Limited edition dishes have a very limited market for two main reasons. First, they feature a very limited selection of art. Cute dogs, American flags, flowers, and Russian folk tales only appeal to so many people. These plates are basically baseball cards for grandmas. Second, most of these dishes are designed solely for display and could actually kill you if you ate off them–this is crazy since the last time I checked normal people used dishes for serving food, not decorating their walls. These companies need to expand their stables of artists and use nontoxic paints.

To get things started concretely, I propose the following set of four limited edition dinner plates by Frank Frazetta. Imagine the look of wonder on your guests’ faces as they clear their plates and reveal the raw ferocity and masculinity of Conan the Barbarian. I know I would buy them. Click through to see them in their full resolution glory!

I first heard about how great document scanners are from David Sparks and Katie Floyd on the Mac Power Users Podcast. A little while later I read David’s ebook Paperless where he describes many more ways to use a document scanner and raved particularly about Fujitsu’s line of ScanSnaps. Then just a few weeks ago I read a mini review/announcement of the ScanSnap iX500 on David’s blog (Mac Sparky). You may be noticing a pattern here. If ScanSnap owners are a cult, then David Sparks must surely be a high priest.

My current workflow doesn’t generate a whole lot of paper, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have file cabinets full of paper. Most of it just sits there, but occasionally I want to look at an old bill or a marked up article. In the best case sceneario it takes me a while to find it and more often I’m not even in the office where it resides. I’ve always wanted instant searchable secure access to this stuff from anywhere. This was especially true for the slow steady stream of paper that arrives in the mail and would eventually find a home in a physical folder in one of these cabinets.

After reading David’s review, I pulled the trigger and ordered a Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500. I liked that it could be plugged into a Mac or a Windows PC or even nothing at all since it could talk to a wifi network. Alas, David was right that this stuff didn’t matter since at the end of the day it’s just plugged into my Mac and sits next to it on my desk. That said, it’s been great. I just plop an article on it and press a button. It scans both sides of pages simultaneously and recognizes when one side is blank. When the pages have print on them, it’s smart enough to rotate them right side up. It’s been very robust to some very crinkly drocuments. And it can gobble up 25 pages per minute.

I’ve been using it for three distinct tasks so far:

1. When prepping classes or doing brainstorming for a research project, I sometimes use pen and paper. When I’m done, I just feed it to the ScanSnap and drop the resulting pdf into my carefully engineered hierarchy of documents. The actual paper disappears into the recycling bin. I do the same thing with articles that I’ve printed and marked up in the past. It’s unnecessary with recent articles since I now do all my markup digitally.

2. I keep a folder of pdf’s that I want to read and when something paper comes my way that I want to save for later, I just scan it and drop it into this folder.

3. My favorite things to scan are bills, reference manuals, receipts, and miscellaneous records that usually (but not always) arrive in the mail. I make the Scanner OCR the documents as it reads them in and just drop them into my “reference” folder. Usually I give them descriptive filenames, but I don’t need to since Spotlight indexes all the OCR’ed text making them remarkably easy to find when I need them. And since the folder is on Dropbox, I can search it on any Mac that shares the folder.¹ We still have our file cabinets of paper at home and I’ve still got 5 drawers full of it at work, but very little new paper is entering those drawers and I’m even removing stuff as needed.

The scanner hasn’t been my only recent step on the path to paperless. I’ve also evicted my office printer and replaced it with a palm tree. It’s so much prettier and never smells bad. It sequesters carbon and doesn’t use electricity. And watering a plant feels so much better than replacing toner cartridges. Both the scanner and the tree are highly recommended!

When most people think of heavy metal, the major themes that come to mind are death, evil, testosterone, violence, and maybe misogyny. And sure, the vast majority of heavy metal is probably inappropriate for most kids. Especially little kids. But that doesn’t mean all metal is inappropriate. Some songs are downright kid-friendly and they’re a great way to inject some fresh blood into the typical parent’s rather limited musical repertoire.

Before I dive into my list of recommended tracks, you should know that there exists an actual just-for-kids metal band from Finland called Hevisaurus and they are awesome. They dress in dinosaur outfits and the videos are the good kind of crazy. Unfortunately, singing in Finnish is a deal breaker for me–my kids love fun lyrics and this music doesn’t sound all that different from traditional Scandinavian metal. We might as well be listening to early Dimmu Borgir or Opeth.

My list comes in two parts. First are the songs that are actually family-friendly. The music isn’t too scary and the words don’t have any unacceptably rude surprises. And they rock. Songs on the second list also rock and might seem OK for kids at first. It’s just that some of the words might induce an awkward conversation (best case) or nightmares (worst case).

Part 1: The best of the best

1. Crazy Train (Ozzy Osbourne):

This song is almost perfect–Kids love trains and laughing, and so does Ozzy. If you ignore the fake blood and the bat-eating (and maybe the finger tattoos), Ozzy is just a silly old man–he reminds me a lot of Santa Claus without the hat or the beard. This song even has words John Lennon could have written:

    Maybe it's not too late
    To learn how to love
    And forget how to hate

(Full disclosure: This was my high school yearbook quote.)

2. Rock and Roll All Night (Kiss):

The make-up and the costumes are super-fun and the song’s extremely catchy. Some of the lyrics are a little suggestive, but not enough to make me uncomfortable:

    You show us everything you've got
    Baby, baby that's quite a lot
    And you drive us wild, we'll drive you crazy

3. Merry Go Round (Mötley Crüe):

This song is another slam dunk–carousels are on my older daughters’ list of the top five things in life along with ponies, princesses, fairies, and minotaurs.

4. Pour Some Sugar on Me (Def Leppard):

Kids love sugar and messes and this song has both. The band name also provides a good teachable moment about spelling–adults make mistakes too!

5. Ice Cream Man (Van Halen):

It’s not the heaviest song in the world, but it does have an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo and who doesn’t like ice cream? The only issue is that this song is (surprise) not about ice cream at all, but the kids don’t have to know David Lee Roth is a drug-addled perv.

6. Kids Will Rock (Rough Cutt):

Not too many folks have heard of Rough Cutt–they were one of the hair metal bands that didn’t quite make it big in the 80’s though I’m not sure why. This song is about kids and even has a chorus of kids join in at the end!

7. Raise Your Hands to Rock (Mötley Crüe):

Songs that demand specific actions are always a big hit and this one couldn’t be catchier.

8. Jump (Van Halen):

Another movement song and this one might be even more fun to act out than the last.

9. Stand up and Shout (Dio):

Standing up and shouting is fun, but this song is borderline too fast and heavy. Ronnie also mentions being “nailed to the wheel” in passing, but even though I’ve listened to this song hundreds of times, I never noticed until reading the lyrics five minutes ago.

10. Rock You Like a Hurricane (The Scorpions):

We’ve been reading a ton of Magic Schoolbus books lately and hurricanes are pretty cool.

Part 2: Don’t quite make the cut

1. Bark at the Moon (Ozzy):

I wanted so much for this song to be okay mostly because I’ve played it for the girls in the past and they like it. Hopefully they haven’t listened too closely to the words which contain gems like:

    Years spent in torment
    Buried in a nameless grave 
    Now he has risen 
    Miracles would have to save 
    Those that the beast is looking for 

2. Givin the Dog a Bone (AC DC):

I love dogs and I’m OK with innuendo, but this song crosses the subtlety line right away:

    She take you down easy
    Going down to her knees
    Going down to the devil
    Down down at ninety degrees
    She blowing me crazy
    'til my ammunition is dry
    She's using her head again
    She's using her head

3. Give It All (Ratt):

I thought I might be able to spin this song as a tune about putting in your best effort. Too bad Stephen Pearcy is actually talking about how much love he is going to give his partner that night.

4. Modern Day Cowboy (Tesla):

This song is about cowboys and it’s a story about the Cold War that even teaches lessons about geography and spelling with lines like “the USA! the USSR!” Unfortunately even cold wars involves guns:

    Bang Bang, shoot'em up.
    Bang Bang, blow you away.

5. Hungry (Winger):

Kids get hungry and Winger is catchy as heck. But this song is not about being hungry for food:

    Girl I'm hungry for your love
    Girl I'm hungry
    Baby let me in
    Hungry for your love
    Hungry I can't get enough

6. Don’t Talk to Strangers (Dio):

This song had such promise as a fun song that teaches a valuable lesson. Too bad Ronnie James Dio comes across as a paranoid psychotic:

    Don't talk to strangers
    Cause they're only there to do you harm
    Don't write in starlight
    'Cause the words may come out real
    Don't hide in doorways
    You may find the key that opens up your soul
    Don't go to Heaven cause it's really only Hell
    Don't smell the flowers
    They're an evil drug to make you loose your mind
    Don't dream of women
    'Cause they'll only bring you down

7. Iron Man (Black Sabbath):

The story of Iron Man is in many ways a like that of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. He looks different from everyone else and people mistreat him. And just as Rudolph led the sleigh on that foggy night, Iron Man “travelled time for the future of mankind.” But instead of joining in everyone’s reindeer games, Iron Man “kills the people he once saved.” Oh well.

Part 3: Confession time:

I am a true child of 80’s metal and would very much like to share my passion for heavy music with my children. That’s why I’ve gone to the trouble to curate this list of songs that won’t get me fired as a dad. But a few issues remain:

1. The girls don’t actually like these songs very much. I’m hoping they will grow on them, but for now they far prefer kid music, boy bands, girl-pop, and even Latin music and reggae.
2. None of my recommended songs are all that heavy. Korn, Metallica, and Slayer are all conspicuously absent. I’m going to be listening to “real” metal on my own time until the girls are quite a bit older.
3. I don’t suggest watching any of the video versions of these songs. All the subtlety goes out the window and is usually replaced by pyrotechnics and half-naked women.
4. Suppose the your kids love this play list. There isn’t really anywhere else kid-appropriate to go. It was surprisingly hard to come up with even these few songs.

All that said, my girls do put up with it in small doses and I certainly enjoy it!

Update: Maybe some black metal is an option for younger listeners.

Our household is heavily invested in iTunes. We have a big collection on an iMac that never sleeps. We have an AppleTV in the living room and an Airport Express in the kitchen that serve as AirPlay destinations. With the iOS Remote app, we can stream whatever we want wherever we want. It doesn’t depend on Bluetooth or on keeping iPods synced up to date, and now that our wifi network is working well¹, it’s great. But I wanted more.

It turns out that our current 13,585 songs is not enough. Pretty often I’ll hear a new “artist”² on the radio and want to hear more from them. In the olden days I would carefully listen to 90 second samples in the iTMS and fret about whether to invest in the whole album. Now I can login to Spotify on the desktop and listen to as much as I want over and over. If only there was a way to easily spread this goodness around the house. Of course there is.

The key to the system is a piece of Mac software made by Rogue Amoeba called AirFoil. It costs $25 and it will push the audio output of any app to any Airplay destinations. The next piece of the puzzle is an iPhone app called Reemote ($4.99) that remotely controls AirFoil. Another iPhone app called Remoteless ($2.99) lets me control the desktop Spotify and do things like search for artists, albums, or songs to play. Each app requires a free helper app that runs on the Mac. If you’re willing to put up with Spotify’s ads (so far I am), the service is free!

Once Spotify, iTunes, and the two helper apps are up and running, here’s how it works. If I want to play music from my library, I bring up Reemote and make sure Airfoil streaming is turned off to my three destinations. Then I use Remote just as I used to. If I then want to play something with Spotify, I tell Remote to stream only to the computer and tell Reemote to stream to either the kitchen or the living room or both. Then I use Remoteless to get Spotify going. The process is surprisingly efficient when all three apps are on your iPhone’s home screen. The system itself is a little finicky and does occasionally require me to restart Spotify on the desktop, but the extra power is so worth it.

I drive a 2002 Honda Civic. It’s an automatic and even though the interior is smeared with a thin layer of toys and crumbs, it hasn’t been vacuumed in months. It could not be less of a “driving machine” or more of a “people mover.” And yet, my favorite new podcast (Neutral) is all about cars and the tech behind them.

Marco Arment, John Siracusa, and newcomer Casey Liss have teamed up to tell folks on the Internet what they drive, what they would like to drive, what everyone else should drive, and most importantly the reasons behind each in excruciating detail. In just four episodes, I’ve learned about dual clutch transmissions, the appeal of white cars, pricing of used Acura NSX’s, and how hard it is not to generalize from small samples even when we know it’s wrong.

When I was in college, I read Car and Driver and Road and Track religiously. Even though I couldn’t afford a car at all, I could tell you the difference between the latest models of BMW, Audi, and Volvo. So it makes me really happy that a bunch of nerdy guys who now have a bit of money and who have been keeping up better than me can now own nice cars. (Actually, only Marco and Casey are in this situation–John still drives an Accord while he waits for his kids to finish elementary school and middle school and high school and college. It’s going to be a while for John.)

I really only have the tiniest complaint about the show and it starts with a comment Marco made while defending his choice to pay (about) $500/month to lease a “nice” car instead of $250/month to lease an “adequate” car. He said that meant he must get twice as much value from the nice car to make it worthwhile. A reader graciously wrote in to correct his logic, but clearly it didn’t stick because Marco proceeded to wave his hands and say the argument was “semantics.”

Price is not the same thing as value. People buy a thing when the price is less than or equal to the value they get from that thing. This value (or benefit) is often much higher than the price. The difference between the value and the price is called the consumer surplus. When deciding between purchasing two things (like a nice car and an adequate car), what matters is which one has the higher consumer surplus. In Marco’s case, that means he needs to get at least $250 additional value from the nice car–that’s almost certainly much less than double the value he would get from the adequate car.

Part of being a nerd is sweating the details and getting stuff right. No one wants to ship buggy products and they shouldn’t ship buggy podcasts either. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt since Neutral is still a 1.0.

Mommy blogs are full of articles about how to reuse stuff you have lying around the house as toys for your kids, but for whatever reason, the trappings of my teens and twenties have not proven very entertaining for the girls. The awesome car stereo I had in my Honda CRX is long gone and it might be a while before the girls age into my dartboard and collection of heavy metal cd’s. Even my old volleyballs are not as fun as the purple and pink balls we picked up for 99 cents at the drug store.

So I was thrilled the other day to find my four year old happily flipping through my First Edition Monster Manual. If you didn’t spend big chunks of high school playing Dungeons and Dragons, you might not have heard of it. It’s basically an encyclopedia of monsters with illustrations that look a lot like what a high school student might doodle on their notebook. Check out this review at Something Awful to get a flavor for it.

The big question you’re probably asking yourself right now is “Good God! How is that appropriate for kids?” If you happen to have a kid that loves monsters, the pictures won’t give her (or him) nightmares–they’re that cheesy. The only real issue is the occasional topless demon or mermaid, but that’s not much different than the average clothing catalog. The only caveat is that you probably don’t want to read the monster descriptions out loud. I made this mistake with the ochre jelly and won’t make it again.

I work regularly with two computers. At home, I have an iMac with a big drive that is on all the time. At the office (and everywhere else) I use a MacBook Air. All my documents and data are stored on Dropbox and I use Subsonic to stream my home music collection wherever I happen to be. If I watched movies, I could probably do the same with them. With this setup, I am equally productive on both machines and it doesn’t take that much work to keep apps and preferences in sync.

I used to think I had the perfect backup system. At home, my iMac’s internal drive is backed up to an external disk with Time Machine and to the cloud with BackBlaze. Since all my documents and data live in Dropbox, they’re duplicated (along with old versions) in Dropbox’s cloud. My Macbook Air has almost nothing sacred outside Dropbox and until recently, I thought that if the disk failed, all I’d have to do is reinstall my apps (just a few minutes work with the App Store) and I’d be back in business. I was wrong.

About two weeks ago, it happened: my Air’s disk failed: The only thing that showed up on my screen was a blinking Folder icon with a question mark in the center. I quickly dropped off the machine at the local Apple store for service and muddled along for a few days with my old ThinkPad Hackintosh. When I finally picked up my repaired machine, it had a pristine installation of Lion and nothing else. I brought it home, installed Dropbox, and let LAN Sync work its magic over the local wifi and in a couple hours my documents and data were back. Then, with the press of a button I installed my 25 or so App Store apps.

That’s when I realized just how many apps I rely on are NOT in the App Store. They fall into four broad categories:

1. Apps that break Apple’s sandboxing rules

Several really useful utilities want to insert themselves deeper into the operating system than Apple would like.

1Password: Lets me use ridiculously long strings of unguessable gobbledy gook for passwords without having to remember them. Also securely holds all my account numbers, credit card numbers and plugs this stuff into web pages as needed.

Alfred: After a simple Command-Space I can type short incantations to make amazing things happen. You really need to check out the web page to see how awesome and productivity-enhancing this is.

TextExpander: I type short things like “;s” in any app and TextExpander fills in long snippets of text.

KeyRemap4Macbook: I use it to give me emacs key combinations pretty much anywhere, but the app can do lots more.

Moom: Makes it easy to move and resize windows to common places and sizes.

DefaultFolderX: It expands the File->Open Dialog to show bigger QuickLook previews and makes it easy to select commonly used paths. It’s super-useful if you have very hierarchical directory structures.

2. Apps from companies that don’t want to give Apple 30%

Microsoft Office: The cheese sandwich of software–it does its job competently, but it’s hard to get excited about it.

Stata: My go-to data analysis software. Fast, feature-filled, relatively shallow learning curve, and great documentation. What more do you want?

Papers: Manages big collections of pdfs and simplifies search for academic literature.

3. Apps I think should be in the App Store

These apps are free and frankly I have no idea why they’re not in the App Store:

Skype and Google Chrome: If you are reading this on a computer screen, then you already know these two.

Aquamacs: Puts Mac lipstick on an old pig of an editor. That said, I’ve been using emacs for 20 years and I love it.

nvAlt: I’ve been using nvAlt for about six months to manage all my miscellaneous notes. It’s super-easy to search and the data are accessible on all my devices.

4. Apps that are just too geeky for the App Store

You’re going to be spending quality time at the command-line if you use brew, Ruby, and Octopress, so you may as well install them by hand.

Once all I installed all these apps, I still had lots of little things to do. I had to tweek the preferences for most of my apps. I had to set up the finicky network printer in the office. In order to access the secure university wifi network, I had to install the required certificate. I could go on, but this gives you the flavor–The whole process of getting back to where I started took far longer than I had envisioned and I don’t want to go through it again.

The Solution

The main requirement of any solution was that it back up what wasn’t already safe–i.e., everything outside my Dropbox folder. But any solution also had to need absolutely minimal human intervention. I am not to be trusted to manually mirror drives every week. I also wanted to do as much as possible with hardware I had lying around.

Because we’re only talking about about 40 GB, I was able to repurpose an old 250GB external drive as a Time Machine disk that now lives at the office nestled into a book shelf. It’s plugged into a hub along with my phone charger, iPad charger and USB ethernet adapter. The first thing I always do upon arrival is plug the Air into it’s power adapter, the external display, and the hub. This procedure hasn’t had to change at all. When I leave, I pull the external display cable and close the lid on the Air. Jettison automatically waits for any ongoing Time Machine backups to finish and ejects the external disk before sleeping the Mac. As soon as I hear the disk stop, I unplug the hub and my power cable and I’m ready to go.

The other day I took my favorite winter coat to a tailor to have the zipper fixed. The woman very graciously showed me that nothing was actually broken–I’d simply forgotten that it was a two way zipper and both parts needed to be at the bottom in order for it to work. It was embarrassing, but I was still happy since the “repair” was extremely fast and it cost nothing. I feel the same way about this adjustment to my backup system. It’s a little embarrassing that I didn’t recognize the weakness up front, but I’m also really happy that it was so easy to fix.

This post has moved to Teach Better.

For the past few quarters, I’ve noticed a disturbing pattern. At some point near the end of the financial quarter, professional stock analysts predict Apple’s numbers (e.g., profit and revenue) to go up a lot. The market takes these predictions seriously and the stock price adjusts to take them into account. Then Apple does report good numbers (usually record-breaking) but not quite as good as the analysts predicted. The stock goes down as the market adjusts using the new (factual) information about how well the company is doing. This is all perfectly normal.

The disturbing part is that the Apple tech writer blogosphere then complains that it doesn’t make sense. Their logic seems to be that because Apple just did really well, they should be rewarded for it and the stock should go up. They think the expectations shouldn’t matter. They don’t seem to understand that stock prices are a function of currently held capital and expectations of future performance. Sigh. If these writers want to be mad about something, they should be mad that the analysts are doing a lousy job at predicting Apple’s performance. They shouldn’t be surprised by basic market behavior.

Three important points I forgot to make when talking about couch cushions the other day:

1. Turning the cushions into toys wasn’t actually my idea. I went into the kitchen to get a drink, and when I returned to the living room, the girls had already started the party!

2. Unless you run an unbelievably clean house, tossing your cushions around is going to raise a fair amount of dust and maybe even fire retardant. Not great for kids with bad allergies or asthma.

3. You may have noticed in my picture that the seen was augmented with dog beds. We don’t currently have any pets, but our old dog beds do let us slightly reduce the probability of this whole exercise ending up at the emergency room.