I have been an avid Firefox user since 1.0. It started mostly as an excuse to use something other than IE 6.0 and was one of my first forays into the anti-Microsoft movement. Prior to that, I had used Linux for servers, and tinkering but I wasn’t doing it for posterity, just because it appealed to me and was cool. But, I started to get the negative vibe from M$FT about the time Netscape folded so Firefox was a shoe in for me. I use it and encourage everyone I know to use it rather than IE.
On my Macs I’ve been mostly happy with Firefox, but I have to admit that it is slow. When Safari 4 came out I tried the beta and was pretty happy with it and only had a few unexplained crashes and only one of those caused me to lose some work (ironically, I was editing a WordPress entry when it crashed). I found myself using Firefox for the extensions (namely Delicious). Since the official release of Safari 4, it has become my primary browser on my Macs. The reason being speed; it is noticeably faster than Firefox. I even downloaded it on my PC so when I happen to have booted to Windoze, I run Safari.
According to this article from US Telecom, online video viewing is growing leaps and bounds. With 74% of broadband users downloading or watching videos online. The article is based upon two studies from Pew and the American Life Project.
What’s amazing about the numbers is that 15% more adults are watching online videos than using social networking sites. Another number that’s amazing is the “near-universal” use by 18-29 year olds (old media beware).
I work with a lot of communities who still think that “broadband” is just high-speed internet and nothing more (which granted, all this online video viewing is occurring over today’s broadband). I often coach them on the fact that broadband will deliver all of your telecom services in the future including services we don’t even know about yet as well as those we do (like cable TV, telephone, etc.). As more and more folks experience video online, they will pressure their local community leaders to become active in promoting broadband availability and broadband adoption so that they can experience the same services that those of us who live in more urban or suburban areas do.
Personally, I watch videos on my TV over Netflix from my Tivo, but also have a MythTV computer acting as a video server where I have ripped most of my DVDs and downloaded (mostly legal) videos. I also watch plenty of youtube, google video and plenty of old media sites (like comedy central).
If you don’t have broadband, why not? Is it too expensive or is it not available? If it’s not available, contact your local elected officials and ask what they are doing to bring broadband to your area. It’s not just for browsing the web anymore and has serious economic development impacts on your locality.
I got my Google Voice invite recently. Even though I consider myself pretty tech savvy and up to date on cool betas and other Internet tools, I let this one bake for a bit before giving it a test. My first impression is that it’s a very useful tool and is yet another example of the Internet (and Google) making past and present tools and technologies commodities. In this regard, I have to express my frustration with AT&T and Apple and echo many folks before me. I’ll get into that, but first here’s my early impression of the service and features.
For a brief introduction, Google Voice is a telephone number that is supposed to be your last and final telephone number. You set up Google Voice with your other phone numbers and then you can control how and when you accept calls from who. Sounds great, but let me provide an example which may make more sense. You set up your Google Voice number to send everyone in a “Work” or “Coworkers” group to your office phone number and your cell phone number during week days from 8am-7pm, but not your home number, but you have one particular work buddy that likes to call you on weekends so you make an exception for that individual, but only for your cell phone. You never give out your cell phone number (or any other number) and Google Voice “screens” your calls.
My boss and I were talking recently about blogs, the Internet, Social Networking (Social Media), Twitter, and the like. He brought up some statistic about blogs that I found interesting. That only 5% of blogs have been updated in the past 120 days (according to a New York Times blog entry from June). He considers himself one of the early bloggers and has had a blog since the dinosaurs. He regularly updates it (at least once per week but sometimes as frequently as dozen times per month) and has many opinions about the value of bloggers and blogs in general. I’m not going to go into that, but he can on his blog if he so chooses.
It got me to thinking about my own blog and the fact that it’s not something I update regularly. I sort of go through spurts where I’ll write blog entries a few times per week and other times where I either can’t think of a topic or I have bloggers block I just don’t want to blog on topics that may be on my mind.
Chalk this up to musings of someone who has had two G&Ts who is also suffering as a bachelor for a few more weeks (while his wife is in Kentucky at some giant vet clinic or other) and he may or may not feel like he’s in need to find some topic or other to post on his blog or facebook or twitter or something or like that….
Consider this scenario: Have you ever purchased something at the store that you were really looking forward to? (eating)? Like you recalled picking it off the shelf and thinking, wow, garlic black pepper pork loin, “that sounds damn good.” So it is in the fridge overnight (or three) and you decide to fire up the grill and have you some garlic black pepper pork loin.
Meanwhile, you’re on the phone with your wife (from Kentucky) and you pull the pork loin out of the fridge just thinking how good it will be for dinner. You casually read the package that says, “? portabelo mushroom ?” pork loin and you literally say (into the phone), “Oh, Snap!”
Why? Because you don’t much care for fungus. Thank you very much.
It’s been a long time since I posted a blog entry. Chalk it up to being super busy at work, selling our home, preparing to move, and spring. I noticed that my the main page of my blog was top heavy with the weekly tweets posted by from the Twitter Tools plugin. Why do I have my tweets show up on my blog? No particular reason, but I figured that it sounded like a good social networking thing to do.
As it was looking like my blog consisted of nothing but tweets, I wanted to hide my weekly tweet posts (from Twitter Tools) from my main blog page. I still wanted them available for search engines, or if someone just wants to see my tweetroll (hey baby … want to see my tweetroll?) (did I just coin a new word? – A google search indicates I did not).
After poking around on google and the WordPress site, I figured out a pretty easy way to do what I wanted.
I’ve had my EeePC 901 for about a month now. I’m using it as much, if not more than I thought I would. When in the house or even on the road, I reach for it unless I really need a larger screen and keyboard. In fact, I have changed my typical browsing location from my home office to my living room and den. It’s just more comfortable being on a couch with the EeePC in my lap and coffee on the coffee table than being in the office just to browse, e-mail, tweet, etc.
The battery life, while I do get a solid 5 or 6 hours of constant use out of it, could be a bit longer. The 1000HE looks to fit that bill with an advertised 9 hours. I bought a car charger for the EeePC on eBay for $8 + $3 S&H have have charged it in the car a couple of times while on the road.
The WiFi on the EeePC works as well as my MacBook Pro and much better than my wife’s Dell Inspiron Laptop.
Someone I am very close to was recently writing an article for a professional journal for veterinarian medicine. She asked me to proof read the article, but was unhappy with my recommendations and suggestions. The topic of the article was the Internet and veterinarian medicine. She presented a couple of angles on the potential uses and misuses of the Internet by veterinarians but failed to mention web2.0, social networking, social media, and viral marketing.
She asked that I help her with some changes, but when I started making suggestions she was reluctant to include my changes in her article because the audience had never heard of “web2.0” and were more concerned with the loss of prescriptions as a profit center to 1800petmeds.com.
So, after much ado, I have been able to fix the tapping issue on my EeePC 901 running Eeebuntu NBR 2.0.
To be honest, the solution was all over the forums, but none of the posts specifically mentioned the 901. I spent a few hours trying different things and eventually got the settings about where I want them. The trick was that all the steps in this post need to be followed. The post indicates that this works for the 900 as well, but YMMV.
The trackpad seems responsive, yet not overly so, it’s not jumpy (as it was with just the elantech driver), and I even have both vertical scrolling on the side of the trackpad and two finger scrolling as well.
Here’s the steps that I performed (these are pretty much identical to the post, but I’ve added some dialog):
I found the coolest add-on/plugin for WordPress. It creates a theme for your blog when browsed to from an iPhone. It doesn’t mess up your default theme, but when someone browses to your WordPress blog from an iPhone, iPod touch, or Android it displays a custom theme for the small form factor.
No modifications of any kind were necessary on my part. After installing, I immediatly browsed to my blog from my iPhone and checked it out. I then went into the settings for the plugin and made some changes like including tags in the theme, or changing the icons in the menu.
Here are some screenshots from my iPhone:
And since I was plug-in happy, I added the NextGEN Gallary as well..now I just need to see how that is displayed on my iPhone.
