Entries from January 2008 ↓

I traveled two hours outside of Istanbul today to interview Ahmet Okutan, the mufti of Tekirdağ.  He was incredibly helpful both in terms of providing information about sermon preparation in his province and in terms of setting up additional interviews in the region (tomorrow I’m going to Edirne and tomorrow night it’s off to Çanakkale). 
Thanks to [...]

I swear I’m going to post about my research soon, but I wanted to point out that MacHeist’s deal on a bundle of some cool Mac apps ends today. Here’s what Lifehacker has to say:

Web site MacHeist’s second annual shareware bundle sale, which offers nearly $500 worth of software for the relatively low price of [...]

A Turkish court blocked access to YouTube last week for hosting a video that portrayed Atatürk, the founder of Turkey, as a monkey. This violated several Turkish laws, including Article 301, which was in the news so much after the assassination of Hrant Dink last year. 301 is the law that makes it a crime [...]

First we saw how a simple ballpoint pen could unlock those expensive Kryptonite bike locks, now pens are wrecking havoc on your locked luggage.  This quick video shows how easy it is to break into a locked suitcase by simply poking a ballpoint pen through the zipper.  The worst part is that you won’t know [...]

Belated props to my home state for kicking off the presidential race…

I found this image at the Etch-A-Sketchist, a site mentioned somewhat randomly at the end of the NYT piece on Scrivener.  And then there’s Etched in Time, a site that shows off the work of a young man who apparently sold his soul to [...]

Scrivener got a glowing tribute in the New York Times Magazine last Sunday.  This is the application I’ve been using for several months to write all my field notes, store ideas, and draft papers.  It’s not a full replacement for MS Word or other word processors — mostly because it can’t handle footnotes like those [...]

There’s a quick way to check whether a document being edited in Mac OS X contains any unsaved changes.  Just look at the red button in the upper left corner of the window.  If it has a dark dot in the center, the document has changed since being saved.  If not, you’re all set.
I’m usually [...]