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  • Podcasting, Again

    When the whole podcasting thing started to take off I found I was quite into it, but then RL got in the way a bit and it kind of fell off my radar. Interestingly enough, this happened when I stopped being good about using the treadmill three times a week. Today as I was getting ready to walk I realized I needed something to listen to and decided I needed to upgrade iPodderX and start listening again.

    iPodderX looks like it is really progressing nicely, even if I’m going to end up having to shell out some $$ for it soon. It’s got some really slick features, and I’ve already found one feature that I want in it. It lets you set the genre of what you download, which is cool, but I want to be able to access other tags also. iTunes has one called ‘grouping’ which I use for any extra data/keywords to describe the track. For instance, anime soundtracks are in genre soundtracks with anime in the grouping tag. So I’d love to be able to put ‘podcast’ into the grouping (as well as any other info).

    Now I need to get off my ass and figure out where to set up my turntables so I can start doing a mix of the week podcast.

  • Project D.U.

    Seen via Compendium, SBC’s new RSS reader: Project D.U.. I guess D.U. stands for Digital Universe.

    proj·ect · d. u.
    (noun) 1. a reader populated with headlines pulled from across the web.
    2. relater of news and rumors
    3. hiding place for next month’s topic of conversation.
    4. the center of your Digital Universe. Synonyms: middleman, informant, eavesdropper.

    First off, the site. It feels like it is trying way too hard to be ‘Hip’. Almost all the buttons you can click are animated in some way. Luckily none of them burst into flames. Next, the Project D.U. Reader. I personally found it to be pretty lame in a bunch of ways.

    • The interface leaves much to be desired. It just feels clunky.
    • When you look at the lists of posts for a blog it only shows you excerpts, even if the blog provides full posts. Clicking on their ‘read more’ link opens up the actual post .

    • No way to export your subscriptions.
    • No support for enclosures.
    • Kinda slow and clunky.
    • When it couldn’t resolve a hostname right away it told me that the feed was bad.

    • Project D.U. is a stupid name.

    And as I was about to close my browser window on the site, I noticed this on their about page:

    One of the best features of this site, not unlike the advent of color television, is the Project D.U. Reader. It’s filled with headlines from some of the best blogs you’ve never heard of. In fact, we’ve spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours scouring the web, trying to find the most intriguing sites the world has to offer. To be fair, we pay the favored blogs a bit each month for the right to use their stuff. But we don’t edit what they say, that would be a very un-fun read.

    Wait, they are paying the blogs they list money?? How can I get in on that racket.

  • Just What *IS* flickr Anyways?

    About 2 weeks ago I received a Nikon D70 Digital SLR camera in trade for some computer work I’ve been doing for a neighbor. I’ve long wanted an SLR of any type and this has helped energize the creative side of me a bit. It also means I’ve been putting pictures online more and making much more use of Flickr. Which has also led to many of my friends asking “so what’s so great about this Flickr thing anyways?”

    Flickr is a photo hosting/sharing service from ludicorp that’s been in beta for a while now. I think I first started using it around 8 months ago, but didn’t really get into it until the new camera. I’d fiddled around with running my own photo gallery software a few times, tried a few other services, but nothing really jumped out at me until Flickr. Flickr is all about finding ways to organize and ways to share your photos. Like most other photo hosting services you can upload pictures, create photosets (albums), etc. It also has a bit of social networking type stuff built in so that you can choose to only share photos with your friends or family.

    But where Flickr has really hooked me is with some of the other features. The biggest of which are tags. Tags are keywords you can add to a photo to provide more data about it. For instance, in this photo that I uploaded there are a bunch of tags. I can then choose to look at only pictures of mine with the tag ‘squirrel’, or I could see all the public photos on Flickr that have the tag ‘squirrel’. You can also put notes onto a picture that show up when you mouse over a certain area. Oh yes, and they also have it set up so that you can post your pictures to your blog or LiveJournal from within Flickr and they accept photocam posts too.

    One thing the tagging system has done is that some tags have a following. People will take pictures that can be tagged with a certain keyword. One of my favorites is squaredcircle, where people post pictures of circular things in a squared image. This one has enough of a following that someone has created a group for pictures like this (groups are things you can join which have their own photo collections).

    The other thing that made Flickr my choice for a photo hosting service was that someone wrote a plugin for iPhoto so that you can export your pictures straight from iPhoto (instead of saving them and uploading with the web site or one of their uploading tools). When it’s this easy I can’t help but want to post stuff all the time.

    Flickr is currently free, also also has a Pro option. With a free account you can upload 10MB of pictures a month, have 3 photosets, and people can view the 100 most recent images you have uploaded. The Pro account offers quite a bit more, you can upload 1GB per month, there’s unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth use, unlimited photosets, and permanent archiving of high-res images. In the future Ad-free browsing will be added to that. You can check out their FAQ for more info.

    The last thing I have to say about Flickr is that it has really inspired me to really learn more about taking pictures and to actually get out there and take them. The other day someone invited me to a group called ‘sky‘. For the next few days I was on the road and everywhere I went I kept looking for good shots of the sky (and I finally got one I really liked). It really ends up being quite addicting after a bit.

    Oh, and no, Flickr isn’t paying me to rave on and on about how I like them. I just think it’s one of the cooler sites out there and want more of my friends to use it.

  • I’ve Been Noticed?

    A few friends of mine have been getting trackback spam for a while now and I still didn’t quite believe it really existed. Until today. The spammers have finally discovered that I can be pinged. Luckily mt-blacklist seems to be catching at least a bit of it. It still annoys me though.

  • Blog + Wiki = ?

    The folks over at Everything Sysadmin have started a wiki to go with the book (along with their blog). They’re also talking about integrating wiki and blog, something that I think could be a really cool thing. I’ve thought about trying to find easy ways to do that myself (especially when I’m posting about some nifty OS X tip).

  • Posting from Flickr

    So that last post was from Flickr, and I’m not sure if I like how it posts. I may have to fiddle around with their template for posting. Overall though it was pretty painless. The only issue is that there aren’t any categories for that post.

  • Podcasting Idea

    One of the things I’ve been watching lately is the growth of Podcasting. The idea is that various audio broadcasts online would be available for download, with RSS feeds being used to announce when new broadcasts are available. Adam Curry is the one who really gave this a kick-start with his Daily Source Code.

    The other part of this is the iPod. There are a number of programs out there for watching the RSS feeds for these broadcasts. When a new show is posted, they automaticly download it and put it into a playlist in iTunes so that you can sync it to your iPod. It’s all pretty slick.

    My idea is kind of an expansion of an idea I’ve been playing with for a bit: Audiobooks. I could record an chapter at a time, and as I finish post it so that people can download. In the end I’d love to expand this to having a resource for various kinds of storytelling. Maybe do a book reading with a few people, each taking various parts. Or provide a directory for other people doing the same thing. As usual, the big issue is resources. I’ll think about this a bit more after I get a bit more sleep.

  • OS X mySQL tools

    I have a few different tools I use for managing MySQL on my OS X server. I’ve always been a fan of phpMyAdmin and have also used something called CocoaMySQL. But I was recently in a situation where I didn’t have those available and needed something quick. After searching around some I discovered dbSuite Admin Tools X, a very nice piece of donationware for OS X and Windows for working with your MySQL server. The big bonus it has over CocoaMySQL is that it has user management built in (something I’m sure it will have eventually). These folks will be getting a little bit of a donation from me on my next round of payments.

  • BlogACatMas

    Well, at least I have some pictures I could post for this occasion, even if I don’t have cats of my own.

    BlogACatMas This Friday!

    It may be only a one-year-old tradition, but it's still a tradition! Last year, Boss Ross and I declared that the first Friday in October shall be “Post a Cat on Your Blog Day”, or more simply, BlogACatMas. Yeah, posting a picture of a cat is nearly as old as blogging itself,

    but we figured why not have a designated special day for that most bloggy of blog practices?

    Here's some inspiration:

    why_some_guy_on_livejournal_hates_cats.jpg

    …

    So gather your kitty pictures, because Friday's the day! [via The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century :: Joey deVilla’s Weblog]

  • Cats Regarding Cats Regarding Cats in an Electronic Melieu

    From my friend Greg: The Infinite Cat Project. Pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats (help me! I’m stuck!)…