12 CommentsReading the morning paper, I noticed yet another ad that said something to the effect of “Company X now has a Blog!”. While it’s certainly no news that blogging has made a mainstream breakthrough these last few years, I found myself wondering: why is this exciting? Why is it worth ad-space?
Well the answer is as [...]
4 CommentsMy favouritest lexicon, Wikipedia, has a competitor. One of the co-founders of Wikipedia — Larry Sanger — has forked the project into something he calls “Citizendium”. Yeah, it’s like citizen + compendium, real clever. The idea is that of a new Wikipedia, but without the “problems” with the inherent openness of a wiki. That is, not everyone is allowed to edit the Citizendium, and “accountability” is emphasized.
Well, the pilot project of Citizendium has launched. Ars Technica comments. What do you think? Would you rather pool your knowledge in Wikipedia, or the Citizendium?
Ironically, the best source of information regarding the Citizendium seems to be an article on Wikipedia.
3 CommentsWith the advent of social networking — especially sites like Digg — making sure your Wordpress website is cachable can mean the difference between a surge of new visitors, or a database server crashed.
In this case, “cachable” refers to server-side caching; allowing a caching mechanism (either the built-in caching system or WP-Cache) to serve cached [...]
9 CommentsJust last week, I learned that Gmail can now download my regular POP3 mail to the Gmail interface. Previously, it only worked the other way around, meaning you could download Gmail messages via POP3 to your standalone mail client.
Well I essentially jumped right in and made Gmail my mail client of choice. It now [...]
11 CommentsThere’s no target too small for spam, apparently. Chiming in to agree with me is Mr. Cabanillas, who apparently has experienced the exact same result these past few days.
The last line of spam defence, form-based emailing, is now being targeted by overly complimenting spammers.
What’s there left to do? I can’t use Akismet on form mail, and since the spam is wrapped in headers created by my own form, it’s harder to classify as spam. Maybe one of them Are you human, sorry I have to ask? checkboxes? How would one go about creating such?
10 Comments
I got myself an iPod Shuffle for christmas. My previous mp3 player was an aging FrontierLabs NexIA, so the gift was a welcome surprise.
The iPod Shuffle is a tiny 1GB mp3 player. It has shuffle and sequential modes, no screen, and options for play, pause, forward, backward and volume up/down. To add mp3 files to the player, one can only use iTunes.
The player does exactly what it says on the package, and does it so well that I’ll have to declare it the best dedicated mp3 player of its size. If it wasn’t for the fact that it was iTunes only, it would get six hearts.
iTunes is Apple’s main music application. It plays music, creates playlists, subscribes to podcasts and of course it gives you access to the iTunes Music Store, which sells both music, videos and iPod games.
I have learned, that one either loves or hates iTunes. Both feelings, I believe, are grounded in the fact that iTunes does things differently than most other media players. This goes for handling music, managing playlists, syncing players and subscribing to podcasts. The latter, podcast subscriptions, it does particularly well. The former, not so much.
It may be that iTunes doesn’t work as well on Windows as it does on a Mac, but for me, playing music in iTunes is slow and bulky - the forced-upon chrome skin feels like it’s simply slowing down things. Playlist creation feels like an exact science in iTunes. Syncing the iPod works well, once one gets the hang of it, but I really believe this feature would be more worthwhile had I used iTunes as my primary player and hence gotten the benefit of statistically created playlists I could sync to. Basically, iTunes does most of what I would want from such an application, but does none of it as simply, quickly or easily as alternatives such as Winamp or Foobar2000. For me, the podcast area is where iTunes really shines. For that, I give 2 hearts. For the lack of global hotkeys, the annoying background services and general bulkiness, I’m not keeping the remaining 4 hearts, at least until version 8 comes out.
8 CommentsApparently as of February 2007, Gmail is not only open to the public, but has a new feature which I’ve been hoping/waiting for since April 1st 2004. That feature is called “Other Accounts“, and basically means you can download your non-web based emails, from your server, to Gmail, via POP3.
Why is this so great? For so many reasons. Essentially, you can now have a single unified email address (with Google in the name of course). That, or you could just route all your various mail addresses through Gmails spam filter and have Gmail forward it to your other mail address of choice. Either way, for me, Thunderbird has fierce competition. Now I wonder if Apollo could be used to wrap Gmail as “standalone” desktop app…
20 CommentsDespite what I’ve said in the past, I do not despise the Mac. I like many things about the Mac — the look of the hardware, the clean and crispness of the operating system, the modern feel it exudes.
But it’s not all strawberries and sunshine. Criticizing means caring.
Commenta living organism characterized by voluntary movement
The Fauna Theme is installed on thousands of edublogs and Wordpress.com blogs. Built around Wordpress‘ theme engine, PHP and MySQL, it is highly customizable by end users.
Fauna is “charity-ware”, which means users pledge to be do-gooders in exchange for using the otherwise free and open-source theme.
29 CommentsSo, late to the game as usual, I have discovered podcasts. They’re great. It’s radio, on demand. As an avid Mac critic, I’ve tried holding off installing iTunes, but finally succumbed. So far, iTunes is just the best solution out there for subscribing to, downloading and playing podcasts. I’ve tried TWiT’s webplayer, Digg Podcasts webplayer. They’re both okay, but iTunes is just more comfortable. Fine.
I’m currently subscribing to:
Now I just need more good podcasts. That’s where you come into the picture. Tell me: what I should be subscribing to?
16 Comments
Favicon2Dots turns your favicon into a 3D dot projection. It works rather well and is a quite interesting way to see a 16×16 picture. For a future update, I’d wish for semitransparent pixels to be not quite as tall as the other dots.
What does your favicon look like?
CommentCoacheye makes it easy for clients and coaches to find each other.
The talented Coacheye team approached me with a functional website and asked for a design review. During the course of a few weeks, I provided usability suggestions as well as advice on structure and interaction design.
The process involved:
(73)
(295)
(7)
(11)
(59)
(424)
