I’ve been using MS Office for so long, I hadn’t thought about this before—pointed out by John Gruber:

Icon for the Save button is still a floppy disk, despite the fact that Apple hasn’t sold a machine with a floppy drive for a decade.

UPDATE: Email from a DF reader:

I help out in an elementary school, sometimes in the computer lab, and always get a laugh out of how there is absolutely no way to convey to a bunch of 8 year old kids which button they should click to save without physically pointing it out or describing the one next to it.

Tell them to “click the disk” and they look around for a CD icon. Tell them to “click the floppy disk” and they laugh at the word “floppy.” The machines have floppy disk drives, but the kids have never seen them used.

(via Daring Fireball)

Continuous Partial Attention (CPA) is the trend of stretching our ‘attention bandwidth’ to cope with the myriad demands on our concentration posed by technology. The term was coined by the writer Linda Stone, formerly of Apple and Microsoft, who describes CPA as ‘the behavior of continuously monitoring as many inputs as possible, paying partial attention to each’. According to Stone, CPA is ‘post-multitasking behavior’. If multitasking is ‘motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient’, CPA is ‘motivated by a desire to be a live node on the network’. Anxious to connect and desperate not to miss an opportunity, CPA ‘contributes to a feeling of overwhelm, over-stimulation, and a sense of being unfulfilled’. Indeed, the ‘always on’ character of technology (emails, PDAs, IM, VOIP) compromises ‘normal’ social interactions (checking your BlackBerry or cell during lunch) and, in Stone’s analysis, ‘has created an artificial sense of constant crisis’. Like wild animals in a continuous state of alert, an ‘adrenalized fight or flight mechanism kicks in’. Of the hundreds of emails received each day, Stone asks, how many are ‘tigers’, requiring immediate action, and how many are merely ‘mice’? (Most, in fact, are likely to be spam.) Faced with this profusion of inputs we increasingly turn to filters (TiVo) and blocks (iPods) to find a signal amidst the noise.

Stone suggests that ‘the world may continue to be noisy, but our yearning and fulfillment are more likely to come from getting to the bottom of things, from stillness, and from opportunities for meaningful connection’.

From Schott’s Almanac 2007

I’m frequently frustrated by websites that don’t include a text-only or printer-friendly version of the articles they publish.  (While I’m on the topic, I’m extremely frustrated by “Print” buttons that do nothing but select File>Print for me—or, worse, send the job straight to the printer with no dialogue.)

To solve that problem, a great javascript bookmarklet by Arc90: Readability.

Updates to practically the full line: Mac mini, iMac, Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, Time Capsule, and AirPort Extreme.

apple.com

Originally from John Hodgman’s Twitter feed, noted by Andy Baio, here.

By definition, it may mean disinterest (although simple silence would be a more damning and sincere response, in that case)  […]  But in use, it almost universally seems to signal: I am just interested enough to make one last joyless, nitpicky swipe and then disappear

Fun.  Press C to change the color.  (You can also do a gradient effect by dragging from one color to the next.)

ThisIsSand.com

Advanced Beauty is an ongoing exploration of digital artworks born and influenced by sound, an ever-growing collaboration between programmers, artists, musicians, animators and architects.

The first collection is a series of audio-reactive ‘video sound sculptures’.  Inspired by synasthesia, the rare, sensory experience of seeing sound or tasting colours, these videos are physical manifestations of sound, sculpted by volume, pitch or structure of the soundtrack.

Check it out.

If you’re a FireFox user and you haven’t installed the PicLens plugin, you should give it a whirl.  Not worth trying to describe it, you have to see it in action—and you can, right here.  Download from that link too.  In my experience, it works impressively well with older Macs (system requirements aside):  It ran pretty smoothly on my old titanium PowerBook.

Direct Note Access is a technology that makes the impossible possible: for the first time in audio recording history you can identify and edit individual notes within polyphonic audio material.  The unique access that Melodyne affords to pitch, timing, note lengths and other parameters of melodic notes will now also be afforded to individual notes within chords.

Gotta see it to believe it.  Watch the demonstration video here.

Okay, we all know the benefits of buying generic.  Generic ibuprofen is the same thing as Advil, but significantly cheaper.  So, we save money—sometimes quite a bit.

However, Snarkmarket points out the truly unbelievable savings that can be had by buying generic online.

For comparison’s sake, you get 32 pills in each bottle of Unisom (over-the-counter sleep-aid) and pay roughly $11.  Buy generic, however, and you’ll get 1,000 pills for $20.  I shit you not.

Microsoft concedes their Windows Vista blunders.  …And now they’re ready to try again?