Simplenote – By Automattic

I have been using Notational Velocity (nVALT) for a couple of years. It’s a note-taking app (Mac only), built by Brett Terpstra that describes itself as:

… a way to take notes quickly and effortlessly using just your keyboard. You press a shortcut to bring up the window and just start typing. It will begin searching existing notes, filtering them as you type.

A couple of things I like about it are that it saves work automatically, and any URLs that I type in are kept as live links. There’s more, including the ability to type using Markdown markup language.

I could use nVLT to format drafts of blog posts – but the Markdown keystrokes are not second nature to me, so I don’t use them. *

MacUser – my favourite Mac magazine – has a feature this month on note-taking apps, including nVALT and a similar app named Nottingham.

If you are a Windows user, there are a couple of options, which I haven’t tried. They are ResophNotes and Cintanotes. From the screenshots, Resophnotes looks pretty much like nVALT.

Enter Simplenote

I’ve had a Simplenote account for a while (probably a couple of years or more) but just don’t use it. It’s web-based and there are also iPhone and iPad app versions.

Simplenote can be used as a standalone web-based note-taking service.

Here’s the thing though. It can also be used to backup or sync your other note-taking apps.

In other words, if you want to back up the stuff on the note-taking app on your computer, you can back it by syncing to Simplenote.

And/or if you have a home machine and a travel machine – you can sync your note-taking app on both machines via Simplenote.

Enter Automattic – The Makers Of WordPress

What I didn’t know until I took another look at Simplenote today is that it is now owned by Automattic – the makers of WordPress.

Here’s an extract from the Simplenote blog post of Jan 24th this year:

Simplenote has a new home! Our company, Simperium, has been acquired by Automattic, makers of WordPress.com. We think this’ll be great for everyone, especially you, our beloved fans

So there you have it: Use Simplenote as a web-based note-taking app, or use it to sync or backup your machine-based note-taking app.

Syncing nVALT With Simplenote

* If You Are Interested In Knowing A Bit More About Markdown

Markdown is both ‘plain text markup syntax’ and a software tool that converts plain text markup to HTML.

In plain English, it is a simple way of writing an article that contains the code to make text that displays with formatting and that can also be displayed as a web page.

For example, it can make bold text and italic text, as well as headings and links. It was invented by Jon Gruber of Daring Fireball fame and you can read about it on Daring Fireball.

There is more than one flavour of version of Markdown, and the one we use on Quillcards is slightly different from Jon Gruber’s original version. The reason is that when people are writing text in ecards, they expect that the return key will start a new paragraph – except that in the original Markdown it doesn’t. With Jon’s version, it requires two returns keystrokes to start a new paragraph – one keystroke just makes a line break.

So the version we use is the Github-Flavored Markdown.

I am slowly learning the Markdown keystrokes almost by default because, as I say, our own site at Quillcards uses Markdown markup language.

The MadMimi email service that I use also uses Markdown, and as does Google+, and as does Marsedit, which I do use for writing blog posts.

Here are a few examples Of Markdown Syntax

## Put two hash marks at the beginning of a line to make larger size text.

*Put an asterisk either side of the text to make italics.* ( works with underscores as well _ )

**Put double asterisks either side of the text to make bold text.**

Calla Lilly and AZ Claire Free Font

First the free font – which is available from Creative Market – and is named AZ Claire. It is by Andre Zottolo of AristofDesign. Normally it is $20.00, so grab it quick.

And here it is:

Secondly, I passed a flower shop and bought a Calla Lilly. I really should have set up my tripod and checked the light, but time was pressing, so I just shot and hoped. I do too much of that.

Calla Lilly

Yellow Fonts, Contrast, And Clarity

I went into the customisation options for this theme to see whether I could change the colour of the font in the sidebar because it seems a bit unclear. That is, the contrast between the yellow font and the white background means that I have to peer to see the lettering.

I don’t mean that I actually bend forward towards the screen, lift my fictitious glasses, squint, and utter small sounds while trying to make out the lettering.

I mean that inside my semi-conscious mind, my inner ‘me’ is doing that.

Notice that the yellow lettering changes to dark blue when you bring your mouse over any of the sidebar widgets. It is so much easier to read with the mouse at on-hover over a particular sidebar widget.

But that is not the default position for a general view of the page, and the yellow is too light and unclear, in my opinion.

I went into the customisation options, to see whether it was possible to change the colour of the font. There didn’t seem to be an option to do this, so I went into the custom upgrade options.

That’s when I saw the information (see the image above) that the option to change the colours will be available at some time in the future – and without buying the custom upgrade, of course.

The Superhero theme is made by Automattic (the makers of WordPress), so I would think it would be high on the list of themes for which they will be making this feature active.

Self-Hosted Superhero

The Superhero theme is available for self-hosted WordPress sites and I have this site that I keep for testing themes, which is at DBWORDPRESS.COM.

I went into it and activated Superhero, and then in the stylesheet CSS I changed the colours of the font in the sidebar from #F6C628 (yellow) to the same colour blue as the headings in the main body content, which is #1E4A66.

Colors/Colours On The Web

I might change the font colour to something else when I have the time and inclination to decide what colour palette will work.

Then, when WordPress.com introduces Custom Colors, I will have done the groundwork and be able to change the colour straight away to something that ‘works’.

I use Colors On The Web for playing around with colour palettes. Go to Color Tools in the main navigation bar and click on Color Wizard in the drop-down menu. That will bring up an interactive color-matching application like you can see here.

You can start from scratch or you can input a hexadecimal if you have one that you want to use. Then you have various choices like the one shown here – ‘split complimentary’.

By the way, the font in Superhero is Carrois Gothic, which is a Google font, available by going to the Google fonts pages.

Moi On Rebel Mouse

Have you tried Rebel Mouse? I am not sure where it is going with its service (oh, yes – they introduced a ‘pro’ service recently) – but whatever may or may not happen with the service, it is pleasant to see all my posts gathered in from here and there.

And I have a couple of extra tabs set so that I can see the latest updates from one or two people. I’ve got tabs for Bianca Bosker from the Huffington Post, and Kristi Hines from Kikolani.com

As you might see, my URL is https://www.rebelmouse.com/moi

Update, update, read all about it

Weekly Photo Challenge: Culture

Culture

The word culture comes from the Latin word meaning to cultivate, as in agriculture. It gained its modern usage in the 1800s.

What is this culture of which we speak?

Is in the brightly-coloured baubles in the shops?

Is it in the high-flown opera to which I do not go?

Is it in the book I am reading?

Is it in the conversations I have?

Where is it when the conversation runs dry?

Where is it when I am silent and meditating on my breathing?

Is it given to me or do I have to find the key?

Is there more to come or is this all there is?

The Mini Maker Faire

I took these photos at Summerhall, at the Mini Maker Faire that was held there on 7th April as part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival.

This man was playing a wooden xylophone at the time. The slightly dreamy look is him keeping time as he beat out a constantly changing melody and rhythm.

When I took this photo, he was probably about twenty minutes into a continuous piece that went on for another twenty minutes or more. The wooden pads on the xylophone made a sound that brought to mind music from South East Asia.

It was quite something, and because there were people all around doing other things, it was easy to just get into a trance with his mussic hammering out a gentle backdrop to the afternoon.

Fly Agaric Fire Education

The xylophone player stopped for the performance by this man, Ruaraidh Milne, from Fly Agaric whose business card states:

Trapeze, circus skills, environmental education, fire shows and more..

What he was doing here was showing how centripetal force plus oxygen plus fire plus a flammable material behaves. He’s holding bullwhip and he first explained how bullwhips work, which is by the wave created by cracking the whip being forced along the constantly narrowing diameter along its length.

I always thought that the little bit of string or leather tied onto the end of a bullwhip was for decoration. Little did I know that it’s an essential part of the design.

Because the wave is being forced to occupy a smaller cross-sectional area as it travels, it has to speed up – hence the crack.

Then he lit the bullwhip, which he had bathed in paraffin, and it burned. But it didn’t make a big whoosh of flame – it just burned merrily.

But when he cracked it, the flammable liquid and the flame were forced out of the end of the bullwhip at speed. Pretty impressive, isn’t it?

He was terrifically entertaining and a great educator.

Painting skulls

Inside Summerhall I saw kids decorating skulls. The decoration and the skulls themselves were all made of sugar and I couldn’t help but think that there was a certain gusto with which the kids were doing it. I mean, come on, these are skulls – as in dead people.

It reminded me of the Day Of The Dead in Mexico.

Skull work from Mahala le May – check out her site for more decorated skulls and a stop-motion dancing skull.

Tinkering With Electronics

There were a lot of computer engineers tinkering with bits of micro circuitry that did everything from sketching the Mona Lisa to powering tiny cars around a track.

There was also a Tesla generator spitting arcing sparks onto light bulbs to power them. I saw the film The Prestige on TV a while ago and when I googled for Tesla (played by David Bowie in the film) I discovered there is quite a mystique about Tesla and his life. The Oatmeal made an infographic about his life.

Remade In Edinburgh

There were also crafty things at the Mini Maker Faire – including a Remade In Edinburgh which describes itself as follows:

REMADE in Edinburgh is a community-led initiative to create a reuse and repair centre in South Edinburgh. The centre will host courses and workshops, converting things that would be thrown away into useful objects, training people in new skills, and promoting a zero-waste Edinburgh as an alternative to a culture of cheap disposable items.

So if you are in or around Edinburgh – you might want to contact them if you have something to donate or want to join in.

Tech Notes

I shot the portrait and the fire photo with an Olympus E-PM1 with 45mm lens – and I shot the skull with my iPhone.

Glenda Jackson leads the Labour Party

Reblogged from Edinburgh Eye:

• 

Who is that Ed Miliband chap again?

This is the MP I want to lead the Opposition. Because today, she did.

'When I made my maiden speech a little over two decades ago, Margaret Thatcher had been elevated to the other place but Thatcherism was still wreaking, as it had wreaked for the previous decade, the most heinous, social, economic and spiritual damage upon this country, upon my constituency and my constituents.

Read more… 780 more words, 1 more video

My comment: For anyone who is not from the UK, but may have read the news of the recent death of the ex-prime minister Margaret Thatcher and is interested to know where I stand and where many people like me stand in regard to her policies and her legacy - here is the Member Of Parliament Glenda Jackson (yes, the actress before she became a politician) on Thatcherism.

Worrier Owl

This photo and the previous ones are crops of the photos I took. Now I am thinking about how to use the full frames of the images…

Warrior Owl

What does he bring to mind?

He reminds me of a very wise person, or perhaps a Norse warrior dressed in an owl’s feathers to make himself more fearsome for battle.

Super Sweet

Super Sweet

Maria from Accelerated Stall included me in an award given to bloggers who have “wonderfully witty personalities” and who “are very creative” with a request to answer a quiz and forward on the award.

Ha!

I could add to that Bah and Humbug, but I’ve read A Christmas Carol and I’ve seen Groundhog Day, so I know that the path to redemption and a happy life is to say Yes!

Ernie Pyle

I’m reading ‘Brave Men’ by Ernie Pyle. Ernie Pyle was a war correspondent during World War II. He was very famous and well liked, in part because he wrote from the perspective of the common man – the soldier, be he a major or a private – who was fighting on the front lines.

He was killed in 1945 on an island off Okinawa, when the jeep in which he was travelling was strafed from a machine gun. He jumped out of the jeep and into a ditch; raised his head to ask whether the other occupants of the jeep were OK, and was hit.

Actually, I have been reading ‘Brave Men’ for about two years now, but I put it away part read as I turned my attention to other books.

But like a bad student turned good, a few days ago I picked up three or four books that I am part-way through, and determined to finish them. And this morning I got to this particular section (it’s on page 224 of the edition I have, which was published in 1944).

In this chapter, Pyle is billeted with a light bomber squadron, and he writes:

“Another one told me felt he just couldn’t go on. He had completed his allotted missions, and nobody could doubt his courage. He want to go and ask to be grounded, but just couldn’t bring himself to do it.

So I urged him to go ahead. Afterwards I got both sides of the story. The officers told me that they were kicking themselves for not noticing the gunner’s nervousness in time and for letting it go until he had to hurt his pride by asking to be grounded.

But those were men’s innermost feelings. They didn’t express them very often. They didn’t spend much time sitting around glooming to each other about their chances.

Their outlook and conversation were just as normal as that of men in no danger at all. They played joked on each other, and wrote letters, and listened to the radio, and sent gifts home, and drank a little vino, and carried on just like anybody else.

It was only when a man “had had it” – the combat expression for anyone who had had more than he could take – that he sat alone and didn’t say much and began to stare.”

Reading Ernie Pyle makes me think of Catch 22.

Fear and Misanthropy

A misanthrope, if you didn’t know, is someone who has a general hatred, mistrust or disdain of the human species or human nature.

I read just now in Wikipedia that:

In Western philosophy, misanthropy has been connected to isolation from human society. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates defines the misanthrope in relation to his fellow man: “Misanthropy develops when without art one puts complete trust in somebody thinking the man absolutely true and sound and reliable and then a little later discovers him to be bad and unreliable…and when it happens to someone often…he ends up…hating everyone.”

Misanthropy, then, is presented as the result of thwarted expectations or even excessively naive optimism, since Plato argues that “art” would have allowed the potential misanthrope to recognize that the majority of men are to be found in between good and evil. Aristotle follows a more ontological route: the misanthrope, as an essentially solitary man, is not a man at all: he must be a beast or a god, a view reflected in the Renaissance of misanthropy as a “beast-like state.

…In the Judeo-Islamic philosophies (800–1400), the Jewish philosopher Saadia Gaon, uses the Platonic idea that the self-isolated man is dehumanized by friendlessness to argue against the misanthropy of anchorite asceticism and reclusiveness.”

So I couldn’t help but think that what goes on inside a man’s head might be misanthropy, or it might be fear.

The Edinburgh Science Festival

Which brings me to the Edinburgh Science Festival. I have a sense of affiliation with the festival because one of my photographs (of Nerites shells) is included in a large display in St Andrew’s Square in the centre of Edinburgh as part of the Patterns In Nature exhibition.

As well as messing about with various science experiments at the festival, we have been to several talks. One was given by researchers at Edinburgh and Stirling universities and considered the ‘authentic self’.

That’s the sense of self we feel when we are true to ourselves and in tune with ourselves.

One of the things that came out of the investigation is that in general, feeling ‘authentic’ is a social feeling.

People generally feel it when there are others around. They may be actively engaged or just hanging out. But it’s with others that we feel our authentic selves.

And that’s a long way around to saying thank you, Maria.

The Questions

1. Cookies or cake? Cake – moist cake.

2, Chocolate or Vanilla? Vanilla, vanilla to the point that I feel I would stand up and sings its praises like an underdog pitted against more exotic flavours. Chocolate is good, but vanilla is harmony.

3. Favourite sweet treat? Mmmm,… fruit. Any fruit that has reached perfection. It could be a strawberry or a greengage, or…

4. When do you crave sweet things the most? Anywhere near food. I’m very impulsive when it comes to food. I am triggered by what is around me. If you starting eating a cupcake…

5. If you had a sweet nickname, what would it be? ‘Most unlikely’ – that would be my nickname.

Not Complete Without A Photo Of The Outside Of A Dog

I spotted this guy sitting in a pedestrianised street – his compadre was juggling clubs nearby. Is he (the dog) phenomenal or what? Yes, he’s a huskie.

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” – Groucho Marx

My Nominees

Mmmm, I don’t follow many people who have a sweet tooth or a penchant for whimsy, so this is a hard one. I’m going for Annette and Rebkins.

Anette from The Blog Formerly Known As Ink

Rebkins from Purrsonal Mewsings