• Those who pay more taxes than they consume.
• Those who consume more taxes than they pay.

It’s a fairly arbitrary line to draw, and I wouldn’t want to make any value judgments based on it. It’s tempting to call them ‘wealth-generators’ and ‘wealth-consumers’, for example, but that’s too simple. Most teachers fall into the second group, but without them, we’d have fewer people able to be in the first group.

Those in the first group are typically creating value by selling products or services that people want directly. Many of those in the second are doing the same thing, but we buy their products and services via a distributor known as ‘government’. That, to a large extent, is what taxes are.

But I just thought it was an interesting thought experiment, if nothing more. What’s your family budget deficit? How much are you dependent on government subsidy?

And if you don’t like the answer, comfort yourself with the thought that, thankfully, not everything revolves around taxation! How does your balance sheet look in other areas?

• Those who generate more happiness than they consume.
• Those who consume more happiness than they generate.

That’s much more important.

For those unfamiliar with the jargon, CSS stands for Cascading Stylesheets – they’re the things that tell your browser the background colour of a page, how widely spaced the lines in this paragraph are, and so forth. SVG is Scalable Vector Graphics, a system for telling the browser how to draw pictures, using components like lines, circles, etc. (as opposed to just embedding a JPEG-type image). SVG is particularly important as displays become bigger, smaller, and higher resolution, because the browser can draw things at the right resolution for even the newest retina MacBook Pro. It’s been around for a long time but has been held back by, of course, poor support in Internet Explorer. However, it’s now more widely supported than Flash, so if you can’t see this little doodle, you really need to find yourself another browser:

I scribbled this quickly in Inkscape, but here’s the beta version of a nice in-browser SVG editor.

But when it comes to artistic creativity, constraints are often a good thing, which is why some of the best photos are taken with prime lenses rather than zooms. And as CSS itself has become ever-more capable, it has allowed people like John Galatini to create this Tube map entirely from HTML and CSS.

You can tell it’s not an image, because you can copy and paste the text.

Just as amazing is Burak Can’s CSS-only MacBook Air, where the screen background is the only image used.

On the other hand, people have been doing some cool but much simpler stuff with CSS for many years. I like Román Cortés’s Homer Simpson from 5 years ago; click the Animate buttons to see how it’s made.

Well, that’s fine, because I haven’t got one of those…

Actually, the first three series.

On Blu-Ray.

So I guess geekiness must come in bursts…

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

– Richard Feynman

As you can imagine, they’re not cheap, but they’re beautiful, they can be personalised in various ways, and you know you’ll be giving a unique gift made with great care by someone who loves her craft. Worth checking out.

Another place you can use it is in the URL field of a browser, where it will select the entire URL with fewer clicks than the usual tap-tap-select-all.

I use this, for example, if I’m looking at a page in Safari and want to open it in 1Password. As you probably know, apps can register particular URL schemes for their own use, and 1Password’s browser will recognise ophttp and ophttps, so you can just go to the beginning of the URL in Safari, insert an ‘op’, and you’ll be taken to the same page in 1Password (or ‘g’ for GoodReader, etc.)

The problem is that just ‘going to the beginning and inserting something’ can be a pain if the URL is long. You probably have to scroll slowly left, tap the correct insertion point, and so forth. Much easier is a two-finger tap, select ‘Cut’, type ‘op’ and then tap ‘Paste’.

If you’re doing this kind of thing regularly, you may want to set up a bookmarklet to make it even easier, but the two-finger tap is a handy thing to know in general.

Poster is elegant, has Markdown support, and a URL scheme which means you can send posts to it from apps such as Drafts.

I’ve been experimenting with low camera angles – something that hasn’t been so easy with my Canon 6D, since it doesn’t have an articulated viewfinder, so to get shots like these you normally have to lie on the ground if you want to see what you’re taking. But the built-in wifi means that you can, instead, put the camera down low and use your phone as a viewfinder, which is what I did today.

The shallow depth of field was deliberate – I quite like the effect.

But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near…

I was thinking of this as I created my first app for my Pebble watch today, inspired by a combination of a 17th-century poet and my friend Richard, a 21st-century technologist. He held a party a little while ago to celebrate being one gigasecond old, and has a nice web page where you can check your age, too.

So, since part of the idea of the Pebble is that you can personalise it to a great degree, I thought that a watch face that showed my age in seconds would be a good project. I named it ‘Tempus Fugit’.

But then it occurred to me that one could also do the opposite – a countdown. How long I’ve been around is an interesting topic, at least for me. But how long I’ve got – well, that’s even more compelling!

Of course, life expectancy is a highly personal thing (and one wishes to avoid the estimation errors made by the Rich Fool in the parable) but it’s interesting to speculate. Life expectancy, in statistical tables, tends to be quoted as ‘expectancy at birth’, based on an assumption that mortality rates will continue through your life at the same kind of level as they were at your birth. When I was born, in 1967, it was about 69 years in the UK. It’s now 78, according to Wikipedia, and will no doubt continue to rise. So on the one hand, one might expect that the inferior healthcare, nutrition advice etc in my youth would mean that I probably come somewhere between the two. On the other hand, today’s figure doesn’t take into account the improvements in healthcare that are inevitable in the future, which may mean that my allotted span may be more that the expectancy of those born today (as will theirs).

So, as a rough estimate, averaging these two factors, I decided to use the present life expectancy for the UK, currently around 78 for men and 82 for women. (It’s slightly more in Canada and Australia, and a couple of years less in the U.S.).

And so, with a minor variation in the software, I now have two new watchfaces for my Pebble. The first, Tempus Fugit shows how many seconds I’ve been alive. The other shows my best estimate of how many I’ve got left, a number which is already distressingly lower than the first, and, of course, counting down…

Some may think this morbid. But I prefer to think of it as an inspiration… a call to action.

Oh, and in case I should be short of ideas about what to do with the time that remains, I named this second one Time’s Wingèd Chariot. I think Marvell would approve.

I may be celebrating a rather different kind of gigasecond soon!

(For my non-British readers, that sign marks a buried water hydrant.)

(For the curious, the three similar-looking devices on the right are my Kindle, iPad, and iPad mini. I don’t normally need them all in the same place at once! The thing on the left is my GPS logger and the watch is, of course, a pebble.)

If you don’t use either of these, I strongly recommend them.

If, on the other hand, you already use both of them, you might like my (very basic) plugin that lets you list your iTerm profiles using an Alfred keyword and fire up a new iTerm window using the selected one.