and prisons, among other things. The interview is interesting throughout but one of my favorite things is this illustration of the Bortle scale.

Twilley: It's astonishing to read the description of a Bortle Class 1, where the Milky Way is actually capable of casting shadows!

Bogard: It is. There's a statistic that I quote, which is that eight of every ten kids born in the United States today will never experience a sky dark enough to see the Milky Way. The Milky Way becomes visible at 3 or 4 on the Bortle scale. That's not even down to a 1. One is pretty stringent. I've been in some really dark places that might not have qualified as a 1, just because there was a glow of a city way off in the distance, on the horizon. You can't have any signs of artificial light to qualify as a Bortle Class 1.

A Bortle Class 1 is so dark that it's bright. That's the great thing-the darker it gets, if it's clear, the brighter the night is. That's something we never see either, because it's so artificially bright in all the places we live. We never see the natural light of the night sky.

I can also recommend reading David Owen's 2007 NYer piece on light pollution.

Tags: astronomy   books   Geoff Manaugh   interviews   Nicola Twilley   Paul Bogard   space   The End of Night

You planning on having a kid soon? Check out Sandor Weisz's new project, BornYet. When you register for the site, you get a subdomain (like is.rummicub.bornyet.com) that your friends can use to sign up for a birth announcement. When the time comes, it takes two seconds log into BornYet and send out an email blast with the pertinent info (like so). Pretty neat.

Tags: parenting   Sandor Weisz

Imagine, if you will, Twitter’s Fail Whale. But instead of popping up to be like, “Hey, Twitter isn’t working, uh oh,” he’s swimming up to the entire catalog of tweets dating back to the long-ago beginning in 2006 and swallowing all of them in his hungry, gaping maw. The eating is good for those interested in seeing what anyone ever in the history of Twitter time has tweeted about, as one index of the social web says it’s added every public tweet ever published to its collection.

Topsy used to be a social search company that now spends its time braiding Twitter’s hair and talking about sentiment analysis with clients, while indexing just about anything social on the Internet, notes CNET. And that social search engine is now a lot bigger, as the company announced its analytics tools can now go all the way back to the very first tweet on March 21, 2006.

“By adding a full historical index, now we can look even further back to the very first tweets 7 years ago, meaning our users have access to the best, most accurate view of the world’s social conversation,” Topsy co-founder and CTO Vipul Ved Prakash said in a statement.

That service is available only to paying customers, and those clients won’t be paying any additional fees now that the Twitter’s history has been wholly engulfed by Topsy. So if you want to hearken back to that lonely evening where you asked your 10 Twitter followers whether you should eat cereal or lemon wedges dipped in Splenda for dinner, you’ll need to pay up.

Or hey, maybe someone else is reading that about you right… now. Takes Internet stalking your dates to an all new height of scariness, eh?

Topsy indexes entire tweet history for search, analysis [CNET]

 

What happens when you compare an area’s median household income with the average download speed for Internet users in that area? You find out what you’d always kind of guessed, that there appears to be a direct relationship between an area’s wealth and the quality of its Internet service.

The folks at Gizmodo took several looks at the geographic and economic breakdowns of towns and cities all around this country. Probably the most interesting one is demonstrated in graph above. While the data points don’t follow a strict line, one can easily see that areas of higher income tend to have higher download speeds.

So no, you can’t look at the graph and say that an area with a median household income of $60,000 will definitely have a certain level of download speed, you can say that those speeds are likely to be better than someone in an area with a $30,000 median income level.

When you look at the town-by-town breakdown of download speeds, you see that there are several notable outliers.

In spite of a median household income around $37,000, Ephrata, Washington, is quite literally off the chart, as its 85.54 Mbps download speed is nearly twice that of any other town. It just so happens that this town of only 7,600 has its own fiber network.

Another town on the lower-side of the chart’s median income range but with super-fast downloads is Trenton, GA. The town of around 2,300 people in northwest Georgia happens to have the third-fastest download times in the entire nation, just behind Kansas City, with its fancy Google fiber network.

Meanwhile, other towns at the top of the download speed rankings were much better off financially, like Millington, NJ, with a median household income over $130,000; Croton-on-Hudson, NY (median household income: $108,000); Westwood, MA ($120,000); and Randolph, NJ ($148,000).

The lowest median household income of the areas with the top 10 download speeds was McKees Rocks, PA, at only $22,400, according to the latest census. And yet, this town of around 6,000 people has the eighth fastest downloads in the nation.

Another interesting part of the Gizmodo study looked at population density and download speeds. While not as firm a correlation between these two factors, one can theorize that people in the most densely populated areas are being slowed by congestion.

For example, the borough of Manhattan in New York City has a median household income of around $66,000 (and a mean household income of $127,000), making it the borough with the highest level of wealth. It’s also the most densely populated borough in the city, with around 70,000 people per square mile.

But Manhattan’s average download speed is just average for the entire nation (18.43 Mbps) and is the lowest in all of NYC. By contrast, Staten Island, the least populous of the boroughs (only 8,116 people per square mile) has significantly higher than average download speeds of 28.50 Mbps.

You should really check out the all the charts and see what trends (and exceptions to the trends) you can spot, over at Gizmodo.

Chrome: When you let someone use your computer, you'd probably prefer they stick to the web browser. With kiosk mode, you can (sort of) enforce that.

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Three years ago, I came across a post on the Sharpie blog -- I don't know how or why I was following Sharpie's blog, but such were the mysteries of our universe in those long-ago days -- announcing a new kind of pencil: a mechanical pencil with liquid graphite ink, with leads that could not break, whose writing was initially erasable but over time (about three days) would become semi-permanent.

Seriously: the Sharpie liquid pencil shows that somewhere, engineers are always quietly perfecting something old & great. http://j.mp/aFQHBE

— Tim Carmody (@tcarmody) August 9, 2010

Sharpie eventually had to back off some of its claims for the liquid pencil -- the original promo material said pencil would become permanent like a Sharpie Marker, which isn't quite true -- but they brought them to market, and sell them for about $3 apiece. (Sadly, the reviews aren't very good.)

People love pencils. They love them. It's partly childhood nostalgia, partly how a craftsman comes to care for her tools, and partly the tactile experience. It's also a blend of appreciation for both their aesthetic and functional qualities, and (especially these days, but not only these days), a soupçon of the disruptive passion that comes from willfully embracing what poses as the technologically obsolete.

Over at The Atlantic, Rebecca Rosen has a story about Pencil Revolution, which she quite rightly calls "The World's Best Website About Pencils." She lists ten representative posts, from which I'll select my favorite five:

• Vintage pencil advertisements

• Pictures of pencil-shaped buildings around the world

• A review of artisanal pencil-sharpener David Rees's book, How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical & Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening for Writers, Artists, Contractors, Flange Turners, Anglesmiths, & Civil Servants ("a must-read for anyone interested in pencils")

• A confession of having stolen an Ikea pencil (and a link to a Flickr group of other such pencil thieves)

• A review of the Staedtler Norica HB pencil:

I found these at Staples (in the US) a few weeks ago and bought a pack. At $10 for three dozen, it was a pretty good deal. Less than $3.50 for some quality pencils is something I'd find it difficult to pass up. But three dozen is...a commitment to make to the Pencil Gods, when the pencil might just be terrible. I mean, they are pencils. One can't just throw them away if they turn out to be awful. Luckily, these pencils are not awful at all. Unluckily, having a Big Box means that I've given most of them away already.

I feel like there's something powerful about pencils that I feel viscerally but don't fully understand. There's the manuscript part: as much as I love to type, there's something super powerful in that alignment of the eye and the hand. But that's pens and chalk and crayons and markers too, and I have completely different feelings about all of these things.

In "Why pencils?" Pencil Revolution's founder Johnny Gamber tries to explain:

The first and best reason to use pencils is because you like them and enjoy writing/drawing with them. Because you feel better connected to the paper you're writing on (or the wall, etc.) and the earth from which the clay, the graphite and the wood all came. Because they smell good. Because sharpening them can be a sort of meditative process. Because you can chew on them. Or for reasons we can't explain.

The point is that it's best to write with what we like best, no? I'll admit to enjoying taking notes and writing papers and poems with pencils better than pens. That's the biggest reason that I use pencils at all.

Maybe it's that sense of work that's best realized in sharpening: the continual, attentive maintenance to a thing that's ultimately, necessarily, and even intentionally disposable. To adapt George Carlin's observation, when you buy a pencil, you know it's going to end badly. You're buying a small tragedy. Caring for a pencil becomes like caring for a pet, or a person, in accelerated miniature, like in time-lapse photography.

Pencils are like love. Pencils are like us. They are free to love, free to squander, and free to give away.

I'm going to do something rare here at Kottke and open up the comments. I'll close them down at the end of the day. Do you love pencils? Do you hate them? Why? What's your favorite pencil? What's your best pencil story? Did a pencil ever break your heart?

Comments: add yours Tags: matter   pencils   writing

The Glendale city attorney who was in charge of negotiating with the Phoenix Coyotes until April is now the attorney for the Phoenix Coyotes. That is all. Except that Rick Eckstein is really prescient.

Ian Silva is a Australian commuter train driver who spends his spare time mapping an invented country called the Koana Islands.

People in the Koana Islands love baseball. The first league play started in 1882, barely six years after the MLB. Between the top-tier, Triple- and Double-A leagues, there are over 180 teams spanning the island nation. Fans are so rabid that there's even talk of expanding to a Single-A league, adding even more teams. If you're a baseball fan, you might be surprised you've never heard of this. You'll be even more surprised when you try to find the Koana Islands. That's because the 32-island chain, with its nine major cities, 11 national parks, 93 million residents and a landmass that is equal to Spain and Sweden combined does not really exist.

(thx, toni)

Tags: geography   Ian Silva   maps

Whether you're moving across town or across the country, clothes are a huge pain to pack and unpack. If you want to avoid wrinkles and lost hangers though, it's easy with a large trash bag.

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Whether a temporary asshole or a full-blown troll, the internet makes it easy to become any kind of jerk. This doesn’t just happen because we sit at a computer far from the people who engage us in arguments, but because of our built-in biases. The good news? If you can get a handle on the way the brain’s natural mechanics sabotage your thinking, you can avoid some pretty stupid online fights.

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San Diego Mayor Bob Filner will have to look elsewhere if he wants wings and a cold frosty beer: A downtown San Diego Hooters location has blacklisted the embattled mayor in the wake of sexual harassment accusations.

According to CNN, the location has joined forces with a local radio talk-show host’s campaign, and has posted signs noting that Filner “will not be served in this establishment” and “We believe women should be treated with respect.”

This isn’t a blackballing move by the entire company, however, according to a statement on the Hooters Twitter account:

Our Hooters Girls in San Diego have spoken. Not a corporate gig, but we support our girls. #StepIntoAwesome—
  (@Hooters) August 13, 2013

The mayor hasn’t resigned amid allegations from numerous women that he groped and made lewd comments toward them. He’s now facing a recall effort to force him to leave his position.

Hooters blackballs San Diego mayor [CNN.com]

You probably didn’t even know that Gary, Indiana spent $50 million in 2002 to build a sports stadium for an independent-league baseball team, theGary South Shore RailCats— I didn’t know, so I’d be stunned if you did. But now that you do, I bet you’re wondering, “Wait, are people really flocking to downtown Gary, Indiana just because there’s a minor-league baseball team in town?

Fortunately for you, the Times of Northwest Indiana has the answer, and it’s no, not so much:

Walking down Fifth Avenue, where the U.S. Steel Yard is located, it’s not hard to see how much remains to be done. The Steel City Buffet owned by the Gary Empowerment Zone across from the stadium is again in search of an operator. The barbecue joint in the same building is empty. A Bennigan’s restaurant was kicked out of the Steel Yard itself after shootings outside, rowdy nights inside and failure to pay rent…

And it’s hard not to notice the largest projects counted by the mayor as successes have all been heavily, and in some cases completely, subsidized by government. Stand-alone private investment is almost nil.

And:

“There is a lot of traffic out there,” said Christopher Maxfield, 42, owner of a small building with apartments and shop space just across from the stadium. “I just wish it would slow down a little and that some of them would stop here.”…

“The impact the stadium has had for me?” Key muses as business winds down for the day at Fresh Coast Coffee Co. “I’d say it’s more a psychological benefit.”

“It serves to mitigate a lot of the negative publicity the city of Gary has received,” Key goes on to say. “Now thousands of people have come into Gary on a summer evening and had good family fun.”

That’s all pretty typical of what one tends to hear from businesses around sports facilities — it’s nice to give people something to say about your downtown other than that it doesn’t have any doctors or dentists or Walgreens-style general stores, as is the case in Gary, but it’s really hard to catch the firehose of people swarming into games and back out three hours later to build, say, a restaurant clientele. But it’s nice to see a local newspaper interviewing actual business owners to see the impact or lack thereof of a sports facility, unlike … oh, say, Indianapolis Star columnist David Masciotra, who chimed in today with this Atlantic Cities piece about how stadium subsidies are working out at the other end of the state, in Indianapolis:

In the 1960s, visitors and all but the most loyal residents gave it the nickname “Nap Town.” The joke being that the only thing to do in Indianapolis is take a nap… Now, Indianapolis is still the host of the Indy 500, but it is also home to an NBA team, an NFL franchise, a minor baseball team, 200 restaurants, 300 retail shops, 28 museums and galleries, and 12 performing arts theaters. All of these entertainment venues and service businesses attract a growing market of Indiana visitors and out-of-state tourists…

The New York Times praised Indianapolis’ “thriving culture scene,” while the Los Angeles Times called the success of its revitalization project, “breathtaking.”

The unemployment rates in Indiana and Indianapolis are lower than the national average, and both the state and city have sizable budget surpluses.

The essay, which features zero quotes from anyone actually in Indianapolis, is already getting shredded by Atlantic Cities commenters, who have noted errors both small — the Colts moved to Indianapolis in 1984, not “the 1970s,” and the city hosted the Super Bowl in 2012, not 2006 — and large — that “sizable” city budget surplus is actually a $55 million deficit, and comes on the heels of years of painful budget cuts to close past budget gaps. Which weren’t entirely created by the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on new buildings for the Colts and Pacers, or by the tens of millions more that the city gave to the Pacers to keep playing in their brand-new arena, but it sure didn’t help.

To be fair, by the end of the article Masciotra does credit Indianapolis’s alleged renaissance — which, as one flabbergasted Indiana correspondent wrote to me, is sourced partly to an L.A. Times article from “19-friggen-86″ — to not putting all its eggs in the basket of sports, but rather to “cross-sector partnership” that helped spur new shops and “the second largest collection of urban monuments in the country.” (And also to lowering property and business taxes and privatizing services, which also haven’t actually worked out all that swimmingly.) But that just raises the question: If you still have to build public fountains and give tax breaks to downtown businesses in order to create development, can you really claim that it was sports that provided your magic beans?

By dinnertime, your family is tired, in a bad mood, and often not together. The mornings are another story—and can bring all the benefits of supper, with none of the pain. Plus: waffles! Fast Company's Laura Vanderkam lays out why family breakfasts are superior to family dinners.

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So it turns out people actually will drive across the horrible, horrible bridge to Tampa Bay Rays games if you let them bring their kids for $2 each: The Rays drew 25,095 fans for a Wednesday night game against the Diamondbacks last night, thanks to a buy-one-ticket-get-three-kids-tickets-almost-free promotion.

All those kids were then treated to the Rays managing only three hits and getting stomped by Arizona, 7-0. But it’s nights like these when lifetime memories are made, right?

We've already discussed how to hook up a DIY phone charger to your bike, but the folks at MAKE have polished the concept and created an easy-to-follow video if you still haven't tried it.

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Though the name of the Freedom Of Information Act might make it sound like one can just submit a request for government records and they will be released without hassle, in reality it’s a much more complicated process that can cost a lot of money and make even hardened investigators feel like giving up. That’s why the Center for Investigative Reporting has created the FOIA Machine.

Given that FOIA requests often involve multiple agencies, each with its own byzantine bureaucratic rules, many people go into the process unprepared for all the potential roadblocks and requirements needed to ultimately get the documents that have been requested.

Dubbed the “TurboTax for government records,” FOIA Machine — currently in Alpha testing — began as a way to simply track the response times to FOIA requests. Since then, it has developed into a service that seeks to streamline and automate much of the request process, “putting all of the steps, rules, exceptions and best practices in one place and allowing users to track requests on dashboards, receive alerts, share request blueprints and get social support and expertise from the FOIA Machine community.”

Even better, the FOIA Machine will be free. Of course, it costs money to create and maintain the service, so the CIR has launched a Kickstarter campaign to help raise funds.

So far, it’s received more than $12,000 of the $17,500 it needs. Every dollar pledged by Kickstarter users will be matched by the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.

The system is currently being tested by 15 users, but hundreds have signed on for when it eventually opens to the public. But before it can serve all those people, the FOIA Machine needs a notification system to tell users when an agency responds to a request and to notify users when they need to follow up on outstanding requests, the ability for users to follow up with an agency outside of the FOIA Machine, the ability to share requests publicly, and several interface upgrades, along with ongoing costs for updating and maintaining the Machine.

Donations to the Kickstarter campaign start at $1, for which the contributor’s name will be listed on the FOIA Machine site.

In order to receive the funding, CIR needs to reach the $17,500 goal by Aug. 16.

Just because something is marketed as disposable or flushable, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good thing for city sewer systems. In fact, many of workers are now begging us as a nation to stop flushing disinfecting wipes or those “use these when toilet paper just isn’t enough” wipes, because they end up clogging pipes down the line.

Those who operate city sewer systems say that although there’s that convenience factor of flushing wipes when you’re done, once the cloth-like material doesn’t break down like traditional toilet paper. After they leave your toilet the wipes continue on their merry way into the sewer system, where it can seriously gum up the works and cost cities big bucks to repair, reports USA Today.

It’s gotten worse lately as the market has become flooded with bathroom wipes, either as cleaning products or personal hygiene items for that oh-so-fresh feeling toilet paper can’t always provide.

“It’s getting to be more and more of a problem,” said the superintendent for the city of Sauk Centre, Minn. That city had to hire someone to vacuum out a lift station, resulting in a truckload of cloth material.

This kind of thing is going on everywhere, says Cynthia Finley, director of regulatory affairs for the National Association of Clean Water Agencies.

“Consumers are being told by the packaging that these things are flushable,” Finley says.

So what’s a savvy consumer to do? You don’t have to stop buying the wipes — just make sure you toss them out in the garbage instead of sending them shooting off into cloggy pipe land.

Wipes in the pipes snarling sewers [USA Today]

 

Now that we know whether or not mosquitoes are likely to be coming for us, the next step is creating a line of defense. Sure, there are all those smelly citronella candles and bug sprays and the like — but there’s something even easier you can do, something so brilliant in its sheer simplicity I just want to go around telling everyone I know about it: Turn on a fan.

The New York Times presents an idea Our Boss Meg has also used to great effect upon moving from the breezier clime of Chicago to the still air of Brooklyn: Turn on a small electric fan when you’re outdoors, the oscillating kind that’ll send a breeze wafting around the area.

It works, says the president of Swift Food Equipment Inc., who is credited with the method in this instance, for a very simple reason.

“The solution came from trying to think like a bug,” he explained to the NYT’s William J. Broad, “and realizing I don’t like flying into a 15 m.p.h. wind.”

It’s also a method endorsed by the American Mosquito Control Association, which notes that mosquitoes aren’t like stealth missiles that can rocket toward humans at super fast speeds, so even a little breeze is a deterrent. The wind also does a lot to

“Mosquitoes are relatively weak fliers,” it says on its Web site, “so placing a large fan on your deck can provide a low-tech solution.”

Sending air every which way also works to disperse all the delectable human smells mosquitoes are attracted to, whether it’s from your blood type or that beer you downed because it’s hotter than Hades right now.

A Low-Tech Mosquito Deterrent [New York Times]