2 Jan 08 - Stock Music.net

For those of us who actually create media, it can be really hard to find good music that you can publish as part of your own work. Whether it's a trailer, a music video, or a larger work like a film, licensing can be really complicated.

Which is what makes sites like StockMusic.net so wonderful. Each song costs $30, and you can use it effectively anywhere, for any reason, as much as you want. And they've got hundreds, perhaps thousands of songs. Downloadable in AIFF, WAV, or MP3 formats, with a free demo of every single one playable in your browser or downloadable.

A great little service.

Posted in Tech

17 Dec 08 - How to really use Twitter

Okay, so you've signed up for a Twitter account, and maybe posted a few times. How do you move to the next level?

Here are some suggestions for improving your Twitter experience:

• Go to the Everyone stream. See who's talking, and about what.
• More importantly, see what catches your attention. Observe effective use of 140 characters, so you'll know how to tweet more effectively.
• Look at who's popular on Twitter (via Twitterholic). Read their tweets. You probably won't want to follow all of them, but they are popular for a reason. I follow about half of them, for whatever that's worth.
• Get on Twitter frequently. It's really most effective when you can check it several times a day, at least. Fortunately, this doesn't take long.
• Check your @Replies often. While you're away, someone might reply to you about something you tweeted yesterday, and you may not see it in your regular stream.
• Check your DMs (direct messages) often. See above. Also, DMs function more like email, and they're very easy to miss.
• Post original content. This is a personal peeve; I see folks whose stream consists entirely of "@gozo Yeah, and you know what that means" and "@hiroyuki Oh, I know it!" Little real content. Instead, as you're browsing the web, tweet about the websites you're reading. And as you sit down to your computer and load up Twitter, think about what you've been doing, and tweet about that.
• Look into an aggregator application, like Twhirl, TweetDeck, or PeopleBrowsr. These will show all your feeds (including @Replies and DMs) on one screen, making it much easier to notice important topics.

But above all, don't go too nuts. Twitter's fun and useful, but it's not a place to spend your entire day. It's only Ones and 0s.

Hope this helps.

Posted in Tech

11 Dec 08 - PeopleBrowsr

If you like Twitter, you may benefit from a more powerful interface. Some solve this through use of TweetDeck, a desktop application that shows multiple Twitter streams (your stream, replies to you, direct messages, etc.) in columns.

The new service PeopleBrowsr is a web-based application that works like TweetDeck. You enter your Twitter account information, and PeopleBrowsr displays columns of streams. You can easily add more streams, and re-arrange them, right in your browser. The interface is a little busy but highly functional, and provides a lot of information at once. Even better, it's written almost entirely in JavaScript, so it doesn't depend on heavyweight frameworks like Flash.

Why use this instead of TweetDeck? Because you can use PeopleBrowsr from any computer, anywhere. It goes with you; if you have 'net access, you can use PeopleBrowsr and manage a huge array of Twitter conversations.

Very, very handy.

Posted in Tech

3 Dec 08 - What Is Glogster?

A lot of educational folks who "get" the new web (Web 2.0, social networking, etc.) are excited about Glogster. Despite the annoying name, it's a neat site: it lets you quickly and easily create a poster as a web page. Essentially.

So when you go to Glogster, you get a blank page, and a simple little menu of neat things you can add to the page: text, images, clipart, video, sound, etc. And, of course, you can add your own.

Imagine a student who has to give a presentation on Benjamin Franklin. She uses Glogster to create a one-page presentation, with images of the man, biographical notes, etc, and presents that in class. Immediate multimedia presentation, without the ugliness or restrictions of a PowerPoint deck.

Or she could assemble her notes in a Glogster page, and work on it while at home, or at school, or wherever.

Of course, once you've created your glog, you can save it to an account, create new glogs, share them, etc. Here's my glog.

And Glogster's not limited to students, of course; anyone can use it. It provides convenient, simplified website development, without the limitations of FTP or wrestling with a web-based HTML editor.

Cool.

Posted in Tech

13 Nov 08 - Post to Several Twitter Accounts at Once with Matt

Twitter's great; it lets you keep in touch with lots of people.

For those of you who've already jumped onto the Twitter bandwagon, you may have heard of folks who have several Twitter accounts. I have 4 -- my main account (BrentNewhall), BrentRPG for an online game I play through Twitter, OtakuNoVideo for my podcast, and Gunwave for announcements about my online game.

How do I manage them all? Through Matt, the "Multi-Account Twitter Tweeter". It's an online service where, after you create an account, you add the username and password for each of your Twitter accounts. From Matt, you can post to one, some, or all of your Twitter accounts, all from one page.

What's even more cool: Matt was built in 4 days by a development team, just to see if they could do it. See the full story.

Posted in Tech

5 Nov 08 - Save Yourself Time With Google Maps or MapQuest

I recently looked into adopting a dog from the SPCA. It fell through, but during the transaction I was surprised by something.

The SPCA requires an in-home visit to verify that the house is safe for the dog. When I gave the SPCA representative my information, including my home address, she asked me for directions to my house. As in, turn-by-turn directions. I was surprised, but provided them.

A few days later, I received a phone call from the SPCA rep who'd actually be visiting. She asked me for turn-by-turn directions to my house.

I was floored. Could neither of these fine people use Google Maps or MapQuest? Just type the destination address in the search box, click Search, then click the Get directions to here link, type your home address, and click Go or Add Location. Boom! You have complete, turn-by-turn directions to wherever you're going.

It's easy, it's free, and it saves everyone time. Why not use it?

Posted in Tech

23 Oct 08 - Jason Calacanis, His Email List, and Layoffs

Jason Calacanis is a very interesting man.

He's a classic Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He started several major websites, including Silicon Alley Reporter and Weblogs, and is currently running Mahalo, which is a sort of hybrid Google/Wikipedia site.

I first heard Jason Calacanis--literally, heard--when he was a guest on This Week in Tech, a tech audio podcast. He was completely confident, and opinionated, and threw out extremely self-assured opinions.

And this ticked people off.

Now, he wouldn't attack people directly (except when clearly in fun), and he made clear that he's been wrong before. He was also playful with his status as Silicon Alley big-shot, joking about his ability to buy things and such. But he was definitely certain of his beliefs, and dismissive of other opinions. Which he certainly has the right to be.

And, again, this offended people.

I discovered that Calacanis is rather infamous online. Apparently, people can't stand the fact that he has strong opinions.

It'd be one thing if he were nasty. He's just opinionated. Doesn't he have the right to be?

Anyway. He did something interesting a few months ago: he stopped blogging, and set up an email list. Instead of blogging to the internet, he sends an email to a relatively small group of people (750).

He pointed out that pressure from other bloggers, debates on TechMeme, accusations and comment hate, just became too distracting. As he put it, "Today the blogosphere is so charged, so polarized, and so filled with haters hating that it's simply not worth it. I'd rather watch from the sidelines and be involved in a smaller, more personal, conversation."

And today he posted a long, detailed entry to his email list about his decision to lay off a few people at Mahalo. He explained all of his reasons with clarity and honesty, and described the actual layoff process and what he's learned from laying folks off over the years.

It's an honest, insightful post, and I think it benefits from being sent to a "safe" group of people who've actively signed up to hear what he has to say. It changes the nature of the content, in a good way.

If you want to sign up for Jason's list, head over to his email list page. It may take you a while to get in, as you have to wait for a slot to open. But I think it's worth it.

Posted in Tech

22 Oct 08 - Online Photo Printing with Snapfish

Snapfish is an online photo printing service. Quite simply, you upload your photos to the Snapfish site, choose your print options, and pay with a credit card. Your photos arrive in the mail a few days later.

It's simple and powerful. There are similar sites, like SmugMug, but Snapfish is one of the cheapest and simplest. The site also provides basic photo editing tools (red-eye reduction, tweaking colors, cropping photos, etc.).

You can get your photos as regular prints, as well as posters, photo books, calendars, mugs, etc.

Overall, it's a really solid service. Highly recommended.

Posted in Tech

15 Oct 08 - WalaWiki.org

Several years ago, I tried to install a wiki. Back then, the most popular wiki was a horrible mess of spaghetti code, and I just couldn't figure it out. The others all seemed to require too much setup and configuration.

So, I wrote my own wiki engine. I had my own goals, so I didn't call it a wiki; I called it a Wala, which I believe is a Hawaiian word for "talk" ("wiki" is Hawaiian for "quick"). My Wala includes an "Add to this page" field at the bottom of each page, so that folks can quickly append information to a page. This creates a very different user interaction flow than a standard wiki, which requires users to navigate to a separate Edit page to change a page.

I released the code on various places, and Brennen picked it up. He went his own wonderful direction with it, and ended up with a much more powerful version. He wanted to release his own version, too.

After we discussed it a bit, he created WalaWiki.org, a website backed by a Subversion repository that hosts both of our versions of the Wala.

Wala is undoubtedly the most popular piece of code I've ever written, and I'm very happy with it: feature complete, easy to install, and easy to change, with clean code and essentially no bugs. Literally, you just have to put two files on your website, in a non-read-only directory, and your web hosting company has to support Perl.

So, if you want to install a wiki or wiki-like app, consider Wala. And let me know what you think.

Posted in Tech

3 Oct 08 - A Clockwork Orange

So I'm trying to figure out how to review A Clockwork Orange. And I don't know if I can.

It's certainly a remarkable film, and I use that adjective deliberately. I want to make remarks about it. I want to talk about it with others who've seen it. Because it's an intensely visual film that manages something very difficult:

Its protagonist is an amoral punk, and by the end you feel sorry for him, while still abhorring his deeds.

Alex, the protagonist, is the violent leader of a small British gang in the near future. They go around smashing up people and raping girls, with equal abandon.

Alex is eventually caught and sent to prison, where he is entirely unrepentant and does an excellent job of appearing reformed so he can get out early. He then volunteers for aversion therapy, which works (apparently; you never know how much Alex fakes), upon which he's released into society. At which point every single thing he did in the first third of the movie comes back to haunt and destroy him. Every single thing. Everybody wants revenge. And he's broken by it.

Which is the tragedy: whether he was truly reformed or not, he really did want to move on with a new life. But all of his past choices grabbed him and pulled him back into darkness.

And then the ending, which I won't spoil here. Which turns it all around.

But all of the above doesn't do the film justice. It really is an intensely visual film. Kubrick provides very specific information with each shot. This sometimes results in clinical shots, but even those have a modern elegance.

I don't know if I can recommend the film. It's dark, sparse, and filled with violent and sexual imagery. But it works.

Posted in Tech

1 Oct 08 - Wikify Your Text -- Wiki To HTML

This one's very geeky.

I've written a Python script, Wikify, that will convert Wiki formatting into HTML. I actually wrote it many months ago, but only recently have I tested it enough that I feel it's ready for public consumption. It's only 116 lines of code, but it works very well now.

You can find Wikify on my Toolbox, a part of Brent's Software.

Posted in Tech

24 Sep 08 - Tame multiple mailboxes with OpenInbox

One problem with modern websites: the dependence on email. Every site wants your email address, and send you email to verify your account, and email you occasional notices.

But some of these sites give out your address to other, less...useful sites. Moreover, it's hard to keep track of all those emails.

Enter OpenInbox. When you sign up, you get your own subdomain, (your name).openinbox.com. So, I snagged brentnewhall.openinbox.com. The website gives you web-based email. Any email sent to any address at (your name).openinbox.com will show up in your OpenInbox inbox. Moreover, all your email will be listed and sorted by the address.

So, when I register at a new website, I can make up an email address just for it: kagami@brentnewhall.openinbox.com. The next one might be nagato@brentnewhall.openinbox.com. My inbox at OpenInbox will show all the emails to all these addresses, listed under "kagami" or "nagato".

Instant organization, and easy tracking of which sites use which email. A lovely solution. And it's free.

Posted in Tech

20 Sep 08 - Geoff Smith, Geek Musician

I first heard of Geoff Smith on TWiT Live, through his fan song I'm a Twit. It was a fun homage to the show, so I checked out his music.

The man's composed quite a few tech-oriented songs, and he has the distinct advantage of being both a good singer and a good songwriter. His songs are catchy, entertaining, light, and easy to listen to.

And most of his songs have a tech angle, from the anti-RIAA song "Set the music free" to his commentary on vicious online commentary, "Ones and 0s."

Great stuff.

Posted in Tech

10 Sep 08 - twhirl: Twitter and FriendFeed On Your Desktop

If you use the Twitter or FriendFeed services, you know that one of the most difficult things about them is remembering to check the respective websites for updates. They're all great, as long as you remember to check them.

twhirl is the answer. It's a little application that sits on your desktop and displays your Twitter and FriendFeed streams, updating them every few minutes. Works on Windows and Mac OS X.

twhirl's a bit quirky--I've had the window jump around my desktop a couple of times--but it's a perfect way to keep up with Twitter and FriendFeed.

(Side note: Today's my Reading Day; I'm spending the entire day in a chair in my garden, catching up on magazines and books that I've been meaning to read. Will hopefully get through a large percentage of my Media Debt, at least for the printed word.)

Posted in Tech

27 Aug 08 - Listen To Music You'll Like With Last.fm

I've been hearing about Last.fm for months now, but I haven't tried it. It's a website--like Pandora--where you list a few of your favorite artists, and the site plays music that sounds similar. It catalogues music by what it sounds like, basically, then streams music that matches the music you like.

But now I hear that Pandora's in trouble, and Last.fm was described as the competitor that everyone else uses. So, I tried it out.

Color me impressed: I entered Yoko Kanno (arguably the greatest living Japanese composer), and not only did Last.fm recognize her, it immediately played a piece she wrote that I'd never heard of. It then played a piece I'd never heard by another Japanese composer I love, Toshihiko Sahashi.

So I've been using Last.fm since. It works perfectly thus far. The John Williams stream plays John Williams-type music (John Barry, Hans Zimmer), without playing any John Williams music.

Highly recommended.

Posted in Tech

23 Aug 08 - I Turn My Back on ICQ

My first encounter with IM was through ICQ. Over 10 years ago, the folks I chatted with on IRC encouraged me to try ICQ, and since then I've almost always had an IM client of some kind open.

I've since expanded to AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk. But I kept an ICQ account open and active. Until now.

For the past year, I've gotten more and more bogus friend requests and spam on ICQ. Every single friend request has been in a foreign language, and encouraged me to check out a "100% free!!" site of some kind (the most recent purported to be for a child porn site). Every non-spam contact attempt (a small percentage, mind you) has been from people messaging random ICQ numbers (the last one, after greeting me, asked "Who are you?"). I have not received a single legitimate ICQ message or contact request in the past year.

So, I'm leaving ICQ. I don't like to close off a method of communication, but since there's been no legitimate communication through it, I feel justified in doing so.

A shame to see a useful service become so overrun with the equivalent of empty line noise.

Posted in Tech

16 Aug 08 - Test Your ISP's Nefarious Internet Blocking with Switzerland

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have recently been cracking down on various kinds of internet traffic. Some is understandable; others interfere with legitimate uses of the 'net. Worse, ISPs often do this without telling anyone.

Well, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is striking back: they recently released Switzerland, a tool that will test your internet connection to see what your ISP blocks. It's still very basic--you have to run it from a terminal or command line prompt--but it can provide very useful information. Download it here to check your own ISP.

Posted in Tech

9 Aug 08 - Free Podcasting: How I Publish a Podcast Without Paying a Cent (Almost)

I'll be giving a short presentation on my Otaku, No Video podcast today. The presentation's called "Free Podcasting: How I Publish a Podcast Without Paying a Cent (Almost)." It covers the software I use to publish the podcast, and our publication process.

You can view the presentation online, thanks to SlideRocket, an awesome online PowerPoint competitor.

Posted in Tech

8 Aug 08 - Smart Computer Security - an eBook

I've noticed that a lot of folks online don't take security very seriously. They use weak passwords (123456, their name, etc.), they use the same password everywhere, they don't change their passwords, they turn off their virus scanner; every security violation you can think of.

And I can understand that. It's annoying and time-consuming. Besides, even if you want to be more secure, where do you start? What do you do?

So, I've written an eBook that answers those questions. It includes a comprehensive plan for identifying areas where you could be more secure, and what you can do to be more safe. It includes links to solid software to plug security holes, and a complete description of my own (somewhat paranoid) security procedures.

You can buy my Smart Computer Security eBook for $9.99 at Your Online Life. It'll be sent to your email inbox within 24 hours, as a PDF file which you can read on any computer.

As always, let me know what you think of it.

Posted in Tech

3 Aug 08 - Mac Viruses Are Out To Get You!

I haven't consider viruses a significant threat on Mac OS X. While vulnerabilities exist, they're so rare I figure don't have to worry. Yet.

Then I read that Louis Gray, a well-respected blogger, got a Mac OS X trojan. It hijacked his computer's DNS settings, replacing the banner ads appearing on his webpages with ads for erectile dysfunction pills.

So. Time to install some anti-virus software. I researched, and found only one good, free anti-virus app for OS X: ClamXav. It's simple and sluggish, but effective. Which is all I need and want.

I'll post here if I encounter any problems. But this has taught me a lesson: be prepared before trouble hits.

Posted in Tech

29 Jul 08 - Blab To Everyone, All At Once

I realize this blog's turned into Tech and Emotion Central of late, but that's all I've felt like writing about lately.

Today's subject: Ping.fm, an aggregator site for all you social networkers out there. Basically, you sign up with Ping.fm, and you enter your username and password for all the newest Web 2.0 sites: Blogger, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. Then you enter a short message on Ping.fm's site, and boom! that message is posted on all your social networks.

So, you can sign up for many of these services, and even if you don't access them often, you can still post to them. This makes you at least useful on those sites, and relatively active.

Which brings up another point: these sites have varying utility. I only visit MySpace once a week, while I hit Twitter twice a day. But why not at least post to all of them?

Posted in Tech

24 Jul 08 - Yahoo! Buzz Is Not Buzz-Worthy

You may have heard of Digg, a site where users submit stories and rate them, and the highest-rated stories hit the front page. (Slashdot and Fark are similar.)

Yahoo! now has its own version, called Yahoo! Buzz. It has a few problems.

For one, the titles are short, as are the descriptions. Most titles are 6 words or less, and the descriptions are less than 20. And since so many stories start with fluff or backstory, 17 words of description often isn't enough to elucidate the story.

Also, various links and stats on each story don't show up until you mouse over them. Which keeps the site clean, granted, but I was mystified about why stories were popular until I accidentally moused over one and "9 Votes" appeared next to it. (Incidentally, why "Votes" instead of "votes"?)

And there's a big Flash navigation bar at the top, which loaded in a full 10 seconds on my ultra-fast FiOS line, and shows stories just as cramped as those in the main story list.

Overall, it's an okay site. It's just frustrating and superfluous. I can't think of anyone I'd recommend it to.

Posted in Tech

23 Jul 08 - Send an Email to Create a Blog...Wow!

Want a blog, but don't want to spend time building a blog? Do you have an email address? Then you've got a blog, thanks to Posterous.

Just send an email, containing whatever you want on your blog, to post@posterous.com. They'll automatically create a blog, and reply with your new blog's address. Then just continue emailing post@posterous.com with new messages. The email that they send to you will also contain a link letting you set up an account, so you can edit and delete posts, change your site's name, etc.

You can attach mp3s, videos, and links to your post and it'll all show up on your blog. Note that it all shows up, including your signature, so you may want to delete that before sending.

Here's my blog, as an example. Nice, clean, and simple.

Posted in Tech

14 Jul 08 - Topix: Local News and Commentary

I really love this site: Topix. It displays local news stories for your specific town or county, along with forum comments. All the comments are from people local to the story, so you'll see reactions from the parents or neighbors of those involved. You get really close to what happens.

Posted in Tech

11 Jul 08 - Donate to Teachers

Rather cool website out there: DonorsChoose.org. On this website, teachers ask for classroom project materials. You donate money to whatever you think is appropriate. The teacher and students then send you thanks, via email or regular mail.

You can donate as much as you want to any project. If a project falls through, you can apply the money you donated to any other project.

Simple, convenient, and with a real-world impact.

Posted in Tech

9 Jul 08 - Increase Web Page Font Size Using a Custom Stylesheet

Warning! Extreme geekiness ahead, but at least it's extremely useful geekiness.

Are you annoyed with the text size on certain websites? Would you like to increase the text size on just those sites? Do you use the Firefox web browser?

If you're using Firefox, find the "chrome" directory in your preferences (location varies by operating system). Create a file named userContent.css in the chrome directory, and add this to it:

@-moz-document domain(website.com) { body { font-size: 16pt; } } ]]>

Replace "website.com" with the address of the site you want to affect. Then restart Firefox. You can add more entries like the one above for other websites.

If you're using Internet Explorer, unfortunately, I don't know of a way of changing the default font size for one website. You can change it for all websites, though.

Use Notepad to create a text file named userContent.css somewhere on your computer, and add the following to it:

body { font-size: 16pt; } ]]>

Then, in Internet Explorer, go to Tools > Internet Options, then select General, then Accessibility. Select the "Ignore colors", "Ignore font styles", and "Ignore font sizes" checkboxes. Under User Style Sheet, select "Format documents using my style sheet", click Browse, and navigate to userContent.css and select it.

Some websites lock their content down, so this trick won't work on every website. To get it working on specific websites, you'd need to look at their CSS (View > Source) and see which visual elements are used on the webpage.

But this should work on many websites. If it doesn't work on your favorite website, let me know and I should be able to find the offending CSS and offer a specific modification.

Posted in Tech

7 Jul 08 - identi.ca

I'm now on identi.ca, a new social networking site, as brentnewhall. identi.ca is apparently attempting to be another Twitter, though I don't see a lot of activity there yet.

Still, you never know what's going to be the next popular platform. A few minutes' time will at least introduce you to them.

Posted in Tech

3 Jul 08 - Robert Scoble

In concert with yesterday's entry, in which I talked about the IMDb, today I'm going to talk about a really neat guy named Robert Scoble.

Robert first came to my attention when he worked for Microsoft. He was one of the first employees there to blog seriously, and he blogged a lot. Some of his posts even criticized Microsoft policies. He came across as honest and matter-of-fact. He did one of the best things you can do when blogging: he put himself into his blog.

He then left Microsoft so he could freelance. That's when things got interesting. He began joining social networks; now he's on just about every single one. He blogs, he twitters, he Qiks, he comments on Friendfeed. It's like you can't get away from him.

And that's the neat thing about him. He tries out all these services, and not just as a casual experiment. He integrates them into his daily life, and decides what works for him and doesn't. Then he blogs about his experiences.

Meanwhile, his personal network grows. He's subscribed to 28,000 people on Twitter alone. He wrote recently about how he loves the noise, meaning that he derives personal satisfaction out of sifting through metric tons of seemingly irrelevant comments to see what people are really thinking about. And he engages constantly in those comments; he's posted 2,200 comments just on Friendfeed.

He's terrifically popular, and makes money through his interviews and videos, which he gets from tapping his social network.

Really neat to see a guy making a living off of his passions and interests.

Posted in Tech

2 Jul 08 - The IMDb and WALL-E

Surprised how many folks don't know about the IMDb, or the Internet Movie Database. It's a massive online database of pretty much every movie ever made, with entries for actors, quotes, trivia, etc. And they're all hyperlinked, so you can go from a movie, to an actor in that movie, to another movie that the actor was in, ''etc.'

It's not perfect; the general public adds and updates entries on the IMDb, so some entries are wrong or mis-identify an actor. But that's somewhat rare, and overall, it's a comprehensive resource.

It's what I use on my sidebar, listing the most recent movies I've seen. Including WALL-E, which I thoroughly enjoyed this weekend. Not my favorite Pixar film, but entertaining throughout and with a good message that's not preachy. Once again, Pixar can do no wrong.

Posted in Tech

28 Jun 08 - Akamai State of the Internet Report

The huge internet storage site Akamai recently released their first "state of the internet" report, where they detail internet traffic patterns. There are some very interesting trends.

For example, while the three countries with the most internet traffic were China, the U.S., and Taiwan (no surprise), the next three were Venzuela, Argentina, and Brazil. Turkey's also in the top 10. What's going on in South America?

Web site hacks continued, and the scale just astounds me. One attack in January 2008 infected up to 70,000 different websites. Two months later, over 10,000 web pages were infected by hackers trying to steal online game passwords.

How many unique internet IP addresses are used in each country? The U.S. has the most, followed by China and Japan...then Germany.

So, there are lots of smaller countries out there doing a lot of internet work. More so than I would have expected. I wonder what that will mean for the future? How well do you know German?

Posted in Tech

25 Jun 08 - Ning--Less Than I'd Hoped

I heard Leo Laporte talk about Ning the other day on TWiT Live, so I decided to check it out.

Ning's an online community builder. Think of it as a toolbox with templates for online groups, complete with forums, space for photos and videos, and all that. So, if you want to talk with a group of like-minded people, you either find a Ning "social network," or start your own. And it's all free.

Problem is, I haven't found a single active Ning social network that interests me. There are certainly active groups out there, but in the topics that interest me, all the social networks are either empty or way too specific ("This is the online space for Mr. Lennie Irvin's Summer 2008 English 0301 class.").

This may partly be a failure in their search algorithm. When I search for "writing," I get every writing group, in no apparent order. It should probably sort by popularity, and there's no way to filter results by language (I'm just not going to join any of the many Spanish networks).

That said, if you want to start an online social network, Ning seems to have great tools to support it. The technology's there, and it's easy to start using it.

Posted in Tech

18 Jun 08 - Upcoming Events from Upcoming

Seems like every week I stumble on another great service offered by Yahoo!. I'm no fan of its main site, but I love many of its services, including Games, Flickr, and GeoCities.

Here's one I've been using a lot: Upcoming. You enter your zip code, and the site returns a list of events happening near you in the next few days and weeks. This includes book clubs, band performances, DJ appearances, book signings, celebrity appearances, art exhibitions, and pretty much any other public event you can think of. I'm amazed at the exhaustive listings; there are over 100 events per day within driving distance of my house alone.

You can also mark if you're coming or interested, and see how many others have signed up. Most entries list the exact address of the event, with links to Yahoo! Maps and Google Maps for that address. You can even post any event to your iCal, Outlook, Yahoo!, or Google calendar, directly from the event's page.

And, if you have a Yahoo! account, you can add your own events to Upcoming, direct people to the site, and track RSVPs online with it.

Overall, it's a remarkably well-designed site that provides a useful service.

Posted in Tech

11 Jun 08 - Freedom for Your Online Life

I've been working on a project called Your Online Life for a couple of months now. It's a "web guide for the rest of us;" an explanation of current web tech and trends. It's meant to describe the latest websites and services, how to use them and why you'd want to.

My original plan was to release the site as a pay service; $50 for lifetime access and upgrades. I've been increasingly uncomfortable with that, for a few reasons.

• I don't know how to market it, or to whom. I have a few contacts, but not enough.
• While I think it's worth $50, I don't know how to convince others that it's worth $50. People expect web content to be free, unless you're the Wall Street Journal.
• I like giving things away.

So I've removed the payment code. Your Online Life is now free. Go ahead and read through it, and let me know what you think.

I've added a tip jar, and in the next few weeks I plan to offer a few detailed, supplemental how-tos for a small fee ($15 or so), covering topics like securing your computer and a comparison of different messaging services. These are topics that will benefit from a holistic approach covering many subjects, and for which I can write essentially short books of strong, intense value.

The site's future is still uncertain, but I feel better about it now.

Posted in Tech

10 Jun 08 - Fixing MySQL in MacOS X 10.5, Leopard

Techie note:

For the past couple days, I've been struggling to get MySQL to run in Mac OS X 10.5. It would hang whenever I tried to start it. I finally put this updated preference pane file in ~/Library/PreferencePanes, then went in to System Preferences > MySQL and was able to start MySQL from there.

Very strange.

Posted in Tech

9 Jun 08 - Four Tips for Reading Many Input Streams and Maintaining your Sanity

I keep up with a lot of different streams of input: emails, blogs, comics, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, and IM. I have much to learn, but here's what I have learned:

• Skim. Don't worry about catching every bit of every email. Start by skimming, then pay closer attention if the content rewards it.
• Keep up. If you sign up for an email list, read it frequently. I read all my emails and blogs every day. Combined with skimming, it doesn't take very long.
• Reply immediately. Try to immediately reply to any email that needs a reply. Some may have to wait until you gather more information, of course, but can't you reply to most right away? And the more emails sitting in your inbox waiting for a reply, the more frustration and depression you'll feel when you look at them.
• Keep your inboxes clean. Move all emails you've read to a separate folder, or delete them. Process all your Facebook notifications (choose something to do with them). Close your IM windows when the conversation ends. Get it away from you, so you can concentrate on something else.

So, read everything at a high level to begin with, often, reply quickly, then get rid of it. Don't let it clutter up your mind.

Posted in Self-improvement, Tech

4 Jun 08 - Tenacity and Tech

So, a few years ago there was this TV channel called Tech TV. And the most popular show on that channel was The Screen Savers, a call-in tech variety show in which two guys and a crew of geeks covered all sorts of technology news and trends and such.

Then, Tech TV died.

So what did they do? They dusted themselves off and looked for jobs in new media.

One of them started Digg. One of them created DL.tv.

But I want to talk about Leo Laporte, who has since started The TWiT Netcast Network. He began producing free podcasts, then looked for advertisers. He only takes on advertisers who he personally supports, and he provides a live advertisement for their services or products directly in the podcasts themselves (instead of inserting an annoying, pre-generated ad).

Then he signed up with Stickam, set up a few cameras, and began streaming live video of his shows as he records and assembles them. It required a significant amount of money, but way less than a typical studio.

His podcasts now have tens of thousands of listeners, and thousands watch his live streams. Today, he's announced that he's breaking even, and his list of advertisers grows.

He's living the dream. Not through massive financial resources or brilliant marketing or incredibly hard work. Because he dreamed of something, and tenaciously worked towards it.

Posted in Tech, Self-improvement

3 Jun 08 - RescueTime - Not For Me

I've been testing out RescueTime, a service that tracks and plots your computer usage. The idea is that it'll give you an idea of what's wasting your time.

You install a small app and let it run. Every few minutes, it uploads usage stats to www.rescuetime.com, which you can access at any time to check out your usage. It'll also email you a summary every week.

I used it for a few weeks, and to my surprise I learned nothing new. I know what I spend most of my time using (Safari and the terminal, mostly). I know what wastes my time (YouTube and Fark, mostly, which I've now blocked).

It was a worthwhile experiment, though, and you might want to give it a try if you're curious about how you spend your time. It certainly functioned well.

Posted in Tech, Self-improvement

2 Jun 08 - It's Ready

I've just put the finishing touches on Your Online Life. It's a web-based course in web trends and technologies, covering a large set of sites and services. You can learn about online photo sharing sites, user-contributed news sites, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and a host more--both how they work, and exactly how to sign up with them and use them.

The idea is to provide high-quality tutorials and explanations, that are constantly updated and expanding as the web expands. It's a one-stop resource to keep you up-to-date with the web. When you hear about a site or service, you can go to Your Online Life and learn what it is, why you'd want to use it, and how to use it.

I'm offering this for a one-time fee of $50, which gives you lifetime access to the site and every tutorial and piece of information I ever post there now and in the future. It's like access to an encyclopedia of web trends and technologies.

Should be an interesting ride.

Posted in Tech

28 May 08 - Self-Publishing on the Kindle

I published my Kindle Fan Guide several months ago, to quite some success. I've sold almost 300 copies so far.

I learned a lot during the process of publishing it. I had to log in to Amazon's Digital Text Platform, though fortuately anyone can log in using an existing Amazon account. I then selected the option to upload a new book.

Kindle books have to be uploaded in HTML format. This turned out to be tricky, as I wrote the Guide in OpenDocument format in a word processor (NeoOffice). My word processor could certainly save as HTML, but the Digital Text Platform only accepts a certain subset of HTML.

So, I had to save the Guide as HTML, then go in and fix the HTML by hand using a text editor. Then I uploaded it. Fortunately, the Digital Text Platform lets you preview your work; fortunate, because the book didn't look right at all. So I had to go back and tweak the HTML about a dozen times before it looked right.

Then I finished the process. However, Amazon's systems take up to 24 hours to synchronize, so I had to wait until that was done. But when it was, I had a Kindle book ready to go.

As it stands, it might be easier to save the book as plain text, then add a few HTML elements for chapter breaks and such. But at least publishing on the Kindle is a relatively straightforward process. If you want to self-publish, the Kindle's a fully reasonable choice.

Posted in Tech

21 May 08 - Accepting PayPal Payments

As I prepare to bring my teaching website, Your Online Life, online, I've been fiddling with PayPal. I plan to use it to accept credit card payments, and I got lost within their documentation. But I managed to pull together what I need, and here's what I found.

First, log in to PayPal, then click on the link to your Profile, then click on Website Payment Preferences. Type in a Return URL--this is the page on your site that PayPal will send the user back to after they've paid. Turn on Payment Data Transfer and save. The page will refresh with an Identity Token.

Now for some HTML. On the page where the user will pay for the item, enter something like this:

]]>

Obviously, change YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS and ITEM_NAME to your PayPal email address, and the name of the item your client will be buying. This will display a big "Buy Now!" PayPal button.

Now, go to the return page, the one that PayPal will redirect to. PayPal will send a transaction ID to this page, as an HTTP GET variable, named "tx". Grab "tx". Then post the following back to PayPal:

]]>

Plug in the value for "tx" in TRANSACTION_ID, and hardcode your identity token in the "at" field.

You should get back something like this:

SUCCESS first_name=Jane+Doe last_name=Smith payment_status=Completed payer_email=janedoesmith%40hotmail.com payment_gross=5.00 mc_currency=USD custom=Purchasing+cool+poster ]]>

A bit complicated, but it works.

Posted in Tech

8 May 08 - 8 May 08

Twitter, Twhirl, and FriendFeed

I've been using these three technologies for about a week now, and I definitely have enough experience with them to say that I'm hooked. Not massively so, but I'm using them.

Twitter is basically a group IM client in a website. You join, and add all your friends on the service. You and your friends' posts are all displayed together, chronologically, just like IMs. But it's a semi-permanent record; you can glance down the list, see someone's note, and quickly reply. And all your friends see your reply and can join in.

But Twitter's a website. Twhirl packages that up into a desktop IM client (Windows and Mac). Twhirl works exactly like an IM client. So you can have an ongoing conversation with your friends, over the course of days.

Now consider FriendFeed, which aggregates all your friends' Twitter, Digg, del.icio.us, YouTube, etc. messages, along with the ability to vote and comment on each entry. It's like a mini-forum for everyone's activity.

So Twhirl gives you a 24-hour chat channel with all your friends, and FriendFeed gives you a 24-hour forum with all your friends. For free.

Posted in Tech

3 May 08 - In Defense of Facebook

A recent chart posted by cnet shows that Facebook apps are primarily used "just for fun." And there have been a number of blog posts lately (particularly The problem with Facebook) which trash Facebook, saying that the site is effectively pointless and not worth any money.

Allow me to step forward in defense of Facebook.

I know people who spend a lot of time on Facebook. Who use those silly little apps. And who are looking at the ads.

Granted, the apps haven't figured out how to make money yet. Same was true of the web circa 1995; lots of websites, most of them look-at-my-cat pages, and almost nobody was making money yet. It took a little time.

This is like complaining that Penny Arcade is useless and worthless because of its silly humor. Doesn't matter; it can still make money.

Posted in Tech

12 Apr 08 - What I Type A Lot

Inspired by Brennen's entry, here are my most frequently-entered commands:

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf \ "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}' |sort -rn|head 216 ./die 97 vi 38 cd 34 ls 17 su 15 ./generate_homepage.py 14 ./upload.sh 11 b 9 apachectl 6 ftp ]]>

"die" rolls dice, which I've used a lot for role-playing. "b" opens my blog in vi. So, what does this say? I've rolled a lot of dice and edited a lot of files, I suppose.

In other news, the arcade game cabinet is done. Loaded with several dozen games, and sitting in a corner of my living room. Every day or two, I load up Galaga or Battle Zone and blow off a little steam.

Amazing little games. Beautiful designs.

Posted in Tech

3 Jan 08 - Now Here's a Crazy Idea

Imagine a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game with...

• ...no elves or dwarves.
• ...an emphasis on player skill instead of level grinding.
• ...a vast, completely original world that the game encourages you to explore.
• ...the ability to hire shopkeepers, guards, and any other NPCs to automate things
• ...active GMs who regularly interact with players.
• ...quests tailored specifically to your player.
• ...consequences for compromising your honor. If you don't rescue the little girl, she'll die.
• ...an in-game magic system similar to programming. Spells are just like scripts, right?
• ...a cap of 400 players total.

I'd pay a lot of money to play that. Question is, of course, would you?

What's even more interesting is that none of these ideas are technically difficult, or even new. It's just that none of the MMORPGs bother to try them.

Posted in Tech

23 Nov 07 - 23 Nov 07

I keep hearing about Twitter, so I decided to try it out. You send one-liners to the service, telling it what you're up to. You can see other people on there, and watch their updates, which I gather is the real power of the site -- seeing exactly who's doing what, in quasi-realtime.

So I'm on Twitter now. Brennen's the only friend I can find on there; any of you using it?

Posted in Tech

21 Nov 07 - 21 Nov 07

So, anyone of you use del.icio.us? I've finally gotten around to setting up my own del.icio.us page, so if anyone's interested, link me or connect me or whatever it is you do on this site.

(I'm also on Facebook, if you're interested, as BrentNewhall.)

Posted in Tech

19 Nov 07 - 19 Nov 07

An interesting point made on the "This Week in Tech" podcast: A billion people in India and China will be joining the internet for the first time in the next few years. And their first exposure to the internet will be on celphones, not desktops or laptops.

Imagine the money to be made by celphone manufacturers, content providers, and entertainers.

I wonder how hard Hindi is to learn....

Posted in Tech

22 Aug 07 - 22 Aug 07

If you were to parody Web 2.0, you could hardly do better than eSwarm.

(If you're not familiar with the term, "Web 2.0" was coined recently to describe the next generation of websites, characterized by community-driven content that uses the web as a platform instead of a destination in itself.)

I have nothing against Web 2.0 itself; it's a useful descriptor for a real trend. But it's been rapidly appropriated by all sorts of sites, and stretched so thin it often doesn't even resemble its original shape. Or it's just horribly misused.

So, I submit, with eSwarm. It appears to offer itself as a central point at which consumers can ask suppliers for stuff. Consumers go on the website and create "swarms," which are basically requests for particular goods at a particular price. Sellers and/or suppliers will then connect with the swarm and offer the goods at a particular price.

Which means that suppliers have to be persuaded to register with this site so they can to supply a handful of anonymous internet customers. And it's all centralized on the eSwarm website. And eSwarm deducts a transaction fee.

Hey, maybe it'll be the next eBay. But doesn't this look like an idea in search of an audience?

Posted in Tech

25 Jul 07 - 25 Jul 07

Today, I began work in earnest on my new project at RC/STS: RCVA. It's a desktop, instruments-only flight simulator aimed at small training facilities. We build an application that contains all the panels you'd find on a given aircraft (throttle, airspeed, etc.), and sell it off.

The application development process involves copying a lot of files, running various scripts to build everything together, and lots and lots of fiddling with the instruments to make sure everything works. This is what worries me. I don't know aircraft. I haven't spent a lot of time in trainers. My mentor on this project--a great guy named Jonas--assures me that that won't be a problem; I can ask him for help, and I'll learn as I go. Still. I don't like this kind of uncertainty.

So, I spent the day installing and running the tools. Which didn't work; turns out I need access to a remote folder, which I don't have access to. So it may be a few days before I can actually build anything. :sigh:

I took a breather around noon and spent an hour with a fellow anime lover, assembling Gundam model kits. If you've never had the pleasure, imagine a Lego set that builds a detailed, poseable giant robot. Great fun, and completely absorbing.

Back home. Tired. Lazed around for a bit, then read a bit more of Michael York's great little book Are My Blinkers Showing, then took care of a few nagging projects: mending a shirt, re-reading notes for a series of Bible messages I'll be teaching in AWANA this year, putting up a recycle bin; that sort of thing.

Oh. Recycling. That may surprise a few people. I haven't recycled up to now; recycling an aluminum can requires more energy that manufacturing one, so I've heard. But it's not just about energy; it's also about physical resources. I believe Earth has plenty of resources left, but...eh, I'd like to help out a bit.

Plus, I've established a goal: one bag of trash a month. The caveat is that I'll recycle.

Which gets to the real reason I'm recycling: a flyer came in the mail a few days ago, explaining that we can dump everything into one recycle bin and leave it out every Wednesday. No sorting. That's easy enough to get me to do it. I just need two trash cans. So I set up the recycling one, and I'm good to go.

But will I keep it up?

Posted in Tech

28 Jun 07 - 28 Jun 07

Today's counterintuitive idea:

The blogosphere is much smaller than we think.

Posted in Tech

25 Jun 07 - 25 Jun 07

I'm on Facebook now. Brennen recommended it as a convenient way to keep up-to-date with people that one rarely communicates with otherwise. And it does seem convenient in that way.

Lots of pretty little widgets to play around with, too. Which is often a good predictor of a site's longevity.

Posted in Tech

23 Jun 07 - 23 Jun 07

Today is Make Day. Thanks to a post on the Accidental Creative blog, I reserved today just to make stuff (and plan to schedule a new one every month).

One of the results: check_syntax, a script that will check the syntax of whatever source code file you give it. Currently supports C, C++, PHP, Perl, Python, and common Unix shells (bash, sh, csh, and tcsh).

Posted in Self-improvement, Tech

19 Jun 07 - 19 Jun 07

Spent some time today working on Project Omega, the super-secret RTS game that a fewe co-workers and I are developing. And I realized that I spent twenty minutes writing and organizing status and reporting on two hours worth of work. Feels excessive to me.

On the other hand, we're just getting started. Should be faster to update once I get used to it.

We're using Assembla, a free service that hosts code projects. They provide a free Subversion repository, Trac system, mailing list, and Wiki. You can pay for full backups and more storage, but what they provide is plenty for a small project. Highly recommended, so far.

Posted in Tech

5 Apr 07 - 5 Apr 07

I have a Wii. I'm most impressed by its slickness; everything is just pretty and easy to do. I wish computer applications were this clean.

Posted in Tech

16 Feb 07 - 16 Feb 07

When I saw Pan's Labyrinth last weekend, it was preceded by an amazing advertisement. A girl pulls her family's attention to the Apollo moon launch with a murmured, "Wow." A basketball player working with kids watches one scrawny Asian kid dribble the ball around him, and the player says, "Wow." A woman out running looks at her watch, and says "Wow" as she looks back on the long road she's run.

I loved it. It was like the Apple's best ads. I couldn't wait to see if it was an Apple ad.

It was for Windows Vista. The final "Wow" came from a man using Vista's new Alt-Tab feature. Which is nice, but...this was an ad for Windows.

Which made me think. Why did I want it to be an Apple ad? (Pretty easy to answer.) Why was I disappointed to discover it was "just an ad for Windows," or more accurately, "an ad for just Windows?" (Harder to answer.)

Windows is used more than any other operating system, by far. Why doesn't it have the rabid fans that Apple has? Yes, Windows has fans. But not the rock star fanbase of Apple. Really, why not?

Brennen writes:

Microsoft doesn't have to be a technological religion. They're Soviet Russia. Tho that's a bad analogy, given that Soviet Russia tried to be a state religion, but you know what I mean. Honestly? I think being the default system that everyone runs on means that that's all you have time / incentive to do.

Good points.

Posted in Tech

7 Feb 07 - 7 Feb 07

How to pick out a technical book:

• Look for pretty covers. Seriously. Attractive covers usually means well-paid cover artists, which often means a quality book.
• Grab the O'Reilly book on that topic.
• Grab anything else that catches your eye.
• Take them all to a table, and open to the middle of the book. Look for long stretches of text. Is the text funny? Is it easy to read?

Posted in Tech