Precipitate is open source, works beautifully and fast so far, and has been around for awhile. Install it as a pref pane, let it in, and in a few minutes it adds your Google docs to your local Spotlight index so when you search your Mac it finds them.

I LOVE this.

Just bought myself a copy after it worked flawlessly. Great software is just great. Being able to find a good post about it, pull it down, try it out for free, and then pay for it in a few seconds is so much better than the old days…

So this morning I took it out for a maiden voyage, with my son Milo, down to Shopsin’s for breakfast. Here it is on the street outside:

And the riding? I love it.

What struck me was how different the riding feels without gears. There are things I’ve always liked about the lower center of gravity and small wheel size of those bikes, and now with the single speed it just fits together right for a kind of muscular, slow-balanced weave and acceleration. It feels kinda sexy, slinky.

And I found that I could charge up small hills pretty well by getting my weight forward and up over the handlebars (though these were short hills). But for city riding it is totally fun, well-suited to stop/start and sudden swerves to avoid shoppers and obstacles. The fold is really simple and the bike feels very clean without a derailleur, like the internal hubs. No fenders, no rack. The combination of the coaster brake and the hand brake in front are still not super strong for stopping power, but workable. I really like it.

Hard to say what is best here, the food or the people, but it feels like love and it is some of the best falafel in the city. But get the Sabich sandwich because it’s even better.

So I went to Tekserve, and the story ends well. Not only did they charge just $140 for the labor, but they were pretty darn fast too, about a day to get it done. Despite being warned that the part might not work since they hadn’t selected it, the screen has been crisp and beautiful ever since. I did have to wait about 40 minutes to get helped at 9:30 am on a weekday, but maybe that was just a slow morning. Clearly, the folks are doing a great service to the community and I wanted to point it out.

I waited through a month of uploading slowly to get a few hundred gigs saved. And I tried to talk to Tech Support several times to find out why I get this rotten behavior from the CarboniteDaemon:

• Hogging CPU while it shows as idle in its control panel
• Shows 0 bytes to back up when there are new files to be backed up (and they even show up as pending back up in the control panel details) — after waiting for DAYS
• Frozen at the same size for a month now, no additional files backed up

At the suggestion of tech support I rebuilt permissions on the drive, etc. No change. It feels like poor quality software, and I’m sorry that I invested all that time setting it up. I guess it’s time to find another backup service. I’ve heard good things about Mozy…

Highly recommended, and available from NYPL.

Special thanks to David Koosis for the great recommendation to read this.

There are a few things I really don’t like about it (the iPad) including:

• Closed, closed, closed. You mostly have to talk to it through iTunes, you can’t just mount it and copy to it, you can’t put an app you wrote onto it, etc. It’s a peripheral, folks. It’s a fat-a** iPod. Pricey, too.
• There’s no USB port, which is a big clue.
• It’s all about one app at a time. Halting between them bugs me. My Android phone does better.

Now for the good, since I’m finally starting to find things I genuinely like about it:

• It’s a really nice reader for PDFs and e-books. I just read some Winnie-the-Pooh to my daughter at bedside and it was a pleasure. Bright, self-lit, crisp images in full color, wonderful.
• The battery life is nice and long, depending on usage of course.
• Now that I am using Dropbox+GoodReader, I have a reasonable way to get PDFs from my laptop onto it for reading, and that’s really nice. Stuffing tons of reading material in there makes sense and I love that unlike my bag it doesn’t get thicker or heavier.
• Showing pictures to friends is pretty fantastic, too. Even once they get over the ooh-ahh reaction.
• Having quick/easy access to email and web seems to fill a little niche, too, around the house.
• And I do love the touch interface, just for the simplicity of pointing at what you want. Beats keyboard+mouse for several classes of activities.

So now I guess I’m just waiting to get to the point where I’ll feel comfortable whipping it out on the subway. At which point, I will be really happy to have my mail to browse, the morning Times to look through, and some tech PDFs to read. It’s enough to make me start buying my O’Reilly’s in e-form, and finally stop piling up once-read 3-month half-life tech tracts.

Alright, I am finding some things to like about it. But it’s not a general-purpose computer and I wish that it was more of one. It does feel pretty futuristic, though.

So I tried out RingCentral, thanks to this great FaxCompare site. I was immediately thrilled to find a decent native Mac app client for their service, and it worked perfectly. Notifications are clear and fast (MyFax seemed sluggish) and I’ve had no problems yet. Best of all? I can send faxes with PDF attachments from Mail.app, no problem.

So if you’re on a Mac, looking for a reasonably-priced internet fax service — I’m happy so far.