XyzzyB - tech

Stanza + iPod Touch: the best ereader

2008-09-02T15:16:00Z

I just downloaded Lexcycle’s excellent Stanza for the iPod Touch/iPhone and, wow! Hundreds of free books all downloadable from the app itself, very nice. The ereader is nicely customizable (fonts, font size, margins, text/background color) and feels very polished. There’s even feed versions of big newspapers / magazines available.

If that wasn’t enough, there’s a desktop program (Stanza Desktop) that allows the conversion and importing of books from other formats, notably PDF. I’ve already imported some of my Pragmatic Bookshelf. The formatting gets a little screwy, but very nice overall. The great thing is that this also opens up Stanza to Project Gutenberg

OMG Vacation

2008-09-01T02:38:00Z

Vacation! I’m taking the entire week off of work. Four vacation days buys me nine continuous days off. Sweet! No special plans, just relaxing at home with Sarah and Edward. Ahh.

Sarah and I have been watching Hill Street Blues on Hulu and we’ve been very impressed. From the very first episode the characters and story are gripping and nuanced. Of course we have both been imprinted by the theme music, which is now an almost irresistible psychological command to relax and get ready for bed.

Speaking of Hulu: Jaadu has proven to be fantastic for controlling our home theater mac. This great app allows an iPod Touch (or iPhone) to connect to VNC servers (such as Leopard’s screen sharing) and does it extremely well. It comes with some shortcut setups that are supposed to be geared toward driving powerpoint presentations, but also happen to be perfect for controlling mplayer or hulu. Now we don’t even have to keep a laptop on hand, just a couple clicks on the iPod controls anything we need on the tv computer. Establishing the connection only takes a couple seconds, and everything works intuitively. Tapping the screen is a click, double tap is a double click, double tap and drag is a click and drag, and dragging with two fingers pulls the scroll bar for the current window. Jaadu even perfectly scales our odd resolution (when tilted to horizontal mode) to fit, although it scrolls so seamlessly I usually just use it in vertical mode.

Moving on to current videogames. If you have an XBox 360 download the demo for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Unless you think that pulling down Tie Fighters and throwing them at squads of storm troopers sounds boring. While you’re on XBox Live, you should download the demos (or full games!) of Braid, Bionic Commando: Rearmed, and Castle Crashers. The wonderfully, magical, and myterious game Braid is a moving and beautiful mindbender about time. It’s kind of like Einstein’s Dreams in videogame form. If you don’t know about Bionic Commando don’t bother, it’s a perfect remake of an old school Nintendo game of the highest order. If you don’t already have the ingrained reflexes from the ages of high hand-eye coordination games then you’ll just be frustrated. Castle Crashers is the next game from the geniuses behind Alien Hominid. If you get it, hit me up for some four player fun on XBox Live.

A bunch of cool stuff

2008-07-19T02:19:00Z

There are a ton of cool things happening now. Let me show you them.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is pretty much the best thing ever. It’s a musical starring Neil Patrick Harris as the eponymous Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion as a swaggering superhero, and other people that I don’t really know or care about. Watch it now, part three of three comes out tomorrow and it’s all gone by Sunday. After that if you want to watch you’ll have to pay.

Avatar: The Last Airbender has finally had new episodes all this week, leading up the to inevitably incredible two hour movie “Sozin’s Comet” tomorrow (Avatar and Dr. Horrible on the same day, sweet). If you don’t watch it, you are missing out one of the best shows on tv.

Sarah and I have made semi-complicated plans to see The Dark Knight) tomorrow (oh yes, Avatar, Dr. Horrible, AND Batman on the same day). We still can’t bring ourselves to both leave the baby at the same time, so Sarah and her sister will see it in the early afternoon, followed by a dinner by Lance, then Lance and I will see it in the evening.

E3 is going on. The coolest announcement so far may be for the 1-to-1 movement add-on for the Wii that will come with Wii Sports 2. Wii Sports 2 has frisbee throwing and sword fighting. Sword fighting and frisbee.

Terminator 4 looks fantastic. I was very “meh” until I saw that we have Christian Bale as John Connor. Bam!

The wonderful Hulu:http://hulu.com has The Secret of Nimh available for your viewing pleasure. My favorite Bluth movie and it holds up quite well.

I’m on del.icio.us roughly eight years behind everyone else, but now I have a cool little linkroll widget over there on the side. I’m pretty sure you can subscribe to del.icio.us links as an RSS feed if you’re all that interested.

Identi.ca just annouced that they’ve implemented the Twitter API, which is great because that means that every cool app people have written for doing Twitter updates will seamlessly work with identi.ca with just an address change. So Twitterific, can I have an Identi.cariffic for my iPod Touch?

Speaking of the iPod Touch. Its firmware 2.0 is great for two reasons: multiple message movemenet and deletion in email, applications. As for iPod Touch/iPhone applications I have three standouts: Remote, Pandora, and Scrabble. Scrabble is scrabble, so that’s a given. Pandora gives me access to my Pandora radio stations via my iPod Touch anywhere there’s open wifi (and that would be a huge win for an iPhone user, Pandora everywhere! Who needs XM?). Remote lets me control the iTunes on our mac over wifi with my touch. Let me say that again. I can sit on my couch, and with just a flip of my iPod Touch start browsing through our entire music collection (including videos and podcasts) and play them on our nice surround sound system. Of course I could do this before, but it involved: turning on the tv, switching to the computer video input, turning on the surround sound, getting the (sadly, wired) keyboard and mouse, and then going to iTunes and playing the music. Now I just have to turn on the surround sound, and start up Remote on the touch. Oh yeah. It’s really nice to be able to jump around our whole music collection while feeding Edward. It even streams the album artwork to the iPod just to be cool.

Like Twitter, but fast and open

2008-07-07T15:55:00Z

Dave’s article How to think about identi.ca on his excellent blog Scripting News pointed me to the nice new twitter replacement, identi.ca. I’m now on it as xyzzyb. Currently the service is really snappy, we’ll just have to see how it scales as more users load it up. One nifty feature (although I probably won’t use it) is that it can slurp your IM away messages as status updates. Now I just need an iPhone/iPod touch API.

Internet traffic shaping howto

2008-06-27T12:41:00Z

Internet traffic shaping howto

TCP Shaper Script

Maintaining Sanity

2008-06-15T21:49:00Z

A steady stream of flashing lights and sound really helps with keeping awake and alert during late-night feeding and baby care. And when you’re only sleeping three to four hours at most, everything is late-night.

Sarah and I have come to really appreciate the following inputs:

Cable Television with DVR

From National Geographic to Food Network to HGTV to Discovery to SciFi to Comedy Central: there’s always something cool, fun, or interesting to watch on our DVR. While channel flipping would be ok, the DVR is really what makes cable worth it. Frequent interruptions for the baby mean that without the ability to pause and rewind our shows we’d essentially only watch about twenty five percent of the content IF we happened to catch something really cool during the weird hours we’re feeding the baby. Unless you’re into paid programming, there’s not a lot of tv on at 4:27am.

The News and Weather via the Wii

For quickly keeping up with the news and weather with one hand (the other holding the baby) nothing beats the Wii weather and news channels.

The Internet via the Wii

The Internet is, of course, just stuffed with fun content. The Wii’s internet channel allows truly one handed browsing of all of our favorite sites.

Hulu.com

We finally tried out Hulu after discovering to our chagrin that our DVR had dropped two of the last three Battlestar Galactica episodes. Awesome! It has a wide selection of TV Shows and even quite a few movies, all with very small commercial breaks. The commercial breaks are denoted on the video’s progress bar and have a timer countdown while they are running. I’ve always said that I’d be right onboard with official tv torrents that included commercials and, since there’s no download time, hulu.com is even better than that. Hulu even has full movies and a pretty decent selection of them at that.

While it isn’t supported by the Wii’s browser (Flash higher than version 7 required) it does, of course, work great with Opera 9.5 on the PowerMac connected to the tv. The full screen mode taxes our Internet connection a bit too much, but using the mac’s mouse scroll wheel zoom with cursorceror to hide the mouse cursor we get a nice full screen presentation without stuttering video. Since we have the PowerMac connected into our surround sound system as well, the sound is even (thanks to Dolby magic) pretty decent. In a stroke of genius they even mapped spacebar to pause, so after we get the zoom in situated we don’t need to move everything around to find a pause button.

Endless Ocean

Videogames and baby watching are a tricky combination. If he’s deep asleep I can get in some game time, but I can’t really focus on anything involved. Even Super Mario Galaxy requires a bit more concentration than I’d like. Endless Ocean, on the other hand, is a game that requires absolutely nothing from the player. You get to run around beautiful underwater environments and have absolutely nothing that requires focus. In fact, the entire game encourages relaxation over acoomplishment. You can even drive the boat to a scenic spot then just sit in a deck chair and watch the ocean. While diving you don’t need to worry about air, depth, or anything at all. Drop the controller and your character will just patiently wait while fish and creatures swim around to the soothing music. When you do have time to explore, the game is actually pretty interesting and rewarding. Seeing a whale glide in and swim alongside me was an awesome videogame moment.

BMW Gina

2008-06-11T15:59:00Z

The BMW Gina concept car with a fabric, instead of metal, skin looks amazing.

Microsoft vs. Users

2008-05-28T12:42:00Z

I thought we had moved on from stuff like this, but no. Count on Microsoft to kick it old school.

Microsoft recently patched Office 2008 (the Mac version of office). All well and good, but a side effect of this patch is that all .doc and .xls files created on a Windows box can’t be opened by double-clicking them on a mac. Double-clicking those files (which for us mac users, is most files) opens Word just fine, but to a new blank document that Word has merrily assumed you wanted to create because as far as it can tell you’ve just started the program on its own.

So, there that is. Imagine you are a mac user working in an office environment. You are probably surrounded by PC users and you are probably used to getting lots of emailed word documents from them or from the web. Now, instead of just quickly getting content by double-clicking that unfortunate plethora of word documents, you have to save the document somewhere on your disk and then use the file/open dialog to open it.

As if that weren’t bad enough, Microsoft and its apologists are coming out and saying that this (wait for it) isn’t a bug, but a feature!

This is not an error. Various file types have been disabled by design.

I am sure more will be removed in future updates.

This is a security measure, it was intentional, and there’s no chance it will be changed.

—Comment by John McGhie in PROBLEM: 12.1 version of Word 2008 will not open WinWord .doc files?

While in general I am not in favor of added inconvenience, I strongly feel that if someone using computers doesn’t know that when double-click doesn’t work, they should try another method such as File | Open, then they will really benefit by the lesson in basic computer literacy that MS has forced on them. Learning where attachments and downloads are stored on the hard drive is a slightly more advanced but equally beneficial lesson in computer literacy. In the long run, more computer literacy in the general population will benefit the whole world.

—Comment by Daiya Mitchell in PROBLEM: 12.1 version of Word 2008 will not open WinWord .doc files?

I can see the tagline now: “Microsoft. Saving the world one inconvience at a time.”

On moving and movies

2008-02-17T15:54:00Z

Happy Valentine’s weekend everyone!

Sarah and I have been enjoying a leisurely move back into our “new” house. So leisurely that this is the first time that I’ve booted up my laptop since it was packed away downstairs over two weeks ago. I’ve been online of course, but only in bits and pieces: at work, at home on the XO, on the powermac connected to the tv. There is a big difference between using any computer and using my computer though. My computer at work is awesome, but it’s at work. The XO is also a fine machine, but only for its niche of cool programs and easy interface. The powermac is great, but even connected to our beautiful 40” LCD television it’s still a little squinty for use from seven feet away. My still-kicking 800Mhz G3 iBook is where its at (ergonomics be damned).

We are seriously loving our bamboo floors. It is ever so nice to be able to look in any direction and see elegant reflections and soothing wood tones instead of dingy carpet. The leisurely move is also quite fine and well recommended. Since we had to clear everything out of every room (including artwork) except for the kitchen and bathrooms and everything was moved into the basement and garage we have the opportunity to start the house over with a blank slate. We are only moving it what we need or want, just pieces at a time, and really making sure that we keep the house nice and neat while we are doing so. Every other move we’ve had has been a regular “move out and in as fast as possible”, but this is the way to do it. It also really helps to be ruthless with your culling of stuff. We have sent boxes and boxes to good will or the dump so far and don’t even really remember what exactly we’ve sent. As two packrats it was hard to get started, but after the initial break we’ve really gotten into the “use it or lose it” mindset.

Speaking of using it (oh man, I am awesome at segues): Sarah got me a Playstation 3 for Valentine’s day! With the HD-DVD format quickly dying after Warner Brothers commited exclusively to blu-ray it was time to get with the true HD movie bandwagon. After a couple days of playing with it I am forced to admit that the better format won. Whereas HD-DVD movies felt like an HD hack of the DVD format (slow menus, buggy discs, etc.), blu-ray really feels like a next-gen movie format. Of course, that impression could stem from the fact that we have a sony television and have been brainwashed by its subliminal messages (and supraliminal, it does force our XBox360’s HD-DVD player to 1080i afterall). Either way, Ratatouille and Casino Royale look gorgeous in high definition. It is a little weird to have a videogame system without any videogames, but all the best games for the PS3 are also on, and done better by, the XBox360. The 360 features better graphics, a much better controller, and achievements! It will be nice to be able to pick up the ‘Darth Vader’ version of Soul Calibur IV though. But without the achievements I might not even do that.

The PS3 doesn’t even have a single “must have” game. There are six contenders: Resistance, Motorstorm, Rachet and Clank, Heavenly Sword, Uncharted, and Ninja Gaiden Sigma. Two of those have really short playtime (perhaps good enough for the bargin bin though), one is a remake that I’ve already bought twice, and three are rehashes of game types done better by other games on other systems. The PS3 needs its own ‘Dead Rising’, ‘Mass Effect, ‘Super Mario Galaxies’, or ‘Metroid Prime 3’.

XO, bamboo!

2008-02-08T03:37:00Z

The XO is a pleasingly capable machine, especially after installing Opera.

Our new bamboo floors are in! With the baby on the way Sarah and I decided that we’d better get that big project out of the way. For the past couple of weeks Sarah and I worked on clearing out the garage and basement. Last weekend Andrew and Lewis helped me move all the furniture into said garage and basement. With some help from Sarah’s parents (especially to her mom’s excellent skill at fish tank transport) I got the rest of the things down and out of the way. Yesterday and today the highly recommended crew at Sedaris Hardwood Floors (fun fact: the owner is one of David Sedaris’ brothers) cleared out the carpet on both floors and installed our nice new prefinished bamboo. It looks and feels so great! Now we can work on setting up the nursery!

Install Opera on the XO

2008-02-05T22:58:00Z

How to install Opera on the XO laptop

How to install Ubuntu on the XO

2008-01-20T16:52:00Z

How to install Ubuntu on the XO

New blackest material created

2008-01-17T18:55:00Z

New blackest material created – check out that picture, the material looks like a hole in the table.

WRAL's Antenna Giveaway

2008-01-14T15:47:00Z

WRAL’s Antenna Giveaway

6 Megapixels is the ideal digital camera resolution

2007-12-27T14:26:00Z

It turns out that six megapixels is the ideal digital camera resolution. Less than six and there is too little resolution, greater than six without significantly increasing the size of the camera and there is too much noise