Jamie Thingelstad

This week we said goodbye to one of the most distinctive art features of our house. In January of 2003 Tammy’s longtime friend Liane McMeen painted a great mural in our living room that surrounded a piece of art that we got in Denver featuring a dog positioned in a Volkswagen Bug door. For over 6 years when people have come into our house and turned the corner to enter the main living area, they’ve been greeted by a very large mural that put a smile on their face and welcomed them to our house. It set the tone of our house: fun, lighthearted, happy.

As much as we liked the mural, we decided that it was time for a change, and that the mural should be retired. We celebrated with a dinner at our house with Liane and her husband Chris. Just this week the actual paint went up and the mural is gone. Some wonderful new pieces of art have gone up in the spot.

In memory of this great gift, I decided to do a new version of the original time-lapse video I did when the mural was put up, with some new photos on the end.

I put in the post 6 years ago that “We live with all of our art, but this is part of every day.” That couldn’t be more true. Thanks again to Liane! We still have the Blue Dog sculpture but it has been moved to a different spot in the house.

Enjoyed listening to Frankhouse tonight at the 318 Club. Good jazz. Friend of mine is the lead/trumpet player.

Still totally digging my Mini.

Just finished an emergency dog bath for Chase. I have no idea what he got into, but it smelled absolutely horrible. Hopefully a double shampoo got whatever off of him. Ugh.

Holy crap did the WordPress plugin Hot Linked Image Cacher just save me a ton of effort in moving things off of Tumblr.

I got an email from Four Firkins at 10:13 am that they had received their very first limited shipment of Surly Hell. They were limiting sales to 2 4-packs per customer, and opening 2 hours earlier to accomodate. I immediately mobilized with my neighbor Mike and off we went. Got the last four 4-packs in the cooler. They sent an email at 11:47 am saying:

Sorry people, it was crazy in here, it’s all gone.

It tastes delicious.

With the 3.0 release of the iPhone software Apple brought the platform level search capabilities of Spotlight to the iPhone. This has been a really nice addition, one that I’ve been using very regularly.

I’m a bit of an “app-aholic”. I’ve got more than a handful of applications installed and as a result I often have to flip through pages of apps in Springboard to find the right application. Sometimes I have a hard time finding the icon I’m looking for. I was thinking how I really wished that the iPhone had something like Quicksilver, and then it dawned on me that Quicksilver was really made as an optimization of using Spotlight as a launcher. Well, the iPhone has Spotlight so this should work, right?

With many applications installed I may have to swipe as many as 6 times to get to the application I want to launch.

But if I just do a single swipe, or a double-tap of the home button with the right settings, I can be at Spotlight and just start typing the name of the application I want. Say I wanted to launch a Twitter client like this.

One action to get to Spotlight, type two letters, and launch. Pretty much as good as using Quicksilver on my Mac. A lot faster than all that swiping, and it saves on thumb fatigue.

Now, it won’t work like this out of the box because by default Spotlight wants to show you email messages, address book contacts, and pretty much anything else before it will show you an app. So, let’s change that.

How to Set This Up

First, launch Settings and tap on General.

Now tap on Home.

We are now going to change search preferences. While you are on this screen you may also want to specify that double-tap of Home button launches search. With that, you are just two taps away from launching a new app anytime.

Okay, now we are just going to reorder the search results and put the Applications at the top of the list.

That’s it. Done. You can now simply double-tap the home button and type a letter or two to launch any of the dozens and dozens of apps on your iPhone. Nice!

As I was flowing through my RSS subscriptions in Google Reader I was struck for the millionth time how much everyone likes to write about “All Things Twitter”. “Man, I wish I could just zap these items from these feeds” I thought. Then it hit me that I used to do that all the time in my favorite Usenet News Reader nn nearly 20 years ago! Usenet programs nearly all supported killfiles, and it was great.

What is a kill file? From Wikipedia:

A kill file (also killfile, bozo bin or twit list) is a per-user file used by some Usenet reading programs (originally Larry Wall’s rn) to discard summarily (without presenting for reading) articles matching some particularly uninteresting (or unwanted) patterns of subject, author, or other header lines.

That is exactly what we need in our RSS readers. Please, please, pretty please?