July 2003
Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
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27	28	29	30	31
Jun   Aug

Feeds I Read

Know Thyself: An Easy Approach. Asking yourself five basic questions can provide a surprising amount of information about your values, motivation, temperament and personal style. Here's how to use these insights to guide your career choices. [Computerworld News] 

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PluggedInns.Com "specializes in hotels that offer high-speed Internet access." [Scripting News] 

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Good stuff on WiFiNetNews lately. Glenn Fleishman has been doing an excellent job with his WiFi Networking News site lately. His last half-dozen posts are really fascinating. Check it out. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 

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hmmm..... blogLinker

HERE'S THE BIG IDEA: If you link to a member of blogLinker, the member will automatically link back to you, thus dramatically increasing the number of visitors to your site!

[via Sugarfused] [jenett.radio] 

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The Economist: Storing e-text for centuries. Rather than invent a better mousetrap, they are using existing technology to imitate an important function of libraries. They want to ensure that readers will still be able to access electronic academic journals even centuries after they have been published. [Tomalak's Realm] 

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Google Tricks & Tips - Stuff you Bloggers need to know. Steve Covell has a good post on how to use Google to search just blogs, or just law blogs.  Inspired by his love of Google (and his specific recommendation) I have purchased Google Hacks, which contains a wealth of information on how use Google productively. [Ernie the Attorney] 

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PCWorld: Best Free Stuff on the Web

[The Scobleizer Weblog] 

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Susan Bradley put together a really great page of Microsoft RSS Resources. Fire up your aggregator! Thanks Susan for doing this! Yet another example of MVP goodness.

[The Scobleizer Weblog] 

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839 Buttons.

In case you haven't noticed, the "Steal My Buttons" effort run by Taylor at gtmcknight.com is up to 839 Buttons. Wow.

[inluminent/weblog] 

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Behind a Hacker's Book, a Primer on Copyright Law. An engineer and programmer in San Diego has also been an introduction to copyright law in the digital age. By Seth Schiesel. [New York Times: Technology] 

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Blog Chatter. With Blog Chatter, you can get an up-to-the-minute list of recently updated blogs. It is a real-time event stream of weblog updates, similar to the data provided by weblogs.com, without polling or a static data format. Pings to BlogChatter are displayed instantly the moment they are received, and only persisted in memory for no longer than 30 seconds. This is actually a good way to check out some new blogs, and be assured that they haven't gone stale. Permalink Created Wed, 09 Jul 2003 ### [The J-Walk Blog] 

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Stock icons for developers, designers. Iconfactory has designed the interface widgets for Windows XP, Netscape 6, Extensis Suitcase, Panic's Transmit, Microsoft Messenger, and many other products. Now you can afford to add their potent blend of information design and illustration to your own software projects and websites. [Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report] 

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Tasty tutorials and network effects. Mike Pick's sweet little tutorial on Pull Quotes and the Web, and Hebig.org's CSS trickery in "About the Title Pictures" will not only repay your interest, but the existence of material of this quality on independent personal sites also says a great deal about the rise of entrepreneurial authorship among designers. It also shows how network effects have succeeded at decentralizing the medium, as was intended from the day the web was created. But with that decentralization comes a question: what is the value of centralized web design resources like A List Apart when so much excellent material can be found across ten hundred thousand million design blogs? [Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report] 

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Beginner's guide to wireless home networking. Speaking of WiFi, PCStats has a beginner's guide to setting up home wireless networks. Nothing that many of you out there probably don't already know, but these are still pretty helpful for first-timers, especially given how much more confusing WiFi has gotten lately since the introduction of 802.11a and 802.11g. Read... [Gizmodo] 

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Re: Traffic stats?. Scott, Try blogpatrol. http://www.blogpatrol.com/ By Kevin Respecki. [Radio UserLand Messages] 

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Linkage Harvest. Herewith, dear reader, practical hints for turning up interesting stuff on the Web, with a sample of the findings.... [ongoing] 

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Chris Pirillo sent me this one (does he ALWAYS find the cool Windows utilities first?): FolderSizes. Hey, they have a weblog too (and the tool does just what you'd expect)!

[The Scobleizer Weblog] 

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If Abraham Lincoln had Powerpoint, the Gettysburg Address might have gone like this.

And we as a nation would have been poorer for it. [FS Consulting Inc's Weblog]

 

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Buzzing New York, July 9 - 16.

Hey, I'm headed to New York next week (after the 4th of July holiday). I arrive on Wednesday, July 9 and I'm returning to Oakland late on Wednesday, July 16.

Before then, I have some brutal deadlines. While in New York I'll do some work (mostly reviewing manuscript for my current book project and meeting with a few publishers) but I'm also trying to take some time off, decompress, and catch up with some old friends.

Speaking of which, for my friends who do have a life, I thought I'd mention the b3ta newsletter that sends out a slate of kooky links every Friday. If you already know about b3ta then you are a geek, which is OK. Don't send me any "d00d, I've been getting my wacky links from b3ta for years now - where have you been?" mail. I am mentioning the b3ta collective for the benefit of my less jacked-in friends and family, who are legion and include Jeff Green.

[Radio Free Blogistan] 

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Live On.

Just ran across this from WebSense on GlobeAlive:

Not since I discovered blogging have I been as thrilled with a new idea on the internet as I am now with GlobeAlive.

Yep, there's something to it.

[The Doc Searls Weblog] 

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Building A (Serious) Home Network From Scratch [Slashdot] 

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Hacker How-To Good Summer Reading. Stealing the Network is an entertaining hacking manual that purports to get inside the minds of hackers, explaining how they think. It's a good read, but it may infuriate some security types. A review by Michelle Delio. [Wired News] 

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Burning Copy Protected CDs. If you would like to burn a copy protected CD or DVD, you'll find complete instructions here. It is my duty to inform the public on how to correctly burn some copyrighted copy protected games Permalink Created Fri, 27 Jun 2003 ### [The J-Walk Blog] 

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Loop Recorder. I haven't tried this yet, but I will. Loop Recorder lets you capture music from web casts or other streaming sources. The loop mode infinitely records up to a specified number of minutes in a continuous loop while scrolling the data. At any time the current data can be previewed and songs can be cut and saved as WAV or MP3-files, while the recording continues in the background. So you can always save the recently played songs. This will be great for capturing some of the highlights on Whol...[MORE] [The J-Walk Blog] 

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Web Comics Reviewed. Instead of working, I spent the better part of a week reading over 15 different web comics in their entirety. What follows are the fruits of my labors, with a link to the comic, a rating (out of 5 stars), and a short review and description of the comic. Before we get to The List, we'll take a brief look at the history of web comics, and provide some tips on finding those rare web comics that are actually good. [kuro5hin.org] 

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Photo Managers.

A few photo managers to checkout

Preclick
iView Media
Picasa

[Scobleizer]

[Alan Kleymeyer's Radio Weblog] 

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Good story on Photo Management [Alan Kleymeyer's Radio Weblog] 

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Zen Garfield. Jim Davis' Garfield is one of the most popular comic strips -- and also one of the most unfunny comic strips. The Zen Garfield site is much more amusing. I ripped off a copyrighted work and made a mockery of modern living. This site displays random panels from Garfield comics, and puts them together as a single strip. In most cases, you can't tell the difference between the phony strip and the real thing. (via Incoming Signals) Permalink Created Wed, 25 Jun 2003 ### [The J-Walk Blog] 

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Zen Gardener. A few weeks ago, the CSS Zen Garden burst on the design scene and opened a few people’s eyes, including mine. I had lunch today with its author, and he’s an interesting story.... [ongoing] 

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What Inventions Would You Create To Change The World?. Earlier today I posted a story about ten inventions Newsweek thought might change the world. However, those are inventions that people are already working on and not what kind of inventions people really want. The DaVinci Institute asked that question, and they got quite a number of interesting (and amusing) answers. A self-cleaning house certainly sounds nice, but do you really need plaid spray paint or caffeinated eye-drops? How about "instant sleep"? You walk into a little chamber for a few seconds of shut-eye, and come out completely refreshed. Of course, I wonder how well that would work with the "dream recorder" - to make sure you remembered all your dreams. Fun stuff to get you thinking. Of course, I swear I've heard of a bunch of these before, so I wonder how many are really original - and how many are stolen from science fiction stories or elsewhere. [Techdirt] 

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Tips on setting up a wireless LAN. Mobile and wireless analyst Craig Mathias gives realistic advice for building a wireless LAN. [Computerworld News] 

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Ten Inventions That May Change Your World. Newsweek is running one of those always-popular stories talking about "ten inventions that will change your world". To avoid the unnecessary overhype, I probably would (and did in my title) change the headline to "may change your world". Still, though, I always find these types of articles interesting, if just to get me thinking about new possibilities. Yes, clearly, some of these technologies are overhyped or vaporware, and some may go nowhere. However, it's a good reminder of the spirit of innovation - something that (despite repeated predictions of an "end to innovation) will never go away. Some of the more interesting technologies mentioned are advances in ways to "trick" the tongue into tasting flavors that aren't there (useful for making dietary products taste like their fat-and-calorie filled relatives) and quantum cryptography (where the act of spying on a message changes the message itself, so you know it's been tampered with). [Techdirt] 

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Amazon.com RSS Feeds. They never got around to it, so we set up 160+ separate RSS channels for darn near every type of product on Amazon.com for you. If you have any feedback for this new (free) service, please let me know immediately! We're looking to make it an outstanding and permanent part to your collection. Enjoy!... [C:PIRILLO.EXE] 

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Mastering Regular Expressions [Slashdot] 

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The Tard Blog. The Tard Blog is a weblog written by a special ed teacher. This site is not intended to mock the retarded, the mentally disabled, or the behaviorally challenged. The authors understand that these people have a difficult life, and sympathize with them. This site does nothing but catalog the funny happenings in a special ed classroom. If you think this mocks anyone, this is because you are bringing these prejudices to the site, they are not here to begin with. (via Hi, I'm Black!) Permalink Cre...[MORE] [The J-Walk Blog] 

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The Wireless Sensor Net.

Excellent, in-depth article in the July issue of Technology Review on wireless smart sensors and how they have the potential to change just about everything, if only manufacturers could settle on a networking standard.
Read [Via TechDirt]

[Gizmodo] 

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Please be my guest.

To anyone who wants to use the

graphic that I have on my weblog - please, be my guest.

It was created with the

magic button maker.

I'm very grateful to them for making it available.

[Curiouser and curiouser!] 

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Learning from others mistakes - this is broken.

This Is Broken: Bad Design from Good Experience.. Ever notice design errors in everyday things? Send them in for a post-mortem to mark at goodexperience dot com. He's cataloging them at This Is Broken. Learning from mistakes. [a klog apart]

One of the powers of imagination is that we have the opportunity to learn not just from our own mistakes, but also from the mistakes of others.  Repeating others' mistakes is a singular waste of time. You don't make progress unless you're making new and interesting kinds of mistakes.

I'm reminded of a comment I first came across reading the proceedings of the 1968 NATO conference on software engineering (one of those classics in the field which I unfortunately gave away years ago, glad to see it is available on the web). Paraphrasing Newton's remark that he had seen farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, software engineering had mostly been characterized by "standing on each others' feet".   

[McGee's Musings] 

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Glaser's guide to the blogosphere. Fascinating. [Scripting News] 

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Simon Willison: CSS ain’t Rocket Science. Excellent ongoing tutorial on real-world CSS design, warts and all. [dive into mark] [Alan Kleymeyer's Radio Weblog] 

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:::Today's Pick::: [Coolstop Daily Pick] 

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Blogging for knowledge workers--think compound interest and start tomorrow.

Why PhDs should start blogging.

Things New PhDs Should Start Doing [via José Luis Orihuela]

1. Keep a Research Diary
2. Maintain an Electronic Bibliography
3. Know Your Search Engines
4. An Archiving System for Useful Info
5. Learn The Composition of your Research Community
6. Document Useful Learning Experiences
7. Keep a Professional Home Page
8. Maintain an Updated CV
9. Get Involved Early On
10. Develop Research Meta-awareness

This article provide a good reference to justify why PhDs should start blogging :)

[Mathemagenic]

This is a much richer post than its title might suggest. What it really offers is a nicely thought out and articulated mini-case about what any aspiring knowledge worker ought to be doing to get more leverage out of their work.

While it's never too late to start these kinds of strategies for yourself, the earlier you do, the sooner you'll start building and refining your own private, custom-designed and organized knowledge base. Youe specifics may vary, but this provides a good road map to what you ought to be thinking about. And if you can't generalize and abstract from the world of a Ph.D. student to your own world of knowledge work, then perhaps you ought to start looking for one of those nice 1950s assembly line jobs that don't exist anymore.

It's just like compound interest, the sooner you start the better.

[McGee's Musings] 

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33 Things. Jake Metcalf: 33 Things I hate about the Internet. I agree with every one of them. Permalink Created Tue, 17 Jun 2003 ### [The J-Walk Blog] 

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Cool Blog Tools. Don't know which blogging software to use? Need to know about the less-popular alternatives? You could always try before you install, but I'd recommend refering to the Blog Tool Feature Comparison Table. And if you're looking for links in all the wrong places, perhaps you need a little BlogMatcher? And what would a post be without telling you about that guide I created last week; if you've read it and have any additions, let me know and I'll include them in the next revision!... [C:PIRILLO.EXE] 

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If you need a simple but powerful video capture and editing tool, there's VirtualDub: "It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video." Licensed under the GNU General Public License. [lawrence's notebook] 

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Worth your time. Truly engaging websites. Beautiful redesigns. CSS mini-tabs. Great reads on the use of weblogs for marketing and PR; design basics, from fonts and color to white space and alignment; how fonts really work in Mac OS X. Desktop backgrounds. Swedish pop bands. And so much more. [Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report] 

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Better Google Searching, anyone?. Just follow these tips from renowned tech-guru Simson Garfinkle. [Ernie the Attorney] 

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Just to keep the name-dropping alive (hey, I got a parody to live up to now): I bought Doug Rowan coffee at Victors on Friday morning. He's CEO of Corbis. Very interesting guy. Total digital photo freak. He told me "stop using OFoto for printing" because they charge almost twice as much as PhotoWorks. Ofoto charges $.49 while PhotoWorks charges $.29. I like CEO's who try to save me money.

He went on to tell me about a new app called PreClick and got me access to a beta of an upcoming version. Awesome. Looks sorta like Picasa, but adds in metadata about your photos (directly into the file) so that your photos become easier to find over time.

Since buying my Nikon, I have taken 5300 images. So, I'm real interested in things like PreClick. OK Doug, keep us up to date on the digital photo scene.

[The Scobleizer Weblog] 

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Hey folks who use Microsoft products: point your RSS News Aggregators at the Microsoft Download RSS Feed. Thanks Susan Bradley for linking me to this.

[The Scobleizer Weblog] 

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cool tool. PowerMenu (for Windows)  [via gammatron (phase ii)] [jenett.radio] 

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Derrick Story has some good tips for taking digital video as well as new pocket guide on digital video out. I have his pocket guide to digital photography and have found it to be useful, but felt like it could have included more. [FS Consulting Inc's Weblog] 

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The Web 100. The Web 100 keeps a list of the best web sites, arranged by category. ...where user ratings and reviews of Web sites guide you to the best of the Web. The Web 100's rankings change hourly, with new sites added each day. Permalink Created Fri, 13 Jun 2003 ### [The J-Walk Blog] 

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Burning Down the House: audio-hacking for techno-illiterates. Burning Down the House is Eliot Van Buskirk's new how-to guide for acquiring, manipulating, storing and sharing digital music. It's basically a step-by-step reference for turning unsophisticated computer users into mash-up-crazy, rip-mix-burnin' monster DJs. As such, it is a really fantastic book, one that clarifies a lot of rather opaque subject-matter, from the physics and psychology of sound to the free software movement's contribution to codec and tools development to the best places to find the raw components of mash-up mixes to the state of copyright law as it befits digital music. It's organized into a series of projects of increasing sophistication, and Eliot's very careful about identifying tools that will enable both Mac and Windows users to hack audio.

I got a review copy last week and just finished reading through it on an airplane, and I'm mighty impressed. For years, Eliot's been turning out top-notch columns on digital music for CNet -- it's clear that he has a deep and thoroughgoing knowledge of the subject, and the ability to explain it. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

 

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Blog Traffic School. I've crafted and released a new guide for the world: Chris Pirillo's Blog Traffic School. It was designed to help you get more traffic to your (duh) blog. I've already shown it to Dave Sifry, Robyn, Robert Scoble, and Jason DeFillippo; they've all given it a "thumbs up." For $10, the information is yours to keep. Heck, I'll even start a blogroll for all the people who buy it and like it.... [C:PIRILLO.EXE] 

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Implementing WiFi in the Real World [Slashdot] 

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QTVR fun: panorama of Indiana Jones' lost city of Petra. QuickTime VR evangelist and BoingBoing pal Hans Nyberg says:

In the last scenes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the Treasury is a secret temple, lost for hundreds of years. The City of Petra was hidden in the mountains of Jordan for thousands of years when a young Swiss explorer Johan Ludwig Burckhardt rediscovered it in 1812. This place is impossible to capture in a normal still image. You have to visit it -- or, see it in the cubic QTVR that Greg Downings created last year on assignment for Intel. Greg visited some of the most famous places in the world during this assignment, but he describes the visit at Petra as the most memorable.

Link to panorama, Link to interview with photographer, Discuss
[Boing Boing Blog] 

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Cool online comic: Nowhere Girl. Nowhere Girl is a haunting, resonant web comic by Justine Shaw. It was recently nominated for two Eisner awards, and winners will be announced at San Diego ComicCon in July. For now, the seies is web-only, but about the possibility of a print edition Justine says, "Not currently...I hope to print it someday, when I have more of the story completed. I hope to release it as full-color graphic novels. "Link, Discuss (Thanks, Warren Ellis!
[Boing Boing Blog] 

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Cool Disc Analysis Tool.

Cool Disc Analysis Tool

I haven't had the time to look at this personally but Chris Pirillo im'd me last night about it and say "best ever" so I think it must be good.

[The FuzzyBlog!] 

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Full coverage.

This isn't much of a problem at the 200 square foot Manhattan apartment that doubles as Gizmodo HQ, but Paul Boutin gives the lowdown on how to set up proper Wi-Fi coverage in an actual, full-sized American home:

The current crop of 802.11 gear (colloquially known as "Wi-Fi," even when that's not technically correct) can reach through a room or two, but many homeowners find it's not enough to cover the entire house and yard. Wi-Fi uses a microwave radio signal to reach through walls, floors, and ceilings, just like a cordless phone. But these obstacles also dampen the signal just as they do with the phone. The advertised range for Wi-Fi is 150 feet indoors and 300 feet outdoors, but in real life it often fails to reach from the kitchen to the living room, or upstairs to the bedroom. Determined to exercise my inalienable right as an American to surf the Web from the swimming pool, I enlisted a Wi-Fi engineer who also owns a sprawling suburban home to make my system work. Our mission: Blanket the entire property with Wi-Fi, using only off-the-shelf consumer hardware and without running more cables. That meant setting up multiple Wi-Fi bases ("access points," as they're called) linked back to a single DSL line.

Read

[Gizmodo] 

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