Archive for October, 2005
I remember having AOL 1.0 and loving it as much as I hated it. I loved the internet but I could not play online games through their service and web pages loaded so slow. It really felt like a walled garden. Even though TiVo has been out for a while it really has the same feel of early AOL. It’s doing something revolutionary but doing it so haphazardly and poorly that it’s almost not worth it.
I just got a Tivo and you need a phone line to set it up. I don’t have a phone line. Search for setting up a TiVo with out a phone line and you’ll get a ton of results. Most are little help as they are very vague about why it needs the phone line or what exactly they use to set it up with out a phone line. I know there is a way to do it but not with the equipment i have.
A lot of people graduating from college move out of home and get a land line. They get one just because that’s what you do. I’m a leading edge case of some one who knows they will not use a phone line and refuses to get one. The same techy people who makes this leap of reason are the some kind who want TiVo. Yet they don’t seem to want to cater to this group of people. I’ve just ordered a phone line that will take a week to get so I can use my TiVo. I don’t know any one in my building or any one with the same service as me in my area. I’m not going to make friends with people in my building so I can take over their TV for about 10 hours.
I think many people who run in to the same problem get over it eventually. I will not. When I got AOL I immediately started to look to see how I could get off. where could I go to get better service at a cheaper price. I’ve been looking for better options than TiVo for a long time now and I opted against them because TiVo was cheaper and easier to setup. Is it cheaper and easier? I really really want Myth TV now that I have TiVo.
tivo, tv, phone, mythtv
I’m fairly new to PDF creation. I’ve outputted my share through Illustrator, Photoshop and Quark but have put too much thought in to it as I mostly have not had a need for it. My resume is in PDF and that’s about it. Working on a little beta feature presentation for the Sconex reps I need to up the PDF anti and really make it shine.
Screen shots don’t scale well. When my senior portfolio teacher made me print out 11×17 print outs of my website I was less then pleased at the 200 dpi print out of a 72 dpi file. Damn you internet and your low resolution. A similar problem happens when you save a screen shot to PDF. The default zoom is default to what ever the user’s Acrobat (or in my case Foxit) is set too. This means that if the zoom is set for anything other 100% your screen shot looks like crap and you don’t look very professional.
The trick is to force any PDF reader to open up at 100% so the screen shoot looks as crisp as it does on the site. Most times I’m fairly impressed with Adobe’s help files, but Acrobat’s seem to be rather sparse. Search through google got me no results either.
What you need to look for is the Open Options, which on Acrobat 5 is listed under File > Document Properties > Open Options. Here you can set all the different things you want to happen when anyone opens your PDF. The one I was looking for was the magnification which was set to default and I simply changed it to 100%. Now every one can see my beautiful screenshots with out Acrobat Messing them up.
acrobat, pdf, foxit
Praise the lord! Odeo has released a new mp3 player. The last player consisted of a play button and a stop button with the additional ability to pause while playing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve accidentally reloaded the page forcing me to listen from the beginning. While having to listen from the beginning would drive most people away I kept coming back knowing that Odeo provided such a service that I could not get anywhere else. I just don’t want to download mp3s to my computer and be forced to be locked to that one machine. I feel more people will ruin in to this problem as handheld devices become more ubiquitous.
One interesting change of interface is the play button. Previously you could play, pause or stop. Stop would make the mp3 play from the beginning while pause would let you pick up where you left off. Now there is only one button that toggles between play and stop. This time though stop does not put the scrubber back at the begging of the file but instead pauses.
The new interface is just beautiful. I was begging for a way to advance with in the mp3 since the beginning and I’m glad that they didn’t just tack one on but instead completely redesigned the user interface. I am so so excited that I’m really having trouble forming coherent thought about it. If you have not checked Odeo out now is the time to do so. They don’t seem to have made any big announcement but I see this as a reinvention of the site since it is so focused on audio files.
odeo, podcasting, podcast, update, mp3, flash, web2.0
Want to start a tech company and need some help? Although I have not meet them all, here is a list of all the Boston residence that are looking to change the world.
I hope to be able to come back to this list in 5 or 10 years and count the millionaires who changed the world. If you want to join the fun check the Boston Startup Meetup group.
startupschool, boston
Startup School was amazing and every one I meet there was not only interesting and friendly but passionate and motivated. I think the atmosphere was really different from other conferences I have gone too mostly because people seem to be activly looking for people to work with and bounce ideas off of.
The Startup Wiki really seems to have taken off and I hope to be able to reconnect with all the people I meet and continue to keep in touch. Hopefully a real community will build up around the wiki. Though I think we really need a more general community site. I was thinking of building something with Ning but perhaps I will bunch the idea off a few people to see if there would be interest.
startupschool, boston
Eric Meyers came by Boston today and gave a talk on A List Apart similar to what he talked about at Web Essentials 05. It was much more informative with the slides in front of my face as opposed to just the podcast. While the ideas and concepts were nothing new to me it was good to have it reiterated and pounded in to my head. As much as I know about semantic mark up I constantly find my self making common mistakes.
While I love my laptop that Sconex got me I don’t know how good the wireless card is that is built in. It found the wireless network in the MIT building but couldn’t connect. All well, no live blogging for me. I’ll have to play with my wireless dongle and see if that works any better.
I have no idea if I like it or not yet. It’s in the flavor of Gmail with tons of JavaScript. All I do know is that loading 181 feeds from bloglines in to Reader seems to be taking forever. Updates to come as I continue to play with it.
All the Digg.com kids are having fun bashing it. Slashdot too. Lot of people saying they like Bloglines better. In general bloglines is okay but but it’s still painful to use.
Update: In general the feed reader has an interesting focus and one that Keri might agree with. Gmail has shown how google can really get to the heart of what people are trying to do with technology and I think they realty hit the head with their feed reader. The way I use bloglines is almost like bookmarks. If I find an interesting web site I subscribe and that’s how I have 181 feeds in bloglines.
When the feed updates bloglines bolds the feed and tells me how many posts. There are a lot of feeds I am subscribe to that i don’t check daily like Slashdot, Robert Scoble and Metafilter. I have my list of favorite sites and I start checking them until i run out of time. When I come back later I start back at the top of the list of favorite and work my way down again. This way some of the blogs on the bottom of my list rarely to never get checked. Some blogs I don’t really ready everything and like to wait till they have a bunch of post and then quickly look at the headlines to see if anything jumps out. I believe this way lets me see what I’m really interested in as well as get a general knowledge of what some of the people I don’t have time for are talking about.
Google reader really focuses on the individual post. When a blog updates the post is put at the top of your queue and that’s it. This system is a very Post driven reader as opposed to bloglines which is Subscription driven. The current way i read blog is extremely Subscription driven though I can see how a system based on new posts is more focused on reading new content now and not saving it for later. Right now I like saving it for later and then skimming it and stopping if I’m really interested. It does allow for free tagging though I’m not entirely sure how you navigate the tags.
In general I say I like it but there is something about it that I find off putting and I can’t put my finger on it.
Update: TechCrush has a pretty fair review.
reader, google, rss, bloglines, gmail, web2.0, xml, rss, atom, feed, tags
Kottke has been talking about the WebOS and how a lot of the feed back talks about how as fast and cheep high speed internet spreads people will be offline less and less. Jason points out that if the system fails then you either don’t have access to your stuff or you might possibly lose it all. Not to mention that librarians will point out that broadband or even dial up is as far spread as you might think.
While trying to use a service who’s site has gone down is a pain I think the bigger picture of WebOS is ownership of data. While it would be nice to have access to all your gmail while you are offline I think the better reason to keep a copy is for portability. If you want to change emails clients today you need to find some way to get the mail off the old website and over to the new website. While it can be done I don’t think any two email services have made moving to and from their service easy.
In the future, with all my mail on the server and my computer, I can just abandon the old email service. The new email service only has to reorder the email on my computer to match their new service. Barring the addition of any sort of email DRM it should be relatively easy to read the email text files on my computer and reorganize with new file structure, new files name and new structure in the files. How awesome would it be if every email client you logged in to automatically displayed you’re entire email history?
I think it would be swell.
webos, kottke, gmail
Whiteboard is not going to get me to leave Writely anytime soon.
whiteboard, writely, 37signals, spelling, ajax
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