Archive for the ‘Web’ Category
Get EVDO, and stop being taken
I was having a fascinating chat with my traveling buddy, Walt, yesterday. We were sitting in the restaurant of the Hilton North Greenpoint in Houston, and he asked me how the internet access in the hotel was working out.
T (Me): Well, the speed’s fine.
W (Walt): Is the wireless pretty good?
T: I suppose. It transmits data, if that’s what you mean.
W: No, I’m just wondering if it’s any better than what I went through to use on of their desktops in the “business center.”
T: I’d guess that using my MacBook is better than using a PC in any room, on any internet connection. /me grins.
W: Yah, especially at $1.50/minute.
…and this is where the rant begins. $1.50/minute? I was already paying [correction: the company was paying] $10.77/day for a connection, wireless or wired, on each device that needed one. In my case, that was three - MacBook, Dell laptop for work, and the iPhone…which made for a grand total of $64.62 in internet charges for two days. [Note: this is about $5 more than what I pay for my Sprint EVDO card/month]
TiVo To Go
I’ve had a TiVo for quite a while now, and it’s been good to me. As a result of laziness, my trusty TiVo has operated with a standard phone connection as its only link to the outside world; it downloads its updates in the background, and I hadn’t given it a thought.
That is, until today.
So it turns out that one of my buddies is on MTV this week, and we want to capture the show to send around (Disclaimer: this practice probably violates several content protection laws, but I’m claiming ignorance). A recent chit-chat confirmed that I was the best bet, in our circle of friends, in getting this video on a hard drive. Naturally, I turned to my TiVo.
Fortunately, I had an extra USB wireless adapter laying around…and after some USB cable jiggery pokery (can you believe it uses an A-A USB cable?), was able to get the TiVo on the network here at the house. And a whole new world opened up to me…
You might know that I have an affinity for podcasting, and it turns out that the TiVO has a “Podcaster” app built in. Yep, you guessed it: you can listen to your favorite podcasts directly through your TiVo! Rad.
Copying movies from the TiVo is a cinch with the TiVo To Go app from their website, and a slick little app called DirectShow Dump, you can quickly convert the videos to an unprotected MPEG format.
I’ve now got all of the music on my server available for perusal and enjoyment through my TiVo, as well as all of the photos in my iPhoto library.
Did I mention that there are several little internet apps on there (like weather and traffic)?
Hook up your TiVo. Seriously.
technorati tags:tivo, tivotogo, television, dvr
I originally heard about Twitter on the Macworld episode of Macbreak, where Justine was preoccupied with the constant updates on her Treo…and I just had to check it out.
Twitter’s premise is a little bit difficult to figure out at first. Their motto “What are you doing?” does an excellent job of summing it up, but only after you dig for a few minutes (ironic, eh?). Fundamentally, Twitter is a service that lets you send updates on what you’re up to from your cell phone, IM client, or the web (update: there are programs like Twitterific that let you update without taking up a tab). Your buddies can choose to “follow” you, and will receive text messages when you send an update to Twitter.
For instance, I know that Leo Laporte uses Twitter…so I told Twitter to follow him by texting “follow leolaporte”. Now, throughout the day I get little gems of interest from Leo. Any time he posts an update, Twitter sends the update to my phone (or my IM client, if I choose).
They’re pretty clear that Twitter is not intended to be a replacement for your favorite IM system, but I can definitely tell that there’s some inside chit chat that takes place. Given that you’re broadcasting your updates to anyone who’s following you, it’s not uncommon for people to see your response to another person’s update, and have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.
Kinda fun, eh?
Anyway, I’m Twittering semi-regularly; it’s fun…and fits in nicely as a badge on Turnipville. You can find me on Twitter under the username “Turnip,” or at this page.
technorati tags:twitter, leolaporte, text, IM
The Web, Video Style
Take a minute, and watch this video (thanks, Boing Boing). If you’re a web lover, like me, you’ll be grateful.
Trailfire.com
I’ve managed to recover from the Chargers’ loss long enough to take this quick snapshot of Trailfire’s social “tagging” program on Turnipville.
Trailfire is actually very cool, in that it allows you to make “trails” about certain topics across the web. In many ways, it reminds me of Flickr photo comments…except they can span multiple sites.
The idea here is simple. Download their client (for Firefox or IE), create an account, and then insert your trail comments wherever you deem appropriate on whatever site you’d like. This service (which is free, for now) reminds me of del.icio.us on steriods. I’ve created a “Turnip Network” trail outlining the sites that we’re currently running, but it doesn’t need to be that logical, I’m guessing.
I could see myself creating a trail for every tech-related problem that I solve online. Think about how that works for you. You search Google for “nvidia video card ubuntu,” and you find your total solution after piecing together the text of three or four different pages. Instead of just bookmarking them in del.icio.us (which you’ll probably still do), you also create a trail called “nvidia on ubuntu.” This trail takes you - and your fellow trailfire users - through the path (path, trail, whatever) you’ve just been down, and adds a sequential element to bookmark tagging.
I’ve installed the client, and can definitely get some goodness from it. Go check it out. I think we’ve got a winner here…
technorati tags:trailfire.com, trailfire, tagging, web2
Searchmash.com
I was super excited to see Google’s newest venture, SearchMash. It combines the typical Google search results with blog results, image results, and news results in a pretty Ajaxy/Web2 feel.
I was so excited with it that I downloaded the necessary stuff to make it my default search bar engine in Flock and Firefox.
Apparently, I was so excited, and searching so often that I’ve killed it. All visits to searchmash.com are redirected to sorry.searchmas.com, and a beautiful 404.
Man, what gives? I was so pumped…Come on, Google!
technorati tags:searchmash, google, searchengine
OurStory.com - Get the whole family in on it
I spent a few minutes this morning stumbling around the web, and happened upon OurStory.com - a web2 site that’s offering people a means for cataloging events by visual, annotated timelines.
I actually see this as being similar to a genealogy software suite, as the timelines are quite broad. What’s unique here is that it’s collaborative (one of the things that’s been missing from conventional genealogy suites), it’s web-based, and it appears to be free. That being said, I’m sure that the truly exploit its functionality, one will want to upgrade; it’s in Beta, and I don’t see any pricing options yet…so who knows?
Initially, I guessed this was yet another blogging site, but their blurbs are pretty good:
Stories about our life experiences help make us who we are. Collect the big and little moments of your life and organize them with OurStory’s easy-to-use timeline. Tell your stories at your pace, whenever you have a few minutes, from any computer.
Sadly, one of the first things that enters my mind when I see cool new sites like this is: “Okay, will this site still be around in two years? Will I dump hours into a great new “timeline,” only to find out that the company’s gone bankrupt?” It’s a fair question - but at least they offer the option to print out your timelines once they’ve been done.
As I was reading the list of features, I remember thinking, “Wow, I’m surprised Apple didn’t include something like this in iPhoto.”
Check it out.
“Clear” up your voicemail
Have you ever thought: “Ya know, my voice sounds like absolute garbage in my voicemail greeting…just like everyone else”? Take a hint from us, and give this a shot.
Skype is offering free “SkypeOut” until the end of the year, as identified on their site:
Free calling within the US and Canada.
But remember, you can make free calls within the US and Canada to both landlines and mobile phones until the end of the year. It’s really easy; there are no contract fees, no line rentals. All you need is Skype and a phone number you want to call.
SkypeOut lets you make calls via Skype to regular landlines, and given that the connection quality is higher than your normal phone connection, you’ll find that your voice will sound ever-so-wonderful when recorded on your voicemail system.
It’s also an excellent way to record messages left for you and distribute them online.
OmniWeb: Ehh…Maybe
In our ever-continuing quest to find the perfect browser, we decided recently to give the new version of OmniWeb a spin. For those of you on Windows machines, you can skip most of this: the browser is for OS X only.
For those of you on OS X, using Firefox, Safari, Opera, Camino, or some other alternative, you might find the following highlights useful:
- The Good
- Quick loading times: OmniWeb seems to load pages quite quickly. We’re not into the whole “sit in front of the machine with a stopwatch thing,” but we noticed that OmniWeb consistently loaded pages more quickly than both Safari and Camino, was a tad faster than Firefox, and was about the same as Opera.
- The tab layout scheme (with the thumbnails of the tabs on the left) is awesome. We considered this to be another overhyped feature…until we used it. Having a visual glance at your tab options is incredibly handy, and this feature alone might be reason enough to use OmniWeb.
- Bookmark layout: it’s on the same relative plane as Firefox and Safari, with a very intuitive page for editing and creating bookmarks. We found ourselves missing the integrated del.icio.us links available natively through Flock, and via extensions in Firefox, but satisfied with our local options. The ability to sync bookmarks across iSync (and .Mac) was also quite useful.
- Rendering: everything looked as it should on 95% of the pages we visited.
- The Bad
- The username/password management is absolutely terrible. Terrible. Some of the combinations that it came up with for logins was not only dead wrong, but quite creative. We saw the mixture of usernames and email addresses on several different pages - some of which wouldn’t correct themselves even after telling OmniWeb to accept the new values. Sadly, this issue is substantial enough to keep us from using OmniWeb as our main browser.
- The price: you’re going to have to break out the wallet if you want to use OmniWeb. It’s $29.95 for a single license, and $44.95 for a family license. While that price level isn’t particularly unreasonable, the free alternatives (every other browser we’ve talked about) make the price seem a little difficult to swallow.
- Display lag: we noticed that on slower machines (read: eMac G4/800 with 800MB RAM), form entry lagged several key strokes behind our typing. Yeah, we type fast…but that’s no excuse. Occasionally closing and re-opening OmniWeb helped a tad - which might suggest memory leakage - but who wants to do that? If you’re using Firefox, you’re probably already doing this…but you didn’t pay for Firefox, did you?
On the whole, OmniWeb is a solid browser. The username/password problem is a big one to get around in our book; but if you’re not big on saving that kind of info in your browser, you’ll probably find the graphical tabs to be worth the $30.
Technorati Tags: browser, omniweb
Gmail Hosting: 4 Months In..
We talked almost four months ago about our endeavor to use Gmail Hosting as our primary email conduit; we also promised updates.
Guess what? It’s good to go.
It’s probably self-explanatory, given that we continue to use it (four months later), but Google has done an excellent job of making Gmail Hosting feel and behave exactly the way your Gmail account does.
If you’re not familiar with Gmail, you’re not going to grow familiar with it in this post. But if you love Gmail, hopefully this will convince you to give their hosting option a run (at least, if you own a domain).
It would be interesting to see how many people are using Gmail Hosting as a way to have over 50 gigs of email storage. After all, you could, theoretically, create 25 unique email addresses - each with nearly 3 GBs of storage - and just keep forwarding messages as they fill up.
Or, how are people using this to manage things like Getting Things Done? It may not be an implementation that works, because of the login/logout issues, but it’s certainly a possibility.
Overall, this has been a seamless integration for all of our email. Go check it out.