Some of the stuff will be available in October and there is support for iTunes music formats (though it’s not clear if protected music will be accessible).
Monday, July 31, 2006
Zillow Mobile
This is awesome — you can now get Zillow info on your mobile phone! Imagine if you could do this with Kelly Blue Book.
CyWorld US is live
CyWorld, the most popular social networking site in Korea, has launched their US site. Interestingly CyWorld allows you to customize your space with avatars and “charms” that actually cost small amounts of money (money being called “acorns” in Cyworld). It will be interesting to see if this takes off with American kids, but it is reported that something like 85–90% of South Korean kids under the age of 21 are on Cyworld.
Victory Records has a social site
It’s called “VictorME” and seems to have a lot of users (although it seems that a lot of the profiles provide links back to MySpace profiles).
Check it out because it’s a great example of a corporation building a social networking site.
Smallest USB hub I've ever seen
Lindy has released an ultra-compact USB hub that fits in the palm of your hand, which makes it absolutely perfect for travel. Furthermore, the hub is bus-powered leaving no need for any sort of power adapter. Unfortunately the hub is not yet available in the US, but can be ordered direct from Lindy in the UK.
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
MP3Tunes streaming on Nokia 770
In January I wrote how I could not wait to try out streaming my MP3Tunes songs on my Nokia 770. Unfortunately, the Opera browser on the 770 is not robust enough to support streaming from MP3Tunes on the 770, but MP3Tunes has recently released an applet that allows streaming on the 770, which makes the 770 all that much cooler of a device and makes MP3Tunes all that much more useful of a service.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
World Islands in Dubai
I can’t believe that I missed this, but there is a construction of artificial islands off the cost of Dubai that are loosely fashioned in the shape of the continents of the world. Pricing starts at $6.85mil and range up to $1.8bil and islands range in size from 250,000 sq. ft. to 900,000 sq. ft. with 164–328 feet of water in between each island. Not surprisingly, Richard Branson has already purchased an island.
Monday, July 10, 2006
EZ Armor
I’ve been using Computer Associates EZ Armor Virus and Firewall on my home machine for the last 2 years and have been generally happy with the product. This weekend my subscription expired and I decided that there were probably better solutions that did not cost as much or cost anything at all. Additionally, I have installed much better hardware solutions in terms of firewalls on my home network since the time I originally purchased the EZ Armor products, so I was less concerned about the software firewall in light of my hardware solutions and the Windows XP SP2 firewall.
I did some research and found ClamWin, which is an open source antivirus client, so I uninstalled EZ Armor, downloaded and updated ClamWin, and turned the Windows Firewall back on. One of the surprising things that I noticed after uninstalling EZ Armor and installed ClamWin was that Windows Security Center showed me as not having a recognized antivirus program; I was able to fix that by telling the Security Center that there was antivirus installed and that I would monitor it.
Most surprisingly after the change was how much better the computer ran. During the time that I was running EZ Armor, I was having issues downloading files, issues with particular websites that were trying to set cookies, and lots of issues with programs trying to access the LAN or the internet even after I had told the EZ Armor firewall to allow exceptions for various sites and programs. As soon as I removed EZ Armor, I was able to download a 38MB file with no problems and to access sites that had previously been problematic — it is entirely possible that I had misconfigured EZ Armor, but I was using many of the default settings and it became obvious after the it was gone that EZ Armor was negatively impacting my network experiences.
Certainly I am not telling anyone not to purchase EZ Armor, but would also suggest that you keep my experiences in mind when you think about purchasing a firewall and antivirus solution.
Finding the right printer
I tried to upgrade my home printer this weekend from inkjet to laserjet — found a great deal on the HP 1020 at OfficeMax, so I went and bought it and brought it home. Once I plugged the 1020 into the Airport Extreme and the Extreme correctly identified it, I thought I was in business until I realized that the printer CD had no Mac drivers. Not to be deterred, I searched Google and found what I thought was the solution on MacOSXHints, but could not get the solution to work on my machine — it is important to point out that this “solution” involves using an old version of the Laserjet 1022 driver that, at the time of the postings in the MacOSXHints forums, was compatible with the 1020. After beating my head against the wall for an hour, I finally returned the 1020 and simply bought new cartridges for my inkjet.
Once I got the inkjet reinstalled on my Macs, I found that I couldn’t get the printer to work from the Windows laptop. Instead of installing the printer the hard way, I simply installed the Windows version of Bonjour, which is zero-configuration software that Apple produces and is included natively in OSX. As soon as Bonjour was installed, I double-clicked the Printer Finder and was up and printing in seconds.
The whole experience taught me the following:
- If you are sharing a printer with an Airport Extreme in a mixed OSX and Windows environment, you should use Bonjour to easily set up the printer on the Windows machines.
- If you are a printer manufacturer, you should be developing your software with Bonjour integrated and should install Bonjour with all the rest of your software because the user experience is so amazing.
Monday, July 03, 2006
Switching from PC to Mac
Utilware has a great post about switching from a PC to a Mac — great article if you’re thinking about making the switch.
PayPerPost.com
The name of the site is pretty self-explanatory, but essentially PayPerPost.com pays bloggers to post about products that they are offering — each advertiser through PayPerPost.com offers a bounty for writing a post. Not surprisingly, PayPerPost.com is getting a lot of press in the blogosphere and not very much of it is positive. Jeremy’s LOOSE Wire blog probably has the best summary, so I’m linking to him. Here’s my final take on it: if you’re going to participate in PayPerPost.com, then you need to provide full disclosure that a certain post is an ad and that disclosure should start in the title.
Seth Godin link fest
Looking at things differently by using pictures — Link
Get traffic for your blog without being on digg or having Seth link to you — Link
Making and breaking your habits — Link
Making things better vs. making things different — Link
Important lessons from Trader Joe’s; even more important if you’ve never been inside of one — Link
What’s the effort necessary to get to number one? If your strategy is to be number one, you really need to read this post (and then reevaluate your strategy) — Link
Flexibility vs. rigidity — Link
What stories are you telling yourself? The big thing is the stories that are being told before you even interact with your customers — Link
Windows Update nag removal
Have you run Windows Update only to have it nag you every 30 minutes to restart your computer? I absolutely hate that, which is why I was glad to find the gpedit hack to turn the reminder off. Remember 2 things: (1) gpedit can be really dangerous and you can screw up your computer if you do something wrong; and (2) you will eventually have to restart your computer in order to apply the update.
Video iPod & TiVo Desktop Plus
I finally took the plunge and bought a Video iPod — there are several reasons why I did this, but the rumors about massive delays in the next gen touchscreen Video iPod, a bunch of long trips that I will be taking in the next few weeks, updated iTunes that handles videos more effectively, and an updated version of TiVoToGo that does conversion for the Video iPod were all the major contributing factors my taking the plunge. My initial impressions of the device are very favorable and I can tell how cool this is going to be when there is a touchscreen version. My iTunes is configured to download the album artwork (which I’ve yet to be able to appreciate because none of my existing iPods support that display function) and the presentation of the videos for view/transfer inside iTunes is pretty cool.
In order to make it super-easy to get my TiVo recordings onto my iPod, I plunked down the $24.95 for TiVo Desktop Plus; the “Plus” essentially means that the portable device conversion software is built into the TiVo Desktop. My first attempt at downloading a program and converting it failed miserably as there was some sort of network error that caused the transfer to get interrupted; the TiVo Desktop did pick the transfer back up when the network problem resolved itself, but did not do the conversion. Unfortunately, there is not a big button that says “Convert for Portable” in the software, so I has to download the recording again and it did successfully convert the second time. Over the course of downloading a bunch of episodes of Entourage and some other stuff, I had the same issue happen to me again with the same result — essentially the software is not very fault tolerant if there is any sort of connectivity issue. I’m sure that a lot of these network issues would be resolved if I was operating in a wired environment instead of a wireless environment (everything would probably happen more quickly as well).
I configured the TiVo Desktop to automatically delete the downloads from the TiVo once they had been converted to Video iPod format — TiVo encodes everything as MPEG2 in high quality mode, so a 30 minute program takes up an enormous amount of memory, especially when downloading the entire season of a program, versus the amount of memory taken up in the MPEG4 format that works on the iPod.
Currently I have not purchased any video content from the iTunes Music Store, but I probably will just to see what the experience is like. I also saw that I can now get a “season pass” for TV programs through the iTunes Music Store at a volume discount (as compared to purchasing single episodes), so I may try that out to compare against doing the same thing with my TiVo Season Pass.
Video iPod & TiVo Desktop Plus
I finally took the plunge and bought a Video iPod — there are several reasons why I did this, but the rumors about massive delays in the next gen touchscreen Video iPod, a bunch of long trips that I will be taking in the next few weeks, updated iTunes that handles videos more effectively, and an updated version of TiVoToGo that does conversion for the Video iPod were all the major contributing factors my taking the plunge. My initial impressions of the device are very favorable and I can tell how cool this is going to be when there is a touchscreen version. My iTunes is configured to download the album artwork (which I’ve yet to be able to appreciate because none of my existing iPods support that display function) and the presentation of the videos for view/transfer inside iTunes is pretty cool.
In order to make it super-easy to get my TiVo recordings onto my iPod, I plunked down the $24.95 for TiVo Desktop Plus; the “Plus” essentially means that the portable device conversion software is built into the TiVo Desktop. My first attempt at downloading a program and converting it failed miserably as there was some sort of network error that caused the transfer to get interrupted; the TiVo Desktop did pick the transfer back up when the network problem resolved itself, but did not do the conversion. Unfortunately, there is not a big button that says “Convert for Portable” in the software, so I has to download the recording again and it did successfully convert the second time. Over the course of downloading a bunch of episodes of Entourage and some other stuff, I had the same issue happen to me again with the same result — essentially the software is not very fault tolerant if there is any sort of connectivity issue. I’m sure that a lot of these network issues would be resolved if I was operating in a wired environment instead of a wireless environment (everything would probably happen more quickly as well).
I configured the TiVo Desktop to automatically delete the downloads from the TiVo once they had been converted to Video iPod format — TiVo encodes everything as MPEG2 in high quality mode, so a 30 minute program takes up an enormous amount of memory, especially when downloading the entire season of a program, versus the amount of memory taken up in the MPEG4 format that works on the iPod.
Currently I have not purchased any video content from the iTunes Music Store, but I probably will just to see what the experience is like. I also saw that I can now get a “season pass” for TV programs through the iTunes Music Store at a volume discount (as compared to purchasing single episodes), so I may try that out to compare against doing the same thing with my TiVo Season Pass.
Nokia 770 OS2006 has been released
You can get it at the Nokia Europe site or on the Maemo site:
Lots of information complete with screenshots on Ari Jaaksi’s blog. I just completed the download and update — it took about 10 minutes; the first update attempt failed for some reason, but worked the second time. Be sure to follow the instructions on the installer.
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