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Aggregator Overload - Good Stuff - Some Explored - Some Not
Monday, March 31, 2003
Sunday, March 30, 2003Best war reporters: The Russians?. For somebody who remembers the cold war, this seems a bit surreal. Since those days, it appears the Russian press has swung from the "pravda" of Pravda to the opposite extreme, namely actually reporting unfiltered truth. I started reading these a few days ago with a "this is surely a hoax" attitude. Since then, I am convinced that it's the real thing. They predict division movements and tactics with devestating accuracy, and their analysis seems very well supported. One webpage, which takes a few minutes to read, contains far more information about the war than 4 hours of CNN. So you want links, eh? [kuro5hin.org]
Three Apps to Snag Streaming MP3s. ZDNet's Jason Parker has compiled a sweet list of three streaming audio rippers for both the Mac and Windows platforms."With a good (internet) connection speed, the sound quality is close to indistinguishable from a downloaded or ripped MP3. Here are three downloads you can use to listen to and record... [Lockergnome's Bits and Bytes]
Saturday, March 29, 2003Genius Blogs. Today, my buddy David sent me a link to his latest creation: Legal MP3 Downloads. [C:PIRILLO.EXE]
Wireless audio in the home. Just ran across this article at Slate, which does a good job of showing how you can stream MP3s from your computer to your home stereo using WiFi. Nice. [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]
Search Engine Comparison Chart. Here's a handy chart that compares the features found in a dozen different Web search engines. [The J-Walk Blog]
Syndication Sensation. You're sitting there thinking to yourself: "Yeah, RSS is great and all - but why doesn't Courtney wear a thong in her Webcam? And would she really spank my IP? That, and how do I set up an RSS feed for my site - or for a site that doesn't have one available?" Looks like myRSS may be your answer. I ran a few general news URLs through it and the service came through with usable results. The problem? The primary site is as confusing as hell. [C:PIRILLO.EXE]
Friday, March 28, 2003Top Ten Digital Photography Tips. I've been taking pictures every day since I got my Sony Cybershot U digital camera. This page of digital photography tips has some good information for a photographic know-nothing like me. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
Publishing a project Weblog. Proper tools can create useful information hub [InfoWorld: Columnists] via [Jon's Radio]
Thursday, March 27, 2003Improved Trusted Blog Search Tool: "I've released an update to my 'Blogs I Read' search tool that includes support for blogrolls powered by blogrolling.com. Now you don't have to have a Radio Subscriptions file. The code wizard is now even easier. You just provide the URL of your weblog and I auto-detect if you have a RSS Subscription file or a blogroll." [The Shifted Librarian] [Universal Rule]
One geek to rule them all. Starting off with free email newsletters and a curious brand name, Chris Pirillo has emerged as enfantrepreneur terrible on the web scene. After traditional publishing companies and venture driven ghastlies dumped megabucks pursuing the e-book millennium during the dotcom folly, the word among publishers and authors these days is that e-publishing turned out to be a bunch of hokum, when in fact Chris's GnomeTomes enterprise is doing a steady business in that nascent field. (Disclaimer: later this year I will be bringing out a series of targeted blog-software handbooks - Nanopublishing with... - e-book titles with the assistance of GnomeTomes.) Meanwhile, the Gnomedex conference has busted out as a must-attend for the digerati. They're announcing this year's Gnomedex now ("The Fellowship of the Geeks") and I think you'll have to agree that $99 buys a lot of bang for the buck in Iowa. Of course, Chris is also the host of TechTV's Call for Help show, he writes a column for CPU Magazine, I think he's even coauthoring a book with the dreaded John C. Dvorak. Naturally he has a popular blog, a beautiful wife, glamorous groupies, a crack staff of compadres, and seemingless endless inventiveness and energy. I definitely plan to attend Gnomedex this year. First, though, I've got the annual Waterside Publishing Conference coming up (April 10-12) looming. It turns out the hotel (the Radisson) is having their Internet access overhauled the weekend of our conference, so it looks like we'll need to go through SBC (formerly SBC Pacbell, formerly Pacbell) or an independent Berkeley DSL company to get a three-day line put in. SBC quoted us $400. Doesn't that seem high? I'm determined to make our conference wireless and bloggable. I'm hoping to finally, formally launch my "Agent7" blog about technology publishing and publishing technology in time to cover the conference there live. John Ross has been a huge help in getting that set up. But back to Chris. His blog won the best techie blog Bloggie this year, I think. And the conference, with its One geek to rule them all slogan seems like a gauntlet throw-down to me. Doctorow vs. Pirillo celebrity-death match? [Radio Free Blogistan]
Morons in the news.
Morons in the News: Zero-Tolerance: The 'Tolerance' Stands for 'Intelligence'. If there's one thing I love as much as I hate zero-tolerance policies, it's clever use of a system... [Morons Dot Org]Oh. What a wonderful Catch-22. A 6 year old is facing expulsion for having a plastic butter spoon in his backback. A spoon he got in the cafeteria and wanted to take home. So if they press for expulsion, the parents will sue the school for provding a dabgerous weapon to their 6 year old. Zero-tolerance is for morons. I hope the parents get a ton of money. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]
Something to brighten your day
[McGee's Musings] Tuesday, March 25, 2003Web Site Optimization review. Smart people have said nice things about "Speed Up Your Site". I have not read the book, but the markup on the book's companion site is impressively optimized. (356 words) [dive into mark]
ISFDB rises from the grave. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database -- a bibliogrpahic resource that is to science fiction as the IMDB is to movies -- is finally back online after being off for some months, while it sought out affordable hosting... Link Discuss (via Electrolite) [Boing Boing Blog]
Monday, March 24, 2003Cigarette ads from old TV shows.
Great collection of cigarette ads from old TV shows, including the Flintstones. Link Discuss (via Geisha Asobi)
[Boing Boing Blog]
Chemistry experiments that go bang!.
This collection of "educational" videos demonstrate a bunch of really cool, violent chemical reactions: flaming sodium and chlorine, volatile nitrogen triiodide going bang, and a cast-iron, water-filled bomb that explodes when the water inside of it is frozen with a slush of dry ice and acetone -- and much more.Link Discuss (Thanks, Kyoto!)
[Boing Boing Blog]
Top 10 Satellite Images of 2002.
Satellite Imagery
Source: Space Imaging
The Top 10 Ikonos Satellite Images of 2002
Includes a cool image gallery. Space Imaging sells these and other products to various markets. You can also look at the 2001 list. [The ResourceShelf]
New Free Image Gallery.
Looking for stock photos for a project you're working on?
Look no further than:
Inertia Stock Exchange: share your photos with fellow designers. For personal or commercial use. Long live the free exchange of information and ideas.
[via angiemckaig]
[inluminent/weblog]RSS Feed Jackpot. I was checking out a link that someone sent me earlier, and stumbled upon this jackpot of RSS feeds. Insane! They've even got one set up for Robert Blake, for chrissake. Now, if only they'd add Charlie, I'd be set. I'm telling ya - if you don't have a RSS file, I ain't likely to return to your site. M'kay? Even if you have cool tools like this one or this one.... [C:PIRILLO.EXE]
Friday, March 21, 2003How to capture, clean, and compress video.
Part one of Ars Technica's guide to capturing, cleaning, and compressing video.
Read
Wednesday, March 19, 2003On Being Slashdotted. There may be those who write in public and don't care who and how many people read, but I'm not one of them. So when I turned on the computer Tuesday morning and discovered by visiting Slashdot that they had a pointer to my XML Is Too Hard for Programmers piece, I woke up real fast. Herewith a bunch of random observations on the experience.... [ongoing]
Web Site Optimization. Now here is a site that is really focused on one thing, website optimization. I don't personally run my own website so I can't tell you if these tips are particularly good or not, but there certainly are a lot of them.... [Lockergnome's Bits and Bytes]
Still clinging to the 'digital divide' politically correct foolishness? I've always been amused by the number of people who declare a crisis when anything new isn't instantly equally available to (or understood by) by every race, creed, color, religion, gender, age bracket, income level, education level, hair style, political persuasion...
You name it, there has always been a gradual adoption curve. Fire, written language, mathematics, religion, automobiles, radio, television, computers, basic education, higher education, PDAs, cell phones, CD players, DVD players... Digital divide, my ass. What about the 'fire divide' and the 'radio divide' and the 'television divide' and the 'you-name-it divide'? There aren't enough actual problems in life, so you have to create one?
Divide this...
The Digital Divide Shrinks Among Children. For a long time, those who have argued against worrying too much about the "digital divide" have pointed out that it's more between generations than between rich and poor. Thus, over time, the digital divide will work itself out, as more people grow up with access to computers. A new study seems to support at least some of this theory, showing that the digital divide is much smaller among children in the US. Children in wealthier homes are more likely to have broadband access, but it appears that more and more children of every economic situation have access to the internet in some manner. While they still use it mostly for games (of course), there is evidence that they also use it for helping with homework and research. [Techdirt]
Tuesday, March 18, 2003Loop Labs. I mentioned the Loop Labs site way back in October when this blog was merely one week old. Like most things, I forgot all about it. But Jody reminded me about it, so I'm mentioning it again. It's a Flash-based app that lets you play hundreds of sound samples. Very interactive, and very fun. Office-mates in nearby cubicles will be glad when you go home. Permalink Created Tue, 18 Mar 2003 17:36 GM...[MORE] [The JWalk Blog]
Cheap method of saving scanned document to PDF.
Rick Talcott just emailed me with this nice bit of information that I thought I'd share with others:
"If all one wants to do is save a scanned document to PDF format, there is an easy and free way to do it. PDF995 is a free printer driver that can be downloaded from here. I have used it regularly for over 6 months without a problem."
I haven't tried scanning straight into Acrobat as yet, but I totally agree that PDF995 is a nifty piece of software. I run Windows XP as a platform, and my Acrobat Distiller (the PDF converting driver) continually causes crashes and errors. I have been using PDF995 for a month now, and it is smooth like butter. Just make sure you do purchase the shareware, otherwise you end up having to live with endless advertising Web pages opening automatically all over the place. It only costs $9.50, and is worth buying."
Rick is pretty knowledgeable about these things so if he says it is worth checking out then I'd look into it.
[Ernest Svenson: PDF for Lawyers]Four Guys from Rolla have a tutorial on RSS. [Scripting News]
Sunday, March 16, 2003Tivo. Some handy Tivo hacking links. [Simon Fell]
Old ads....
AdFlip is 'the worlds largest archive of classic print ads'. Brilliant. The ad on the left is from the famous Volkswagen campaign by DDB. [The Cartoonist] [Ye Olde Phart]
Droolmachine. My new favorite blog is Inconceivably beautiful. And I have Erik Barzeski to thank for the pointer. And Simon Fell for BlogToaster to thank for telling me about Erik's post minutes after it was uploaded to the 'Net. If you'd like to import my list of links for BT, here (again) is the link to my OPML file.... [C:PIRILLO.EXE]
Wikipedia. the Free encyclopedia breaks 50,000 articles. For those of you who don't follow along, the Wikipedia is a Free, a multi-language, online-encyclopedia licensed under the GFDL that is created and edited by anyone and everyone. It has recently broken the 50,000 article mark (Brittanica has 85K). Wikipedia aims to one day have more and better articles than the Brittanica. Wikipedia's are currently available in 25 languages. [kuro5hin.org]
Saturday, March 15, 2003Ernie the Attorney
"21 Rules for lawyers How to Succeed as a Lawyer, was written by a father who wanted to offer his son guidance on how to practice law. The father was clearly a wise man. And the son was a fortunate one." [via Ernie the Attorney]
Friday, March 14, 2003BodyTag. BodyTag: Explorations in Web programming. You'll find lots of unusual and interesting things here, using Java, JavaScript, and DHTML. Permalink Created Fri, 14 Mar 2003 17:13 GMT ### [The JWalk Blog]
The Simpsons Complete Episode Guide. An excellent reference, worthy of a bookmark. For each episode of The Simpsons, it displays the original air date, a plot summary, and a list of the guest stars. Permalink Created Fri, 14 Mar 2003 15:13 GMT ### [The JWalk Blog]
Thursday, March 13, 200303/13/03: For a Nickel I Will. Bob has an idea for stopping spammers: Make them pay. [I, Cringely @ PBS Online]
Snowflake crystal hi-res image gallery.
Gorgeous online gallery of high-res images of snowflake crystals. At left, one of many images captured during a single snowfall by Patricia Rasmussen, using a photomicroscopy apparatus designed for capturing ultra-high-res snow crystal images. Link Discuss (Thanks, Reverse Cowgirl)[Boing Boing Blog]
Search Google, me or my friends!.
Search Tool Added Through Lilia Efimova .... Search Tool Added
Through Lilia Efimova I found Micah Alpern's microblogosphere search tool (go see Micah's weblog).As a search tool to search my own blog, and the ones I read, was something I already had on my wishlist of improvements for my blog, I've imeddiately added it on the left hand side, directly below the blogroll.
Great work Micah! [Ton's Interdependent thoughts]
Very cool stuff. Check out my home page to see the resulting search box to see it in action.
You can now from one place search Google, my blog (a Google search limited to my site) or a blog search that searches across all sites whose RSS feeds I read. (Note: you'll need a Google API key to make this work on your own site; visit the Google API site for more info.) This is incredibly valuable - and just one more step down the path to the semantic web.
The end result? You can now run searches that effectively say - "show my everything about topic (X) that my community has said".
Whoa.
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]Lileks's vintage ads.
Lileks has started a gallery of vintage ads printed off the microfilm morgue at his newspaper and scanned in. Lovely stuff. Link Discuss (Thanks, Brian!) [Boing Boing Blog]
Wednesday, March 12, 2003Testing Paolo's softshadowmaker "I've always loved the way Paolo's images have lovely soft shadows around them. Unfortunately as one of the artistically challenged I've never been able to do it myself. I asked Paolo if he could find a way for me to have soft shadows too... he came up with a very neat solution which we've now packaged into a Macro that you can download and use yourself. Enjoy :) To get the soft shadow around my picture I used:[Macro error: String constant isn't correctly specified. Must be of the form "abcd".] "Matt Mower's Knowledge Log - ( liveTopics, k-log, radio, blogging, RSS )
Profile of Freedom to Tinker's Ed Felten. For fans of Professor Ed Felten's Freedom to Tinker weblog, the most recent issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly has an excellent profile of Felten and his work titled The Tech Protector. [McGee's Musings]
Lots of Old Print Ads. Hundreds of ads from 1911-1957, available at the Ad*Access Project. The Ad*Access project consists of five main subject categories: Beauty and Hygiene, Radio, Television, Transportation, and World War II. These subjects were chosen for their broad popular appeal and proven interest to students, faculty and researchers. Permalink Created Wed, 12 Mar 2003 18:04 GMT ### [The JWalk Blog]
The NY Times reviews Cory Doctorow's first novel. Cory writes for the popular Boing Boing weblog. [Scripting News]
Free eBook: VHS to DVD. "Having made the statement that I'd finish the draft of Lockergnome's Guide to Converting VHS to DVD in time for this issue made the issue really late. As promised, the VHS to DVD tome is in its beta stage and ready for download. To get your free copy, just add... [Lockergnome's Bits and Bytes]
Chris Pirillo just won the best technology weblog in the "bloggies". Excellent!
[The Scobleizer Weblog]Congrats to BookSlut!.
Winners of the 2003 Bloggies have been announced, and BookSlut won for "Best Topical Category!"
[The Shifted Librarian] Tuesday, March 11, 2003Whole Wheat Radio. Yesterday I received an email from Jim Kloss, who runs a tiny 24-hour per day webcast known as Whole Wheat Radio. Jim (somehow) found this blog, and asked for permission to use some of the material on his webcast. I tuned in to check it out, and I've been listening ever since. Whole Wheat Radio is a non-commercial venture, of course. You'll hear a wide variety of good music from independent arti...[MORE] [The JWalk Blog]
Gory Gorey....
Edward Gorey's Gashlycrumb Tinies, an illustrated alphabet of horrible things happening to children, is now available online. More about Edward Gorey can be found at the Edward Gorey House and this Gorey tribute site. Enjoy! [via BoingBoing] [The Aardvark Speaks] [Ye Olde Phart]
Monday, March 10, 2003What are the cool new tech products? Dan Gillmor is at Demo 2003 and is reporting live in blog-like fashion. Sounds like Picasa is a hit, and hopefully Activewords will be too. [Ernie the Attorney]
Another ReplayTV Convert.
Well, I'm certainly doing my part to maintain SonicBlue's bottom line. Bryce Yehl just bought a ReplayTV 5040 and it's already having an effect on him:
"In spite of the fact that I'm already used to watching my favorites shows on my own schedule, I do see my viewing habits changing. It's that Magic Pause Button. I like it. A lot."
Even better, he's pointed me to ReplayPC and QVision, two utilities for extracting shows from newer Replays to your PC. I've ordered a Linksys WET11 Bridge so when it gets here, I'll have to try these out. I figure I should be able to pull a couple of shows off the new Replay, convert their formats, and load them on my Archos Multimedia Jukebox to go. Then when we go on vacation, I can take music and video with us!
[The Shifted Librarian] Sunday, March 09, 2003"Legit" music services still suck. David Pogue rounds up the new "legit" music services and concludes that they all cost too much, have confusing pricing plans, use dumbass DRM, and don't have the selection to compete with the free file-sharing networks. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
Building yourself a DMZ. "Eventually, if you get interested enough in Security, you are going to wonder what a DMZ is and why you should or should not have one. DMZ is an acronym that stands for De-Militarized Zone, and in the 'real' world it is the location between two hostile entities such as... [Lockergnome's Bits and Bytes]
Saturday, March 08, 2003Phoons From Around the World. The pose in the accompanying image is supposedly known as a "phoon." This amazing web site has a collection of phoon pictures from all over the world. Each photo is meticulously catalogued, so you can quickly find the phoons you're looking for. Permalink Created Sat, 09 Mar 2003 15:29 GMT ### [The JWalk Blog]
PC Magazine's Top 100 Web Sites. They call it the Top 100 web sites you didn't know you couldn't live without. Unfortunately, the layout of this article is atrocious. It's obviously designed to maximize the number of ads served. Permalink Created Wed, 05 Mar 2003 20:54 GMT ### [The JWalk Blog]
Aggregator reviews: "If you use [...] rss feeds then you will need an aggregator service. There are more than you would suspect. Once and Future has done some research and shares his discoveries with various aggregators available, both as desktop versions and web browsers." [Private Ink] [Universal Rule]
The horror of blimps.
The Horror of Blimps. Scylla: Some blimps are better off dead.
I laughed so hard, tears came out of my eyes. Thanks Ingo!
[Sam Ruby]
This has popped up in a number of places. Be careful.
[McGee's Musings]Searching the Collective Mind of Your Blogroll.
Wow, I love the blogosphere (the capital "B" one and all the little ones)! First Scott Johnson creates Roogle, an RSS search engine (sorry, James), and then Micah Alpern just happens to have written an answer to my request for a search engine for my aggregator.
"Until the semantic web arrives the best method we have to understand a users point of view is to examine the RSS feeds they subscribe to. I currently read RSS feeds from over 70 websites. This list of RSS feeds includes friends, publications, and domain expects; all people whose opinions I value. If Googling my weblog is like searching by backup brain, then searching all sites in my RSS news aggregator is like searching the brains of people I respect and find interesting.
Some times I want to know what the world thinks (google)
Some times I want to know what I think (my weblog)
Some times I want to know what those I respect think (blogs I read)....
I’m using the Google Soap API and PHP to do a series of domain specific searches with the site:foo.com advanced operator. Where do I get the list of news feeds to search? Radio Userland, the RSS news aggregator I use produces an OPML file, which is an XML document that lists all my news sources. All the results are collected together and presented on a single page....
As the quote by Alex Halavais at the top of this article notes, there are multiple blogsphere’s. These intersecting spheres are broken down by, among other things, interests, associations, geography, and responsibilities. We each live in several sphere’s simultaneously. Identifying and exploiting these sphere will require technical infrastructure in identify and reputation that are still being developed. As always the failure of geeks to find what they’re looking for will drive this development."
Basically, Micah has created an engine that searches the web (Google), your blog, or the blogs you read in your aggregator. It can even be incorporated into your web site! Wow. Majorly suh-weet with book-ending happy dances! Of course, you're still relying on Google's indexing of the blogs in your aggregator, but talk about a giant leap for blogkind. Thanks, Micah!
Isobel also suggests trying Agent Frank, which looks quite intriguing. I need more hours in the day!
[The Shifted Librarian]Doc and Dave sitting in a tree: "Doc sent an email out to a bunch of folks this morning, pointing to a new work he and David Weinberger created, World of Ends." [Burningbird] [Universal Rule]