Things That Improve Your Life

[Erkki]

Would the Arc Touch mouse work with a Mac? I notice the Amazon description does nto say so, but I suppose it would be silly of MS to advertise it.

Yes, it would be silly, because it works better with a Mac than with a Windows PC -- don't have to install anything, just plug it in and it works. Disclaimer: I've only used it once or twice with a mac, but the probably aren't any gotchas.

[Nachimir]

Yes, I use it with OS X and Windows 7 on a macbook pro, and it's fine on both.

[TychoCelchuuu]

Criticker is a website that I really like. You rank movies you've seen and, based on the rankings of people similar to you, it predicts what you would rank films you haven't seen. You can choose your own ranking scales and all that jazz. I rate from 1 to 100 and the numbers it predicts for me are rarely more than 5 away from the actual rating I choose to give a film. Pretty awesome for finding new stuff to watch.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Criticker is a website that I really like. You rank movies you've seen and, based on the rankings of people similar to you, it predicts what you would rank films you haven't seen. You can choose your own ranking scales and all that jazz. I rate from 1 to 100 and the numbers it predicts for me are rarely more than 5 away from the actual rating I choose to give a film. Pretty awesome for finding new stuff to watch.

Nice! Definitely going to check that out.

For directory usage stats, I use TreeSize - it's free, tiny, portable, and über fast.

[JonCole]

Directory usage stats for Android - DiskUsage

An excellent tool for those of you with Android devices that have low internal storage and thus limited ability to install apps.

[SiN]

I use DaisyDisk on Mac, it's fast, works really well, but really: because it looks pretty.

[Forbin]

I love this thread is now 101 disk usage utilities.

Something I use every day is this simple OS X app to keep my laptop from going to sleep:

http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/

[Lu]

I recently started using this to keep my desktop organized, as it tends to become a righteous mess: http://www.stardock....roducts/fences/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=w9-xDAnfYlI

I love it! Best 10 bucks I spent in a while.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Wow. That actually look incredibly useful... Every OS should have it by default.

[osmosisch]

I'm always surprised when I see people use their desktop for anything. My windows are always using 100% screen real estate so I never even see the desktop.

[melmer]

I just deleted fences2 off my work computer as the free trail ran out, pretty useful though considering i save practically everything on my desktop

I original had fences1 which you can pick up for free

http://www.afterdawn...dock_fences.cfm

[Lu]

Oh cool, I didn't know 1.0 was free. Any major differences over 2.0?

I'm always surprised when I see people use their desktop for anything. My windows are always using 100% screen real estate so I never even see the desktop.

I always save stuff to my desktop when I'm working on something, and it's incredibly handy to have folder portals on your desktop to things you frequently need. I can't imagine not using my desktop.

[melmer]

i just downloaded version one again through that link, slightly less features. But does the job nicely.

[thainatos]

New Bowie album. March. And new Bad Seeds in February. Life is great.

[JonCole]

Huh, thanks for the heads-up on freeware Fences 1. Just what I needed for the really hectic, non-savvy coworkers I have that need to better organize their desktops.

[James]

I'm always surprised when I see people use their desktop for anything. My windows are always using 100% screen real estate so I never even see the desktop.

Hey, me too. I don't remember when it was, but at some point I had a realization: as soon as my computer's finished booting up, I launch something, and from then on my desktop will be obscured. I was using the start menu, taskbar and run dialogue to get to everything anyway, so why have all these ugly icons sitting around doing nothing?

I always save stuff to my desktop when I'm working on something, and it's incredibly handy to have folder portals on your desktop to things you frequently need. I can't imagine not using my desktop.

I don't know whether it's the fact that my experience of Windows started in 3.1 back when everything other than File Manager was just shortcuts, but I've always found the idea of keeping actual files (rather than shortcuts) on the desktop really strange and dangerous. I guess it's kind of conveniently accessible, but it very quickly becomes incredibly messy and is generally way less functional than keeping things in normal folders. Fences introduces a lot of that functionality to the desktop, though, and the auto-categorization thing seems pretty cool.

I don't know why I think anyone would want to know any of this.

MORE ON-TOPIC: Criticker seems very cool. I think Netflix does a similar thing with its star rating system, but Criticker seems better-realized, and it obviously draws from a larger pool.

[Forbin]

I like Flickchart.com's approach over criticker. It uses the hot-or-not rating system to organize "your best movies" list. But rather than having to think about score on a 100 point scale, I just say I prefer ghost busters to beetlejuice.

It doesn't give you very good predictions based on what you've liked, but it does build up lists like "the best movies you haven't seen". And you can browse a bunch of lists generated by other users input. Like saying "best anime movie released in the 90s".

[TychoCelchuuu]

I used Flickchart for quite a while but I dumped it a little while after finding Criticker for a lot of reasons:

1. No predictions. I mean, yes, it's nice to have a list of my favorite movies, but it's a thousand times more useful to have a list of movies that I will enjoy. Flickchart's "best movies you haven't seen" are just based on the masses, which means that it told me I would want to watch shit I don't care about. Criticker is almost never wrong.

2. Criticker is much faster. If you're starting from scratch it's going to take forever to get your Flickchart set up, and even ranking a single movie in Flickchart takes a little while, and I suspect the results depend slightly arbitrarily on which movies you end up ranking against.

3. Criticker everything Flickchart does, and typically does it better. For example, here is the list of anime movies from the '90s that I haven't seen, ranked by how much I will enjoy them (the number at the end being the score I'd give them):

Serial Experiments: Lain (1998) 92

Samurai X: Trust and Betray… (1999) 90

Only Yesterday (1991) 89

Perfect Blue (1998) 89

Porco Rosso (1992) 89

Whisper of the Heart (1995) 89

Memories (1995) 86

Patlabor 2 (1993) 85

Ghost in the Shell (1995) 85

Onkyo seimeitai Noiseman (1997) 85

Macross Plus (1994) 84

Pom Poko (1994) 83

Golden Boy: Sasurai no o-be… (1995) 82

On Your Mark (1995) 80

Rôjin Z (1991) 80

Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (1998) 80

Comet in Moominland (1992) 79

Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: Th… (1998) 77

Armitage III: Poly Matrix (1997) 75

Dragon Ball Z 12: Fusion Re… (1995) 75

Ninja Scroll (1993) 75

Samurai X: The Motion Pictu… (1997) 72

4. Criticker does a lot of stuff Flickchart doesn't do, as far as I know. It's much easier to build these sorts of custom searches and to search custom lists, like "neo-noir" or "The Onion AV Club's New Cult Canon" or whatever.

5. Most importantly, I became dissatisfied with Flickchart's entire philosophy. I can't put every movie into an ordered list with the implication being the ones lower on the list are worse than the ones higher on the list, because I don't like all movies to different degrees. Some movies I like the same amount for the same reasons, and much more common is the case where I like two movies the same amount for different reasons. Is In a Lonely Place better than The Third Man? Is The Bridge on the River Kwai better than Chungking Express? Is Days of Heaven better than Being John Malkovich? Is The Road Warrior better than Paris, Texas? Dazed and Confused vs. On the Waterfront? Ghostbusters vs. Das Boot? I could give you answers to these questions, but not principled ones. My decision would change daily or hourly. Criticker doesn't make me choose and I think that makes way more sense. I looked at my Flickchart list at one point and realized that anything between #1 and #100 could probably move 20 spots or more without giving a result any less upsetting than what I had right then and there.

[James]

But rather than having to think about score on a 100 point scale, I just say I prefer ghost busters to beetlejuice.

I find the 100-point scale artificially precise for something as non-numeric as critical assessment, so I just decided to restrict myself to multiples of five. It's much easier to make quick decisions that way, but leaves me space to express preference for one of two films that I quite like, for example. A hundred points are available, but you're not forced to use them all.

I do see some merit to Flickchart's method, but ultimately I'd agonize over those decisions just as much as I do over scoring, if not more.

One appealing facet of Flickchart is that it doesn't infer any absolute information, only relative preferences. Starting out on Criticker, I've mainly been rating films I like, because those are the first that come to mind, and the ones that I tend to remember well enough to feel confident in scoring them, and those for which I can quantify my experience the best. Since it labels things according to a curve, I think at one stage it was deeming anything below 70 as "terrible", which isn't right at all.

[ThunderPeel2001]

100 is way too much. I've always said there are about five ratings that people actually use: Bad, OK, Good, Great, AMAZING!

100 is not only artificially precise, but it's open to interpretation. I rated a movie "60" (which in my book is "OK/above average") but Criticker said I'd rated it "BAD". If 60 is "bad", I can't imagine what's lower than that... So 0-60 is "bad" or worse? Is their system really set up to have more degrees for just how bad something is? Very bizarre, especially because "bad" is bad. You don't need to know the different between "bad", "terrible", "awful" and "catastrophic". It's not like you're going to go? "So the movie awful? I think I'll give it miss then. Oh wait, Julie only thought it was "terrible"? Hmm. Maybe I'll give it a shot..."

:-/ I'll keep at it and see what results it gives me.

[James]

When it comes to public-facing reviews, I think that a five-star system is probably the way to go. As you say, it summarizes the adjectives people would actually use to describe quality. I only decided on a more precise scale for Criticker because it's a personal thing. For the purposes of generating a profile of my tastes, it might matter if I prefer good film A to good film B, but in absolute terms it means a lot less. But if you want to use a five-point scale, you could restrict yourself to multiples of twenty, of course (as you may already be doing). I honestly probably should have gone with multiples of ten; as you said, once it's bad, who really cares how bad it is?

That said, I'm not sure how their recommendation system works, but perhaps it could factor into it. If I disliked film A, but hated film B, there may be a better chance of my liking films close (but not too close) to film A than film B.

Anyway, I wouldn't pay too much attention to the labels it gives the scores. I imagine it'll ultimately boil down to it picking recommendations "similar" to your top-rated films.

[TychoCelchuuu]

Like I said when I posted it, you don't have to rate from 1 to 100. If you don't like "60" meaning "Bad" you can change that too. You can rate from 1 to 5 if you want (for a 1 to 5 star rating system). Or 1 through 20 if you're doing things like James and rating in increments of 5. Just go to your profile and scroll down to "Manually control the colors & quips applied to your rankings with this tool" near the bottom.

James, the way the recommendation system works is that it finds people who rate movies like you rate movies and then aggregates their scores to guess at what you would rate the movie. This page explains it. You can also add people as friends ("Kumpels") and check out what they'd think of a movie if you think you know better than Criticker does whose taste to listen to. You can add me as a Kumpel!

[ThunderPeel2001]

I thought you'd said that, Tycho. I looked for that setting and couldn't find it, though. (That's one thing that hasn't been mentioned yet: The awful and ugly UI.)

[chummer]

For those looking for health related improvements, My Fitness Pal app. Been using it for about a week and I'm already paying a lot more attention to my caloric intake. Didn't realize how little an ounce of cheese was one nor how many calories it had!

I just deleted fences2 off my work computer as the free trail ran out, pretty useful though considering i save practically everything on my desktop

I original had fences1 which you can pick up for free

http://www.afterdawn...dock_fences.cfm

Thanks for this! Checking it out now.

[TychoCelchuuu]

Since we are talking about Fitness...

Couch to 5k is what I did when I started running for the first time in my life this summer (which is when I started listening to podcasts for the first time in my life, which is when I became an Idle Thumbs reader!)

Computer Stuff

YTD Video Downloader wants you to upgrade to the pro version and sometimes the download speeds are sort of slow, but it downloads YouTube videos with zero complaints and even converts them to other formats if you want.

MP3Gain is a program I assume everyone knows about, but if you don't, it makes sure your songs aren't too loud or quiet.

Steam Cleaner gets rid of those VC Redistributables and DirectX installers that Steam games download and run once and then never use again. Depending on how much of a Steam freak you are this can save you gigabytes of space.

Culture

KEXP streams its radio station. It is perhaps the hippest thing in the world and it has zero ads. If you want to scrobble it, KEXP Scrobbler works. What is scrobbling? It's sending a song to your Last.fm profile which is cool because last.fm is a fun website for music stuff.

InstantWatcher.com tells you what's new on Netflix streaming, what's expiring soon, etc. The Fighter is expiring soon and it's pretty good so maybe watch that.

Streaming Criterions tells you what Criterion Collection films are on Netflix streaming and on Hulu.

Party Down, Danger 5, and Garth Merenghi's Darkplace are three brilliant TV shows that not enough people know about. Danger 5 is actually going up on Hulu but you should start with the short five episode webseries.

Food

This is kind of cheating because these things don't improve MY life (I don't own them) but I've heard people say that this flatware rocks.

This is a fairly good free cookbook that focuses on teaching you HOW to cook rather than just throwing a bunch of recipes at you, leaving you unable to think for yourself.

Misc

WhatTheFont.com tells you what fucking font it is that they are using.

Kitten livestream. Dude fosters kittens all the time and streams them. The current set of foster kittens is all named after characters from the movie Aliens. I haven't gotten any fucking work done at my computer since I discovered this site. So I'm not sure if it improves my life in the long run. But in the short run holy shit this is the greatest.

Color Scheme Designer is a color scheme designer.