Oddments of High Unimportance

I use a lot of bookmarklets to make my browsing faster and more convenient. I use them to stop blinking text, subscribe to RSS feeds, post to this blog, hide all images on a page, and so on. One of the most important bookmarklets I add to my browser is one I found at MacWorld that enables you to search for text throughout the site you're currently viewing, not just the current page.

Just today, for example, I wanted to know whether I had ever blogged on the topic of boredom. So I navigated to the blog and clicked on the Google Site Search bookmarklet in my Links toolbar. In the dialog box that popped up, I entered "boredom|boring" and hit OK.

The bookmarklet piped my search text through Google's "site:" search filter and the browser returned a list of pages from my blog that contained the search terms.

I find the Google site: search to be more reliable than most web sites' built-in search facility. It's a fabulous addition to any Web user's research toolkit.

• Will tablets kill PCs? Daniel Lemire thinks tablets more than satisfy the mainstream (non-techie) user's needs. Jeff Atwood opines about his spiffy new ultraportable laptop, which is everything he wanted in a laptop 10 years ago.
• A great animation showing the secret law of page design harmony (scroll down).
• The oldest self-help book: a 19th-century American grimoire, or collection of magic spells and incantations. The writer explores the  American zeal for DIY and self-reliance as expressed in this once-popular book, which includes many features of modern self-help books, such as testimonials. "Within the pages of self-help books are recipes not just for healing but for divinity, a promise that every American can be individually complete and autonomous."
• Whatever you think about in the shower is where your attention is -- so make sure you're thinking about something worthwhile.
• Lemire on peer review and this salient quote: "The editor-in-chief of a major computer science journal once told me: you know Daniel, all papers are eventually accepted, don’t forget that."

From today's News & Observer's Horoscopes by Jeradine Saunders:

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): You are perched on the brink of success. Have faith that precious plans for the future are viable even when it seems that core values are briefly opposed by others.

A glorious rant from one of the keystone authors of my first couple of decades on this spinning rock, Harlan Ellison. This is a clip from the documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth, which is itself quite good. (I'd forgotten that I'd linked to this clip before. Forgive me!) I was pleasantly surprised to see that almost all of HE's books are available in Kindle format via Amazon and at great prices.

[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE)

In moments of great emotional stress, we revert to our worst habits: we dig in and fight harder. The real trick is not to get better at fighting — it’s to get better at stopping ourselves: at taking a deep breath, calming down, and letting our better natures take over from our worst instincts.

makingabetterme:

Murray The Nut » Blog Archive » The creative process 2

makingabetterme:

After discovering the world of custom screensavers I couldn’t find anything motivating enough, so I made my own.

You need the screensaver hack to use these images and, of course, a Kindle.

Download here.

Someone famous (Samuel Johnson? Aristotle?) said that in writing (and here I paraphrase because I’m too lazy to hunt for hours for the exact quotation), “Something should be revealed and something should be concealed.” For any writing students out there, that means that in those short essays for your high school or college classes, don’t list in the introduction every point you plan to develop.