March 2005 Archives

I've been playing around with an online bookmark manager called del.icio.us lately. I had heard about them at least a year ago, but never took the time to see what it was all about.

Overall, I think it's a pretty neat concept. To use it, you simply add a bookmarklet to your browser's toolbar. When you visit a site you wish to store, click on the bookmarklet and add some keywords to the URL. I can't recall how many times I've lost my bookmarks due to system crashes and simply forgetting to export them before wiping out a drive. Storing this data online and sharing it with others should hopefully prevent that problem in the future.

I'm guessing there is probably a way to dynamically import favorites into either Firefox or IE, but I haven't taken the time to find it yet.

There's also an RSS feed of my bookmarks if anyone is interested in subscribing.

I stumbled across Kayak this week. It's a airfare search tool that searches across hundreds of sites and returns the best price. I found round-trip tickets from Pittsburgh to Chicago for less than half of what Dan & I paid last November.

Workstudy Jon created a pretty cool wallpaper featuring the code for the smallest known C implementation of a DVD descrambler.

The code in the logo is the tiniest known C implementation of a DVD descrambler. The code weighs in at just 434 bytes. It can descramble in excess of 15MB/s, which is 10 times the maximum DVD bit rate. (Source: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery)

Ever since I've heard of podcasting, I've been looking for a PodCast worth listening too. So far, all the ones I've tried have been a major waste of time. I've listened to a Podcast about Podcasting, a PodCast that was decent until the guy started out of nowhere on a right-wing conservative babbling about how there is no such thing as Black History, and of course, the Podcast of a guy narrating his walk down the sidewalks of Chicago. They all pretty much sucked.

I still haven't found a PodCast worth subscribing to. Perhaps if some of the original crew from the Screensavres got together and did a PodCast, that might be worthwhile.

Below are a couple listings of PodCasts, maybe someone can check a few out and make a recommendation.

TechPodcasts

PodCastMania

I've been using a "desktop dashboard" called Konfabulator for about 4 months now. Konfabulator is platform that allows developers to create functional "Widgets" that sit on your desktop looking pretty while providing interesting and useful feedback (PC and Mac OS X).

My current desktop is showing me the cheapest gas prices in the area, a rotating photo from my family photo album, laptop battery life, IP Info, RAM availiable, an analog clock, the current phase of the moon, a Gmail notifier, and finally a live view from St. Francis's weather cam. To see what it looks like, check out my flickr stream.

The great thing about this software is that new Widgets are constantly being created and every week I'm notified of new widget availiable.

At $25 for a full version, some will argure that the software is overpriced. However, I've that it's well worth the price. It adds a little personality to my once drab desktop.

Konfabulator!

Apparently, the government was going create a free eFile program because the cost to the goverment for someone filing by paper dwarfs the cost for someone eFiling.. The big companies like TurboTax, etc... threw a fit because it was going to cut into their bottom line.

TurboTax came to an agreement with the feds agreeing that TurboTax would create a site where folks can eFile for free. The only problem is that they don't advertise it.

Find it here.

Pennsylvania's site.

Reference:
Very Raw » Blog Archive » eFile for free!

Last month, my screen on my iPaq h555 stopped responding to the stylus. I'm pretty sure that I caused the problem by using Windex to try to clean the screen (I'v always heard you weren't supposed to do that, but I have done it in the past and never had a problem).

After reading some of the posts over at PocketPCThoughts, I found a company called PDA Smart\ that repairs iPaqs. The total cost for the repair was about $100, and PDA Smart was pretty quick with the repair (about 1 week total turnaround time).

A2B is a location-based search engine. Plug in your Latitude and Longitude and it returns websites located close to your geographic location. Obviously, not all sites are in their database, but it's an interesting concept.

It looks like you can even download a small app that reads real-time from a connected GPS and displays close sites.

After much thought, I've decided to place Google AdSense on this site. I'm finally generating enough traffic to make some advertising worthwhile. I certainly am not expecting to make a fortune, but I'm hoping to cover some of the hosting costs.

The other reason I wanted to go with AdSense was that I've been hearing a lot about the technology and I wanted to see first hand how it worked. I'm curious to see what kind of ads this site serves up. I'm kind of surprised that the first ads that I saw were for wireless networking equipment, even through I really haven't written much on that subject recently (other than the very small blurb about my new wireless network). Additionally, I don't find AdSense ads terribly distracting and therefore didn't think they would draw too much away from the content of the site.

This is why I don't watch the news anymore (other than local sports & weather).

The New York Times > Washington > Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged TV News

People can argue that the news from blogs isn't real or that it's "amatuer journalism", but I'd sooner believe a lot of what I read online as opposed to government-funded packaged news.

Thanks to Alex for the link.

Perhaps one of the ugliest web pages that I've ever laid eyes on was the page that resulted when I would do a search on this very web page.

Well, that has changed my frieds. Due to the help provided by Sams Teach Yourself Movable Type in 24 Hours, the search resulting page for search results now looks a heck of a lot better and it's even readable now!!

Go ahead and try it. You know you want to.

Expect more big things from the Sector as I complete this book.

There's a good article in the San Jose Mercury about Peerflix mentioning yours truly:

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/technology/11098274.htm

Username: noway1@nohow.com
Password: nopassword1

It's amazing that an article I wrote several months ago is getting picked up by some mainstream press. Pretty cool.

I've posted my adblock list a couple of times on this site. Here is a more complete list of adblock filters where you can upload your own filters to the master list.

Share your adblock list !

Over the past several weeks, the activity on my Peerflix account has been growing by leaps and bounds. After a nearly activity-free December, I've had several DVDs both requested and sent to my account. Additionally, I've had a couple of emails regarding Peerflix and a reporter from the San Jose Mercury asked to interview me about Peerflix.

I'm not sure if Peerflix is advertising somewhere (I haven't seen any advertisements) but it sure does seem that they have several potential customers looking for information and based on the number of DVD requests I've recieved over the past 2 months, their user base seems to have grown substantially.