Saturday, January 29, 2005

YMMV, indeed The RSS weblog offers some thoughts on listening to podcasts while driving: Listening to podcasts in a car?. . .As they say on the Inkernet -- your mileage may vary! [Really Simple Syndication weblog] I sometimes listen to podcasts in my car on the way to work, using the Griffin iTrip in my iPod. The biggest drawback is the limited choice of open FM frequencies; the one that's clear in Santa Cruz/Watsonville (105.9, I think) is good for 20-30 minutes. By the time I'm over the hill and approaching San Jose the static and interference make it impossible to listen. As a result, my choice of podcasts is affected: Moira Gunn's Tech Nation (from ITConversations) is just about right at 20 minutes, but I can't hear an entire Gillmor Gang or Daily Source Code in one listening. And it's too dangerous to be fiddling with the controls mid-way through the drive home to make catching up practical. So my podcast consumption habits have changed, and I'm being more selective. 8:10:53 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

Intelligent writing tool Now this sounds interesting: a writing tool that understands that the hardest part of writing is researching, thinking, connecting. How computers change writing. Cory Doctorow: Steven Johnson (author of the fantastic Mind Wide Open and other books) has written a fascinating essay about his new creative process, which involves a suite of tools that store his notes and works in unstructured databases, and tease out and suggest subtly connected ideas, so that as he writes, his computer jams with him, suggesting neat tangents to his subjects. It's a great example of good computer-human interaction, where computers are used to programatically count and compare quantifiable elements (word and phrase frequencies) and human beings are used to pass judgement on the output of the computers. People are good at understanding and crap at counting; computers are just the reverse.[ Boing Boing] Cool. 7:56:01 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

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