If you’ve never heard of it, Project Gutenberg (Wikipedia page) is an almost entirely volunteer-driven effort to digitize, archive, and distribute “cultural works” (mostly books). It was established in 1971 and now includes over 30,000 free ebooks that you can read on a wide variety of devices including computers, cellphones, various mobile devices, and ebook readers.

Project Gutenberg contains some amazing, unparalleled works of literature and it is an incredibly valuable resource that just doesn’t seem to get the credit (and support) it deserves. This challenge has two purposes:

1) To inspire people to read some of these wonderful old classics, and
2) To support Project Gutenberg.

Here’s the challenge

1) Set a goal: Pick a number of Project Gutenberg books you think you could read over the next year. This can be anything from a conservative 2 or 3, a more ambitious one per month, or a hardcore no-holds-barred one per week. The number is entirely up to you. Post a quick comment here if you would like to make your goal public!

2) Make a donation: Donate a few dollars to Project Gutenberg. I’m going to donate $2 for each book in my goal, but that’s just a suggestion. Just try to send ‘em a couple of bucks if you can.

3) Find some books and start reading. Each time you finish a book, blog a quick review of it, fire off a tweet about it, or post to Facebook about it. Encourage other folks to play along, donate a few dollars, and read some of these amazing pieces of literature. Project Gutenberg is a great and under-appreciated project that is doing some fantastic work, so let’s show ‘em some love.

Not sure where to start?
Here’s a quick baker’s dozen of some of the fantastic books available through Project Gutenberg:

• Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
• Walden, Henry David Thoreau
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin
• Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery
• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
• Dracula, Bram Stoker
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
• A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
• Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Jacob and Whilhelm Grimm
• Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
• Harvard Classics bookshelf (for a real challenge)

Stickers!

Here are some stickers you can put on your weblog if you decide to participate. Link the sticker to this blog post, and we’ll see how many people we can get reading some old classics and supporting Project Gutenberg.

* Disclaimers: I’m doing this just for fun. I am in no way associated with Project Gutenberg, and they have no idea I’m doing this. Having read their legalese I think I’m ok calling this the “Project Gutenberg Project”, but I didn’t ask for their permission (so the name may change!) If you decide to donate, please go to the Project Gutenberg site, and follow their directions.

Very cool original stamp graphic is from Wikipedia and is in the public domain.

Happy reading!

Testing posting with an attached photo. Let’s see how this goes…

I’m also testing a new blog-feed twitterbot. Crazy times, indeed.

1. What is your reading schedule? Do you have a schedule?

When I first get up in the morning, I start reading through email while the coffee brews. Once I get a coffee, I finish email (flagging stuff for later response, not responding as I go), then move on to read Twitter scrollback (rarely all of it), then forums, then finally moving on to feeds.

Feeds are the bulk of incoming stuff, and I have them cordoned off into folders that are ordered by general relevance. High priority stuff (work-related, generally, and friends/smart people) I check in on several times a day, Mid priority stuff is once a day or once every couple of days, and Low priority is once/wk at best. Low priority stuff often gets dumped unread when I declare a “Mark All Read” day :)

I don’t have a formal schedule — I’m online more or less all day, every day (except for the gym and the pub) and I just dive in and out of various communications streams randomly.

2. What do you read daily, and how often?

• Email: many times/day, usually flipping to that tab once or twice per hour.
• IRC: Constantly. I realized the other day that except for vacations and whatnot, I’ve been on IRC more or less every day since sometime in 1993. And I’m OK with that. IRC is like Twitter — profoundly simple, and so much more than the sum of its parts.
• Twitter: I am utterly fascinated by Twitter and I love it and I’m not sure why. Its immediacy and continual flow creates a sense of connectedness that strikes me as somewhat magical. I’ve been feeling these wires for a long time, and Twitter is something brand new that feels oldskool and important. The ambient awareness it enables is quite something. Very interested to see what develops there. Anyhow, I’m on Twitter all the damned time. Even out and about (but not at the gym).
• IM: When they come in. IM is real time, and I wish people used it more. It’s basically private IRC.
• Planet Mozilla + other Mozilla-related feeds: 4-5 times/day. I flag items for inclusion in the weekly about:mozilla newsletter throughout the week as I do this, compiling the final selection and writing it up every Monday.
• “Friends”, “People”, “Smart”, and “Work stuff” folders: once or twice/day. “Friends” stuff I generally read then and there (and has a pretty deep overlap between ‘work’ and ‘non-work’), but other stuff I’ll flag for later reading in bulk. (“People” and “Smart” is stuff that isn’t directly work related, but that is peripherally so; “Work stuff” is non-Mozilla stuff that is relevant to my specific job.)
• “Fun” folder: I’ll flip through my “Fun” folder if I have 5 mins to kill or need a break. It’s full of internet awesomeness like Cute Overload, I Can Has Cheeseburger, Overheard in NY, Passive-aggressive notes, etc. Pretty much guaranteed to make me laugh at least a few times/day, which is more valuable than gold.

3. What do you read more than once / week? How often?

• Stuff I’ve flagged for later reading when skimming through feeds.
• “Tech”, “Tech blogs”, “Web”, and “News” folders. There is way too damned much traffic in these to try to stay on top of them daily, but I usually skim through them a couple of times/wk. I skim pretty brutally, tho, and probably flag maybe 1 or 2 posts for every 50-100 that come in.

4. What blogs, feeds, and newsgroups do you read?
Blogs + feeds + newsgroups are all basically feeds for me, and I’m currently subscribed to over 200. My “Mozilla” folder contains:

• Above the Fold
• Foxkeh’s Blog
• Metrics Blog
• Mozilla Dot Org
• Mozilla Foundation Futures
• Mozilla Links
• Planet Mozilla
• QMO – quality.mozilla.org
• The irc.mozilla.org QDB
• The Mozilla Blog
• Web Tech Blog
• …and a handful of other personal blogs by Mozillians

Yes, I know it contains duplicates, I do that on purpose.

5. Lastly, name a guilty pleasure in your feedreader.
Confessions of a Pioneer Woman. She’s insanely awesome.

Bonus question: What do you use to read feeds?
Google reader, although I’d kill for something that would help me organize things better and deal gracefully with significantly more volume. I have to keep my feeds down to around 200, which is really a pain in the butt, since I’d like to follow hundreds (thousands?) more.

Taggees!

• Johnath Nightingale
• Gavin Sharp
• Mike Shaver
• Ben Hearsum

Spending a full two weeks offline turned out to be more interesting than I expected. Like many of my friends, I believed that I’d be itching for some connectivity or email or news or Twitters within a matter of days. But I wasn’t. I thought I’d end up feeling cut off and isolated having no access to Web feeds, news sites, email, or TV. But I didn’t. I thought that, by the end of my exile, I’d be relieved when I was finally able to get back online. But that didn’t happen either.

Instead what I discovered is that being online all the time is profoundly fragmenting, stressful, and distracting. It turns out that I really don’t need to be incessantly jacked into the Matrix, that having constant, up-to-date information about all the myriad details of global, economic, political, and technology news doesn’t make me better, stronger, faster, more knowledgeable, or better informed. What it does make me is more scattered, erratic, stressed, edgy, and flighty.

Yes, flighty.

During my two week exile from the Intarwebs, I rediscovered my ability to read long, complex pieces of writing in a single sitting. I regained a sense of calm and an ability to focus of which I had forgotten I was capable. Without the constant distraction of email and IM and IRC and Twitter and Growl and SMS and Web feeds and the telephone and everything else, I found myself more present than I have felt in a long, long time. By contrast, the constant barrage of interruptions and distractions feels very much like a system that appears stable only because all the subsystems are equally unstable. Let just one of those subsystems get out of whack and the whole mess comes crashing down. This, I’ve realized, is neither wise nor healthy.

I also discovered that the lack of a clear line between “work” and “not-work” makes me insane. Now that I have regained some tenuous grasp of my sanity (which I hadn’t realized I’d lost until I stumbled across it again), I’m going to try to hang on to and strengthen it by being very, very disciplined about establishing and maintaining work/not-work boundaries. I’ve been working from home for four years now so this could be a bit tricky, and I’m bound to backslide now and again (and crunch-times are fair game, of course), but it’s a worthy and necessary goal. So far it’s working out.

It’s just time to slow down. I’ve spent the past eleven years continually ramping up my information consumption and communications channels, while gradually blurring the lines between work and not-work to the point of invisibility. I’ve been boiling that frog so unbelieveably slowly that I really had no idea just how stressful it had become. But now I do, so now it’s time to start fixing it.

Vacation lesson #2: Slow isn’t just for food.

Until a few days ago I have been using the Vienna feed reader for Mac OS X. It’s a pretty decent workhorse of a reader with a standard email-client-like user interface, the ability to group feeds into folders and subfolders (and sub-subfolders), and all that. It has always frustrated me, however, that my feedreader — through which I consume the majority of my Web content — wasn’t part of Firefox. In fact, I could go so far as to say that Vienna was on close to equal footing to Firefox as my core tool for accessing the Web. This has always struck me as somewhat ridiculous, so I’ve played with all sorts of tools for reading feeds via Firefox, whether they be add-ons or web-applications or what have you. None have ever been compelling enough to switch me away from Vienna until now.

I’ve discovered Feedly, you see, an incredibly slick Firefox 3 add-on that’s been in development for quite some time.

While I’ve only been using Feedly for just over a week now, it has already completely streamlined how I manage, view, and deal with my feeds. Brilliantly, Feedly leverages the existing Google Reader web application as its back end, and throws in added functionality, other service integration points, and a significantly improved UI for good measure. It installs as quickly and easily as any Firefox add-on, displays your feeds in their own tab, and essentially integrates your entire feed reading experience right into your Firefox. Feedly is almost exactly the sort of tool I was hoping to find, and while it does still have a few bugs and rough edges, it’s by far the best feed reader I’ve used to date.

Check it out: Feedly at Mozilla Add-ons.

Update: Bonus points for demos that show off the new content-related features of Firefox 3.

The Wall Street Journal set them to debating, and the full result is here: Full Text: Keen vs. Weinberger. It is a long but fascinating read.

Link.

There are now an estimated 137 million internet users in China, second in number only to the United States, where estimates of the current internet population range from 165 million to 210 million. The growth rate of China’s internet user population has been outpacing that of the U.S., and China is projected to overtake the U.S. in the total number of users within a few years.

Link.

Unfortunately, the result is that my attention is utterly fractured. If it’s not a conversation in one of my dozen IRC channels it’s an IM message; if not an IM message then it’s a Twitter update, or an email, or my feed reader has new items, or I’m flipping through my dozens of browser tabs, or my calendar is reminding me of one or another meetings or other appointments. I am becoming overwhelmed by this firehose of information, and it’s destroying my ability to focus, to read and think deeply, and, fundamentally, to get work done.

It needs to stop. At very least, it needs to be reduced to a trickle. Thus, I am going on an information diet. The changes I will be working towards are outlined below. “Working towards” means that while I doubt I will stick strictly to this regimen, it is the disciplined ideal towards which I strive.

1) During the work day I will only be checking personal email twice — once at the beginning of the day, and once at lunch (“lunch” can range from 11am to 2pm Eastern Time). After hours, I’ll check when I happen to think of it.

2) During the non-work day I will only be checking work mail once — sometime between dinner and bed. No guarantees what time that will be or whether I’ll be doing anything more than flagging items of interest to deal with the next work day.

3) Over the weekend I will be checking both personal and work mail only twice per day — once in the morning and once before bed.

4) Scheduled meetings are sacred. If I’m scheduled and expected to attend a meeting, I will. If it’s an optional meeting, I will make the decision whether or not to attend when my iCal reminder pops up. If there’s an optional meeting you think I should definitely attend, let me know. I don’t mind meetings, I just want to keep them to a useful minimum.

5) Twitter, while entertaining, has not yet proven to be useful. It will be getting shut off during work hours from here on out. Bummer because it’s invariably good for a laugh, but it’s just too distracting.

6) I will be reducing my IRC channels to the bare minimum during work days. Outside of work hours, all bets are off. If you need to contact me try instant message first, calling my work extension second, or calling my cell third. If I respond to none of these, please email me at my work address if it’s work-related or my personal address if it’s not-work-related.

7) I’ve organized my web feeds into two major groups: “Work” and “Everything Else”. I am reducing the update frequency from every 15 mins to every 2 hours. I will only be checking the “Everything Else” group outside of work hours. Oh lolcats, I will miss you so.

8) When I’m in a phone meeting I will be minimizing all windows except those directly involved with the meeting (agenda, notes, backchannel). Harsh, but necessary. I sat through two phone meetings today and realized that I didn’t hear a single word because I was too busy yammering away in unrelated IRC channels and scanning my web feeds. This is both rude and a complete waste of time, and I apologize for it.

9) I will be unplugging for at least one work hour per day. This means I will simply go offline. During that time I will either be reading, thinking, or working on proposals/documentation/etc. If it turns out that I’m getting solid work done, I reserve the right to extend my unplugged time indefinitely. Turns out a lot of my job is thinking, reading, and writing. If I appear to be offline and you need to contact me, call my extension or my cell.

10) Kinhin. Ok, not technically kinhin, but a very distant personal approximation thereof. Kinhin is a walking form of Zen meditation. Real Zen practitioners do kinhin between periods of zazen (sitting meditation), and it is a very rigorous, formal practice. For me it just means “walking for an hour every day and trying to get my mojo back”.

With the intention of blogging more, I’m starting to test some new blogging and other related tools. Right now I’m writing this post in MarsEdit which I’m trying because I’m also trying NetNewsWire again (in my ongoing struggle to find a web feed reader that doesn’t basically annoy me all the time). MarsEdit apparently integrates nicely with NetNewsWire which, in turn, apparently integrates with del.icio.us which I’m also trying again since Jots.com fell off the net for a while then came back with stupid ads and crappier service. Of course I’m having problems getting the del.icio.us auto-blog-post tool to work, but nothing new there. (Aside to del.icio.us: extend and simplify those tools a little, being able to filter autoposted links by tag would be seriously awesome).

Ok, that’s a long enough test post for now. Let’s see how this goes.

Update: Seems to work just fine. Cool.

Here’s a basic rundown of what I’m looking for: A web-based bookmarking system like del.icio.us only hosted and admin’d by me on my own Linux server. It must also be able to push a day’s-worth of links to my weblog (via xmlrpc, for example). Bookmarklets or a Firefox extension for quickly adding bookmarks would be great but not necessary, and demonstrated integration with Wordpress would be ideal.

Is there anything like this out there?

¹ I’m currently playing with Zenphoto, if you were curious. It’s quite neat.

General requirements: bulk upload from a Mac (ideally with iPhoto integration), must be Firefox friendly, the less Flash the better, autogeneration of resized photos and customizable thumbnail sizes, no upload limit (either per picture or total), reasonable bandwidth limits are OK, pay-for-service is OK, customizable themes would be ideal, proven reliable service would be nice, solid customer service track record would also be good.

I get the feeling I’m going to just stick with Gallery2.

Um. Or not. Personally, I’ll save my money and instead of spending $51 ($44 USD) on a season’s worth of crappily-encoded episodes of CSI, I’ll spend $54 for a season on DVD. Some of which are even in high def!

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t watch enough TV to justify spending that kind of money on that kind of quality when I can, 95% of the time, order what I want from Amazon and have it on DVD at my house within a week. I also don’t buy music online, so maybe I’m just being a curmudgeon. Maybe someday when music is $0.10/track and TV episodes are decent quality. Or, you know, 5 years from now when physical media has gone the way of the poor, poor Dodo and I have no choice.

Damned kids. Get off my lawn.

One easy way for me to make more time is to stop reading through thousands of stories via RSS. I’m of the opinion that the blogosphere has (as quickly as it started) jumped the shark. Once upon a time, weblogs acted as human filters for the sea of dross that flooded through the intartron. Now blogs seem simply to amplify the noise, not only adding to the flood of garbage (one piece of real content will get reflected back a dozen times, with little or no added or useful commentary) but also drowning out the useful-but-less-noticed content that’s out there. Job one, therefore, is to cut my RSS subscriptions from “anything that’s ever caught my interest for more than 30 seconds” to “feeds for things I actually need to monitor every 2 hours”. This will make a nicely compact, useful, and efficient list.

As an example, I got out of bed at 9am this morning. After making coffee (mm, coffee), I read my email. That was finished by around 9:30am. Since then (it is now 1:43pm) I’ve been reading through my RSS feeds. What the hell is with that? That’s four hours of my life I won’t be getting back ever, and only about 6 of the stories I read required any sort of real attention or action on my part (all of which were related to the MDC).

Enough, say I. Right now I am subscribed to 185 feeds. Having looked through those, I’ve found that only fourteen (14!) are things I actually need to monitor regularly. I’ve put those 14 in their own folder. The rest will be getting moved into a web-based feed reader system (bloglines or such) where I’ll check them once every couple of days.

I honestly have no idea how people who boast they’re subscribed to thousands of feeds ever get anything done.

I think I’ll make 2006 the Year of Figuring Out How to Waste Less Time. Paring down my feeds is step 1.

You can grab the extension here, and check out the Solution Watch review.

Update: The HTML formatting could use a bit of love, but I’m sure that will come in time :) The HTML formatting is fine if you don’t rely exclusively on the WYSIWYG editor. Neat!

Note: read the start of the page (above the “Install” button).  That’s where it tells you how to use the extension (hint: F8 and the little clicky button in the lower-right corner of your browser).

The account wizard worked beautifully for my custom WordPress install (you’re soaking in it), which is always a nice thing.

Let’s try some test text: bold, italic, underline, bigger, smaller, link.

Anyhow, from here on in, my “Today’s Links” posts are brought to you by Jots.com. It’s a viable del.icio.us competitor with a much nicer design and interface.

Oh well. Hopefully Yahoo! (who apparently just bought del.icio.us for an undisclosed-but-rumoured-to-be-healthy amount of money) will be able to throw enough money at the problem that del.icio.us will become a reliable service again sometime. Right now I’m just moderately irked because I’ve gone to tag a half-dozen sites in the past couple of hours and keep running into the “del.icio.us is down for emergency maintenance. we’ll be back as soon possible” error message. Grf.

• It will be free and open source. Free is necessary. Open source is a clear “nice to have”, but not absolutely necessary.
• It will allow whiteboard sessions to be saved and loaded.
• It will have background options — ie: the background could be quadruled for simple charting, etc.
• It will not require Flash or other plugins.
• It will have a variety of brushes or shape-drawing tools. This one isn’t strictly necessary, but it’d sure be nice to have.
• It will be cross-platform (in an ideal world, it will “just work” in, say, Firefox 1.5).

Don’t suppose anyone could point me at something like this? Thanks!

Does “Web 2.0″ mean anything? Till recently I thought it didn’t, but the truth turns out to be more complicated. Originally, yes, it was meaningless. Now it seems to have acquired a meaning. And yet those who dislike the term are probably right, because if it means what I think it does, we don’t need it.

Boolean and I just finished watching The Elephant Man, starring John Hurt and directed by David Lynch. This is an utterly phenomenal movie, telling (part of) the story of Joseph Merrick. It’s tragic and heartbreaking, while also somewhat uplifting. I won’t bother with any more trite cliches, I’ll just strongly recommend you rent it sometime soon.

Food

Last night, somewhat on a whim, I did a garlic-rosemary sirloin tip roast with potatoes, onions, and asparagus, accompanied by a nice bottle of wine from Portugal (Quinta D Encontro ‘Bairrada Superior’ 2001, $19.95 @ LCBO). Sirloin Tip roasts are roughly half the price of Prime Rib, which is a bonus, and I think Sirloin Tip actually makes for better sandwiches. Tonight’s dinner was leftovers, transformed into total yumminess as Hot Roast Beef Sandwiches with Cordon Bleu Beef Gravy, extremely fresh thick-sliced white bread from the local bakery, and fresh, very lightly steamed, peas. So, a $22 hunk of meat from the local grocery fed 4 people for a nice proper meal, and had enough leftovers for 3 more sandwiches (I’m having the last for lunch tomorrow).

Games

A bunch of us have been playing a strange little web-based space game called Ogame lately. It’s interesting, fun, not very time consuming (unless you’re phik), and a strangely interesting diversion every so often. It’s not for the weak of heart, however, as there’s basically no documentation. Still, if you like space games (or even just resource management/building games with an exploration/piracy twist), you might get a kick out of it.

Books

Tried reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake. Didn’t make it very far. It…I dunno. Maybe I didn’t give it enough time, but after an hour’s reading, it still felt very much like he was just rambling aimlessly. Felt much more like a drunken weblog than a novel, I’m sad to say. Abandoned it.

Started reading Oblivion, a recent book of short stories by David Foster Wallace. I’m only about halfway through the first, but I’m enjoying the hell out of it. It’s a bit of a jarring leap from Roald Dahl to this, I find, if only because Dahl’s stories are actually short, while Wallace’s first in this volume is 64 pages long or so.

Work

For those of you who don’t know, I work for the Mozilla Foundation, managing the Devmo project. It’s coming along nicely, but we’re always interested in having more people come on board to help out. If you’re interested in Web or XUL development, drop by the Devmo Wiki and take a look around. The place is still a bit rough around the edges as we’re still officially in “alpha” stage (which, here, really means we’re still building stuff), but we’re hoping to shape things up for a beta in the near future. Comments, suggestions, editorial help, and content are always welcome.

How about (this would work, too) something like Pixelpost, only with catalogue pages that will display clickable thumbnails for a whole month. Something like that would be sweet. Like candy.

I’m starting to think I might just have to suck it up and build it myself, but if you happen to know of software that does stuff like this, please post a comment here. Note 1: I have a Mac desktop and a Linux server, so whatever it is has to run on that. Thanks! Note 2: If you happen to know of a WordPress plugin that does something roughly like what I’m describing here, please post a url.