...more recent posts
I'm just hearing about Ecto now. It is a stand alone weblogging application. So instead of posting your blog through a tiny textarea box inside your browser, Ecto gives you a sort of word processing like program with a much richer set of formatting and spell check features. It also does image uploads, and can even crop and resize images. Looks like a pretty slick package. And lots of integration on OS X (it integrates with iPhoto for instance.) Here are some screen shots.
And now there is a Windows version as well.
I'll keep my eye on this, but I don't think it is something I would pay for. Neat idea though.
Nokia 6255. This is the phone I am recommending now (if you don't need an uber geek phone like the Treo600 or S/E P900.) This Nokia has everthing. Very nice.
Experimenting with Bit Torrent & RSS. I wish I could get it together to say more about this combination. Hopefully in the future. I think this might be big.
You can download the Bit Torrent client here (MacOS X and Windows) if you want to play around with it. Sort of like a P2P program, except you don't search for files. Instead, you have to have a link to a .torrent seed file. This seed file then allows you to connect to peers, and download the target file in chunks from many different people at once. As you download bits of the file, you are also uploading bits to other people.
So a server can seed a .torrent file of size x, and then n number of people can download it. But the server doesn't need x * n bandwidth, it only needs x * y where y is some very small number. Then the rest of the people downloading the file (n - y) will actually be downloading it from other people who are downloading it instead of from the original server. So the greater the number of people downloading at the same time (the larger n is) the *greater* the speed you will get (at no cost to the original server.) This is very good for large files that lots of people want at the same time. Perhaps it's the only way to do this.
But, like I said, you can't search for stuff through Bit Torrent. You have to already know the URL of a .torrent seed in order to get started. For instance, here is a web site listing television show .torrents. Just open one of those URLs in Bit Torrent and it will start downloading (be patient, it can take a few minutes to connect and start - but then it will be very fast once it starts.)
If that all makes sense, then the original link to the Bit Torrent + RSS stuff is just about making RSS feeds be able to contain .torrent links, and having the RSS feed reader automatically hand these links off to Bit Torrent. This way someone can publish a .torrent seed, say, in the middle of the night, your RSS reader would automatically get the link, and then automatically start the download. With this setup you could wake up every morning to hundreds of megs of fresh downloads, all without your intervention, just by subscribing to certain RSS channels. (Sounds a little like TV, no?)
Anyway, I'm rushing, and this is not a good summary, but there is something very interesting here. I'll try to come back with better examples.
There might be a Mac OS X trojan in the wild. This would be the first one as far as I know.
Went away for the weekend to a strange house in Pine HIlls New York. About 2 hours north of NYC. It was built with all local stone by a friend's great grandfather in 1921. Beautiful quirky structure on 400 amazing acres. Here are a few (out of order, sorry) pictures of the main house (click the thumbnails for larger images.)
Playfair is an open source program to turn DRM laden (fairplay) Apple iTunes .AAC files into regular .AAC files. Source code only.
Kinja finally launches (beta.) This is the weblog portal that Nick Denton (gawker, gizmodo, wonkette, micro publishing big wig) and Meg Hourihan (megnut, ex blogger co-founder) have been working on for quite some time.
After a quick look it seems like a web based RSS reader (aggregator?) that has a blog like presentation style. You select the channels (RSS feeds from the blogoshpere) and they are aggragated for you on your Kinja page, called a digest. Sort of like an auto generated weblog that is all pull quotes and links with no commentary.
Here's Jason Kottke's digest.
Why isn't the current (voice) phone system considered a danger to national security? Clearly it fails in any large enough crisis. If the telcos would accelerate their switch to an IP based network (which is going to happen anyway) they could solve the problem by scaling back services in times of huge demand (most likely during some major crisis.) Instead of millions of simultaneous voice calls bringing the whole system to a complete stop, the telcos could just drop voice service during such peak times and people would have to use SMS. Not as good as voice maybe, but infinitely better than nothing (which is what most people had in NYC on 9/11.)
Shouldn't they really do this?
Quicksilver is a launcher application for Mac OS X (10.3). Similar to the hugely popular Launchbar, except Quicksilver is free. A little hard to explain, but if you are the type of Mac user who knows and uses all the keyboard shortcuts (I guess this means "power user" but I hate that phrase) you really should give it a look. Amazingly elegant.
My Treo 600 has been out geeked. Okay, this isn't a phone, so it's not really a fair comparison. But Sharp's new Zaurus SL-6000L is the new definitive high end wireless (802.11b) PDA for people who get excited by remote terminal session and reg ex. Slide out thumbboard. Big screen. Runs linux. Case closed.
Well, assuming you can drop $699 on a PDA and you don't mind getting laughed at by all the cool kids with their iPods...