I did this video in Final Cut Express. It was my first time using FCE and I learned a lot through the process. No more iMovie 09 for me. Of course, I do need to figure out a way to stabilize the video since FCE doesn’t have an image stabilization feature. This may be even more of a reason for me to go ahead and buy the Kodak Zi8 to replace my Zi6.
]]> ]]>A web series about dressing like a grownup
Don’t think this is about dressing like a fifty plus year old in a three piece suit, it’s not.
]]>You’re welcome.
Almost a month old article, but now that I have been using Facebook Lite for the past month, I can say that I never plan on switching back to the cluttered mess that is the current state of Facebook.
]]>I usually get to work between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. Of the 16 people at the company, eight of us live here in Chicago. Employees come to the office if and when they feel like it, or else they work from home. I don’t believe in the 40-hour workweek, so we cut all that BS about being somewhere for a certain number of hours. I have no idea how many hours my employees work — I just know they get the work done.
Jason Fried is one of the founders of 37signals, a business I would easily label as a minimalist company. The ideas and way of business that would make anyone over the age of fifty cringe, but anyone under the age of forty strive to be a part of. Those forty to fifty typically side either with the belief alongside the fifty plus mentality or lack clear direction on the subject for various reasons.
The 40 hour workweek is a dated method that no longer applies to today’s ability to do business, but one in which most of us are still forced to follow. Looking at the absolute least amount of time most eight hour a day workers would have centered around a work schedule.
In this scenario, allow one hour for lunch. Adding up the number of hours shows that the day consists of twelve hours dedicated or revolved around work, not eight. If the minimum of five to six hours meant for sleep actually happens, then only six to seven hours can be considered personal time.
Unfortunately, this is the bare minimum schedule for a typical eight hour day. It is more common for people to spend more time getting ready in the morning, more time in their commute and easily over eight hours dedicated to work itself dwindling personal time down to a measly three to five hours.
Factoring in two weekend days that are completely personal time, the personal time throughout the week, and taking out time spent around work and sleep, only forty percent of the average person’s life in a bare minimum work week truly belongs to them.
Although many start ups are taking similar paths as 37signals, it is time for bigger, existing companies to adopt the same.
]]>This was my first time really playing around with iMovie 09, but I think I may need to take more video with the Kodak Zi6 and see what other fun videos I can make.
]]> ]]>But Sunlounger is simply one of the more recent music memories. My life seems to be defined by the music I listen to and what stage of my life I am in at the time. Finley Quaye’s “Dice” reminds me of nights back at home, Fragma’s “Toca’s Miracle” takes me back to 2002 and when I first started working at Saks, whereas Eve 6’s “Inside Out” takes me to when I worked a part time job at a furniture store in 1998.
I was reminded again last week how music can bring up memories you thought were lost when I heard Dr Alban’s “It’s My Life” on the radio, and upon getting home and grabbing a couple Dr Alban songs, hearing a 3 second clip from a Scatman John song. These took me back to when I lived in the 1990’s techno heavy Dominican Republic.
I have found that I can place the years, and even months, of events in my life based off the music of the time, whether it is an artist, a single song, or an entire genre.
Nada Surf, Butthole Surfers, Silverchair, and Superdrag take me to one period. Bone Thugs-in-Harmony, Domino, Dr Dre, and Snoop take me to another; while Metallica, Guns-n-Roses, and Pearl Jam take me to a whole other time and place.
Although work or school may be the places where memory retention is most important, most of that knowledge is easily forgotten, but it is always amazing to see how a song that you may have not heard in 10+ years brings back instant memories of the past (both good and bad).
]]>The ASUS EEEPC 1000HE secured the top spot as our readers’ favorite netbook, building on the reputation of the EEEPC line as a very capable netbook and cinching the deal with one of the longest running batteries in its class.
The ASUS may have won by a lot, but my MSI Wind is no slouch and came in second. Take that Dell!
]]>Super old article (2003/07/10), but I can’t believe I missed it.
3) You enjoy the content fire hose. Give me tabbed browsing, tabbed instant messaging, music all the time, and TIVO TIVO TIVO. Welcome to NADD.
I certainly have N.A.D.D. when read from this “definition.” With me, replace “TIVO TIVO TIVO” with “Usenet/Streaming/EyeTV”.
Although I have thought for awhile this is becoming all more common, I am finding it is much less so than I had imagined. Other than faceless internet “contacts” (and my brother and brother-in-law), I don’t have any RL friends I would classify as having N.A.D.D.
The presence of NADD in your friends is equally detectable. Here’s a simple test. Ask to sit down at THEIR computer and start mucking with stuff on their desktop. Move an icon here… adjust a window size there. If your friend calmly watches as you tinker away, they’re probably NADD-free, for now. However, if your friend is anxiously rubbing their forehead and/or climbing out of their skin when you move that icon 12 PIXELS TO THE RIGHT, there’s NADD in the house. BACK AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER.
This is where I was truly nailed down. I know, it sounds a little OCD, and it is, but please don’t resize my windows, don’t move things around, and don’t put anything on my desktop. My desktop is void of any icons with the occasional exception of being a temp/staging area for current, at-the-moment work.
]]>Not not quite sure how I would classify myself, but it is probably a hybrid of a Digital Callaborator and an Ambivalent Networker.
]]>For example, Digital Collaborators have the most tech assets (PDAs, cell phones, laptops, MP3 players, etc.) out of the five groups, and use those assets to both work and share their creations with others. Media Movers are more likely to create “information nuggets,” like digital photos, and pass them on right away. Roving Nodes get the most out of basic applications, like e-mail and texting, and “find them great for arranging the logistics of their lives.”
Ambivalent Networkers, however, are distinct in that Pew says they have folded mobile devices into every aspect of their social lives. Texting, social networking, entertainment—you name it and this group is doing it with mobile devices of some sort. They’re significantly less likely to watch traditional TV on a daily basis than the rest of the adult population (24 percent, versus 79 of all adults), though they do watch TV shows on on non-TV devices more than any other group. Additionally, 66 percent of this group performs at least one non-voice activity on their cell phones per day, the highest of all the groups, and 91 percent of this group relies on their cell phones for all of their calls.
Multiple “reply to” addresses in Mail.app similar to gmail has been a long time desire of mine. I have one gmail account where all other addresses are routed, but I have never figured out how to get Mail.app to allow me to use the address an email was sent to as my “reply to” address.
Finally I figured it out. What if i just entered a bunch of email addresses seperated by commas (like you normally do when you want to send it to multiple people) in the Email setup? Would it work? Yes! It did work!
Sadly, this tip is so simple, I can’t believe I never knew to do this.
]]>Currently, all but 2 of the videos were recorded using Cycorder on my iPhone. These are from Inauguration 2009 here in DC. They should have been taken with my Zi6, but much like me, I left it at home that day.
I have many more videos to upload later this week that show off what the Zi6 can and cannot do.
]]>Very good overview of Virb. Where it came from and how it is today.
In 2007, Virb wrapped the social aspects of Facebook with the rich, media-centric platform of MySpace in a gorgeous package that looks better than both.
When Virb came to the scene, it desired to do MySpace the right way, while adding a good bit of original and artistic flare based off the individual users. The Facebook social aspects included items such as groups and photo sharing. It looked to be the answer to those frustrated with MySpace and those that wanted more than what Facebook offered at the time.
One of Virb’s most unfortunate shortcomings, however, is its substantial lack of a mobile version. Users can e-mail blog posts, status updates, and photos from any mobile phone, but Virb has no optimized version for mobile phones, though a native iPhone client is in the works.
This statement is very true in today’s world of Twitter, Facebook Mobile, MySpace Mobile, and everything social going mobile, but Virb also suffers from the problem with what it initially set out to accomplish.
As already stated, Virb brought together the best of both Facebook and MySpace in a much better looking package. At first glance, this would be considered a winner, but by 2007, both social giants had huge followings with the numbers continuing to soar higher. No one wanted to leave their social site because that is where their friends were.
Facebook was able to succeed in taking from MySpace by filling a niche from the start with the University and High school students. They created an almost elitist group of people. You had to have a “membership” card to even get in. MySpace initially filled the niche of music interests, indie bands, and their fans.
Virb’s originality was not really apparent. It wanted to do the same, just better.
In an effort to become a “social homepage” like FriendFeed, Virb has increased the number of services it can import, including Twitter, Digg, Flickr, Vimeo, and more. But your stuff from some services, such as Flickr and Vimeo, are not just imported as entries on a sandboxed activity stream—they actually get displayed in your photo and video album areas alongside the content you create at the site.
Virb 2.0 is heading in a new direction. Rather than simply duplicate, they are now going to use all the other services to create a social aggregate. This idea isn’t new to Virb 2.0, but Virb 2.0 appears to be putting this in the forefront. This is their new direction.
Although this idea too is not entirely original, let’s hope their execution of the idea increases their 250k user base and makes them a real contender in the social scene.
]]>Within MT, I use Markdown (created by John Gruber) with SmartyPants to write my posts, but apparently ScribeFire wanted to handle its own formatting prior to passing to MT. I knew this would be the case in Rich Text mode, so I wrote the post in the HTML mode thinking if I didn’t use HTML, stuck with Markdown, ScribeFire would act as a pass-through for the text. I was wrong. The entry was riddled with HTML and even included a spacer gif pulled from another site.
In addition to the added HTML, and the fact that I wasn’t able to use Markdown properly, ScribeFire placed my “Tags” in the “Keywords” section of MT. The label in ScribeFire was “Tags”, place them in the Tags!
Lastly, I re-edited the entry within MT, saved it, and now the entry inside MT is blank even though the entry shows on the site.
ScribeFire…it was short lived. Sorry!
]]>Virb recently did a complete redesign and is now being labeled as Virb 2.0. Although I will admit that I have neglected my own Virb page by over 2 years, I’ll be playing with the newly redesigned site over the next few days and see how it has improved.
Facebook pre-redesign and pre-facebookapps was great, but now it is a mess. Myspace has never once been a place I have enjoyed. I am now very close to deleting my MySpace page (was that repetitive?).
My virb page: http://virb.com/metts
]]>2009-01-14 Ended $85.33
2009-01-15 Started $80.57
UPDATE: 2009-01-15 Ended $83.38
]]>Google is currently reassigning people and letting some go. From an economy standpoint, this is similar to what other companies are doing, but in addition to personnel changes, Google is killing off a few of their projects. One in particular I have questioned the existence of since Google acquired YouTube, Google Video.
I had forgotten that Google Video existed prior to reading this article. Back when Google purchased YouTube, I thought they would merge the two services, but they never did. YouTube had the brand recognition, so Google would never have been able to re-brand it into Google Video with much success. Although I don’t believe they wanted to do this, they still held on to the lesser of the two for longer than expected.
So, bye bye Google Video! Will you be missed?
]]>iPhoneModem is only $10, but uses proxies and is more complicated than PDAnet to set up. PDAnet was free up until version 1.33, but costs $30 if you upgrade past 1.33. Besides some minor bug fixes and a few “enhancements” I didn’t care for, I didn’t see a need for the update; however, I updated to a newer version prior to realizing it was no longer free.
Now, if like me, you would prefer to go back to version 1.33, follow the below instructions.
Jailbreak your iPhone if you have not already
Install MobileTerminal with Cydia
Launch MobileTerminal
Follow the below commands. Use ‘alpine’ as the password when prompted to login as root (unless you have changed the password, then use that).
The following will log you in as root, change directories to root’s home, install wget, download pdanet1.33.deb, and install the deb package.
su
cd /var/root/
apt-get install wget
wget http://modmyi.com/repo/2debs/pdanet1.33.deb
dpkg -i pdanet1.33.deb
Launch PDAnet and use it for free.
Next time you launch Cydia, it will show PDAnet as a package to upgrade. As long as there are no new features in the app you are willing to pay for, do not upgrade.
Feel free to delete the deb file, or just leave it in case you need to reinstall later.
The above steps can be modified. I found this method to be easy way that allows you to do it over wifi or the cellular network. If you prefer to ssh to your iPhone, feel free to do all the steps using ssh and simply exclude steps 2 and 3.
]]>