Category Archive

I’ve migrated several of my machines over to Firefox 3 RC3 and I like it.  Of course, this means that some of the old Add-ons need replacing/upgrading.  My recommended Add-ons:

• Delicious Bookmarks:  Essential for a del.icio.us linkblogger like me.  The 2.x version adds a few active icons to the status bar.
• Gmail Notifier:  Needs no introduction.  If you use Gmail, you need this.
• OPML Support:  When I want to port my bookmarks between FF instances, this is clean.  I rarely use it.
• QuickProxy:  Essential on my work laptop.  I used to use SwitchProxy but found this one when upgrading to FF3.  It doesn’t allow multiple proxy configurations, but I don’t need more and its one-click on/off operation makes up for it.  SwitchProxy hasn’t been upgraded to a FF3-compatible version yet.

I sent my Gmail account a 53kB AMR sound file (about 1 minute of audio) from my phone and when it showed up in my Gmail inbox the attachment was a ~512kB WAV file (mono, 8-bit).  I checked my phone to make sure it hadn’t auto-converted the file before sending it and it says it didn’t.  This means Gmail could be a handy part of an AMR-to-podcast solution.  Besides its conversion and email gateway roles, it would serve as a handy data archive.

Just got done listening to Cindy and John DJ a fun mix of classic and modern rock with a focus on indies.  Great stuff.  Go check out RadioUgly.com.  They’re on Saturday evenings at 8-11pm.  There are several other shows there as well.  I’ll be back!

I’ve been using Yahoo! Pipes to aggregate my blog posts, link blog, and public Flickr pics for a while now.  The output has always been a bland bulleted list on my homepage that was usually in need of a manual refresh.  (I’m such an MTOS weenie.)  No longer.  I’m using the new Pipes badge and it looks about 1000% better.

Also, signed up on Facebook (finally) today.  Don’t know that I’ll use it any more than Pownce (which I haven’t at all) but it seemed worthwhile for the networking/reconnection possibilities.

My photo of a coaster at the Pike Pub & Brewery in Seattle is one of the photos used for Pike’s entry on Schmap Seattle Restaurants.  Thanks to Emma at Schmap for the attribution and the kind note.

I can’t ping the DynDNS domain names I had registered and their website doesn’t remember my account. Be wary of free services. Anyone else have an issue with them?

Update: I had registered with DynDNS with my “root” Comcast.net email address, which I don’t check as regularly as Gmail. They gave me 48 hours to keep my account active in a message from 10/21 that I didn’t see it until… just now. Guess I’ll re-register, but my warning about free services stands; you get what you pay for. My account was completely blown away; their lost password service didn’t remember my email address.

The email talks about Account Upgrades “to prevent your hosts from expiring every 30 days.” Guess I was the victim of a money grab?

Update (10/25):  I think I was bitten by the fact that I wasn’t using an updater client to regularly check in to DynDNS since my IP doesn’t change very often.  I’ve re-registered with DynDNS and am running inadyn as a service to check in every so often.

I’ve got both Firefox and Thunderbird using our Windows-based profiles under Ubuntu 7.04. “firefox -profilemanager” and “mozilla-thunderbird -profilemanager” are my friends.  And so is ntfs-3g.

I just looked out at the National Parks Conservation Association’s slideshow index and found that they’ve published the slideshow about Jamestown that includes the two photos I cited before.  Go take a look!

I couldn’t let this one go with just a link. Today’s annoucement that EMI’s catalog on the iTunes Music Store will be available in a “premium”, DRM-less, higher-fidelity version is pretty big. iTMS customers that have previously purchased singles shouldn’t balk at the 30-cent tax. The fact that albums will continue to cost the same is a great endorsement of the artistic work’s form. Unencumbered 256kbps AAC definitely has the potential to be a great compromise between DRM’d 128kbps AAC and an open, lossless format, assuming that online digital album pricing vs. the price of a physical CD reflects the efficiencies of each distribution model.

I was pleased to receive a request to use one or more of my CC-BY Flickr photos in an online slideshow.  Details to follow once the re-use has occurred.  Since I’ve asked to be credited as “Alex Harden / alexharden.org”, I guess that’s the push I needed to finally create a home page there!

Updates (4/2):  The beginnings of a home page are up.

These two photos are the ones of interest:

The U3 platform came on the Sandisk Cruzer Micro 4GB flash drive I recently purchased and instead of formatting it into oblivion I actually used it.  Apps I already used in a portable fashion (on the Cruzer Micro 512MB it’s complementing) like Firefox, PuTTY, and FileZilla have U3 builds, as well as some other ones I haven’t previously used portably like WinSCP and OpenOffice.  It’s a pretty slick platform, although I have to think Sandisk was inspired by John Haller’s PortableApps.com work.  Looks like he published a similar platform that I hadn’t previously seen or used.

U3 on Wikipedia

I linkblogged the Wired article that purports that the majors are going to consider selling unprotected MP3s with watermarking technology.  I support this.  I’ve long felt that users should be trusted with unencumbered content.  This move would go a ways towards making mainstream music consumption friendlier, but there are still the Catch-22’s of the cases of broken media (did I buy that plastic disc, or did I buy the right to listen to that content?) and copy-protected CDs versus music CD-R/Minidisc tax (I paid your stinking tax, now why can’t I legally transfer the music to taxed media?).

I’m enough of a Flickr fan to pay for the Pro service, but I haven’t taken advantage of their printing options.  Until now.  I decided to print a few recent 4×6’s at our local Target to test out the service (apparently a direct result of their acquisition by Yahoo!).  My four test pics were free, so it looks like they’re giving away some “seed” prints for experimenters.  Check it out.

Update (12/26):  I picked up the test prints this morning.  They’re great!  I’ll be using the service.

In the time since I let my gifted Flickr Pro account expire (since April), I’ve missed being able to tag and dump loads of original-res pictures up there. I’ve messed around with Picasa and have considered using its publishing features, but for now I’ve decided to pay for a Flickr Pro account. I’ll have a lot of new pics up from our Seattle and Colorado Springs trips up soon. If you want me to “friend” or “family” you, please let me know (I’m “aharden” on Flickr); I keep lots of pictures private for friends and family only.

I created an account on Share Your OPML right around the time that it launched, pointing it to my public Bloglines OPML URL. I’ve poked around the site a few times and it seems neat for seeing what kind of attention certain feeds are getting, who’s subscribed to what, etc., but beyond that I haven’t done much with it. Jon Udell mentioned SYO today and reminded us that he asked a while back when SYO would share our data back, presumably in a format other than HTML. He makes some great points, but what I’m wondering is more mundane: why can’t I export my reading list as an OPML file? It seems pretty silly for a service that sucks OPML not to support emitting it as well.

Sam reports that Bloglines has announced they’re now parsing Atom 1.0 feeds. The first thing I’ve done as a result was to unsubscribe from Tim Bray’s RSS feed (which Bloglines forced me to) and subscribe to his Atom feed. Looking great. Thanks, Bloglines.

I’m one of Tim Bray’s thousands of subscribers (via Bloglines) and I prefer his Atom feed. Bloglines recently redirected all of Tim’s Atom feed subscribers to his RSS feed. (Tim’s take.) Bloglines would rather add marginal features like embedded YouTube applets instead of hunkering down and supporting RFC4287.

They would probably defend themselves by saying that they’re just a consumer choosing equivalent feed formats. In this case, they’re not. Tim made the decision to make his Atom feed full text a while back; his RSS feed is just summaries.

Pathetic. I suppose I could call myself that, too, for continuing to use Bloglines. I’m not prepared to jump to Newsgator Online just yet. I’m actually tempted to roll my own Planet and call it a day.

I’m now contributing my clickstream to the GestureBank. Attention Economy, here we come!

Bloglines is the only online aggregator I’ve ever used (after having used Amphetadesk and Sharpreader), but its lack of full Atom 1.0 support is getting a bit annoying. I signed up for an account on Newsgator Online and I’m pleased with its Atom rendering, but it has a few interface quirks that might take some getting used to.

I like Bloglines’ two-frame approach, especially now that they added a support for quick-closing (and reopening) the left pane. Newsgator Online’s layout is good, but since they don’t use frames, the scrolling of the subscriptions and the content isn’t independent. I also would like it if Newsgator Online’s blogrolling feature allowed you to select which folders/feeds you wanted to publicize. I have that control with Bloglines via their per-feed public/private setting, combined with the MT-Outliner plugin’s support for focusing on specific Bloglines folders.

However, besides getting on board with the Atom 1.0 feed spec, Bloglines could take a few cues from Newsgator Online. For example, per-item rankings shared with other subscribers could add a new dimension to the service. Newsgator also has better, more dynamic support for favicons than Bloglines.

Both services have room for improvement, so I’m not moving just yet. Newsgator would have to support the all the Bloglines features I use and make a few interface changes before I would be comfortable moving.

My first impressions of Google Calendar are very positive. I like the fact that they’ve already implemented data export (Atom feed or iCal format) instead of delivering it later or choosing lock-in. I’ve put a few events in there and have liked the feature set. One immediate specific use I see is as a podcast-scheduling service. As long as all parties have a GCal account, they can coordinate times and resources, and possibly even use GTalk to conference. Check it out.

I subscribe to both Sam Ruby’s and Tim Bray’s Atom feeds, and was an amused spectator this morning when Sam broke Bloglines (which I use a lot) and other feed readers by making the title of an entry “<plaintext>”. (Without the use of HTML entities for the <’s and >’s.) In his linkback to Sam, Tim made the comment that “Bloglines is basically unmaintained”, and I have to agree. I like Bloglines’ convenience and the fact that it has enough export features to power my blogroll and my podcast subscriptions list. Soon, I’ll also use it to set up a group of local blogs I read to pump info into Localfeeds: Harrisburg. However, I’ve been disappointed with its Atom support. Even though my Atom feed comes through fine, Sam’s feed’s URLs end up rendered without whitespace (lookinglikethis), and Tim’s feed’s relative links are prepended by “http://www.bloglines.com/” instead of his blog’s URL. I’m smart enough to go to their blogs to see the properly rendered version of their entries, but I thought the point of feeds and feed readers was that I didn’t have to… right?

Mark Pilgrim points out some other Bloglines gotchas that I hadn’t been bitten by yet. Maybe it’s time for me to evaluate other aggregators.

If you don’t check out my linkblog you may have missed my link to the excellent Jedi Trainer game. Lots of fun.

I forgot to mention how much I’m digging the new features over on del.icio.us. They’ve made it a lot easier to quickly tag your submitted links. It’s one heck of a useful and flexible service. Thanks to Joshua and the team for making it a full-time gig and forging new ground.

My del.icio.us.

Via Scoble, Scott, and Ross, I present my BlogMap:

I was catching up one of my Firefox instances and I went to the main Extensions site to browse. I’m blown away by the currently highest-rated extension, ForecastFox. Check it out!

1. Web-based.
2. Clean interface.
3. 1GB of storage.

It just works.

We’re going to try it out for a week and see how it works.

Via Ars Technica: DMCA dealt serious blow by Sixth Circuit Appeals Court

In a word, the appeal [by Lexmark] failed. The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled against Lexmark (decision here), and offered future guidance relating to the use of the DMCA. As you may recall, the DMCA is all about copyright, and it was Lexmark’s (necessary) argument that their copyright was infringed upon by SCC when they reverse engineered the chip. The court, however, sided with the view that access controls are not typically eligible for copyright protection.

Generally speaking, “lock-out” codes fall on the functional-idea rather than the original-expression side of the copyright line. Manufacturers of interoperable devices such as computers and software, game consoles and video games, printers and toner cartridges, or automobiles and replacement parts may employ a security system to bar the use of unauthorized components. To “unlock” and permit operation of the primary device (i.e., the computer, the game console, the printer, the car), the component must contain either a certain code sequence or be able to respond appropriately to an authentication process. To the extent compatibility requires that a particular code sequence be included in the component device to permit its use, the merger and scènes à faire doctrines generally preclude the code sequence from obtaining copyright.

EFF: Lexmark vs. Static Control Case Archive

(Ed. Note: I really need to redefine my categories. Soon.)

Web radio accord reached:

Licensing issues aside, radio looks to be the next Fair Use battleground for one simple reason: time shifting. XM Radio recently pulled a version of its satellite radio receivers for the PC off the market after one user wrote an application (Time Trax) which allowed XM subscribers to record broadcasts for later listening.

[...]

Indeed, the RIAA and XM Radio both issued vague, but ominous threats after the existence of Time Trax came to their attention.

Podcasting is definitely within the scope of the issues raised in the article, applicable to those who podcast copyrighted content. If/when there is a Cygweb/ICYG podcast, I’m going to try and avoid that issue entirely.

In addition, the article’s explanation of webcasting royalty fees reminds me of why ICYG is a club and not a business.

Adam has quite a story about how he got a recent DSC uploaded. What dedication!

Via Google Blog: Can you say “killer app”? I knew you could.

I just tested a whitepages lookup and it worked as advertised.