I seem to add things to my household upgrade list much faster than I remove them. Fortunately the latest addition should be fairly simple to tackle. I tend to leave one USB wall wart plugged in next to the bed to charge my phone nightly. I know I’m losing due to vampire power but I’m also lazy. This product I saw on an engadget post solves the issue easily.
TruePower UCS Power Outlet With Built-in USB Ports
Another day, definitely at an earlier time of day, I may go into my history of examining the “cloud” related to the storage of photos for sharing and secondary backup. For now, I just want to express my pleasant surprise at a Google announcement that came nearly two weeks ago. In a post at their official blog and cross-posted on the Picasa team’s blog, Google announced that they were providing “twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price.” So, from $20/year for 6GB to $5/year for 20GB or under a full utilization standpoint, from just under 28¢/GB/month to to just barely over 2¢/GB/month. This change dramatically shifts Picasa Web Albums rank in my internal cloud storage rankings. I haven’t yet decided how it’ll impact my workflow but it does require me to reach out to a number of friends and update my recommendations. I wonder how I missed this news initially. I may need to revisit my feed reader practices.
In my end-of-day RSS reader catch-up, I stumbled across an article outlining some new YouTube services. Essentially, YouTube/Google is now applying automatic speech recognition technology they’ve been perfecting withing Google Voice, to close-caption YouTube videos. They’re also a providing mechanisms for “auto-timing” self-provided captions uploaded as simple text files. These are exciting new features that will greatly enhance the ability to find appropriate video content as well as become more accessible in general. I hope to see some of these technologies made reasonably available for implementation outside of YouTube. I know in the school systems, YouTube is often entirely blocked. It would be fantastic to see sites such as TeacherTube able to leverage the technology to increase their reach. Be sure to read the full post at Google as there are a few other tidbits such as caption translation that are demonstrated.
Like many of Twitter’s users, I count on good retweets to get some of the best information. It’s quite rewarding when a retweet pops up a whole new blog that ranks getting immediately added to the feed aggregator. Today, my favorite fix for Google Reader and honestly a number of other social networking services, @feedly, retweeted Scott Bowler of QUBA. His post wrapped up in a succinct way, a number of tools that I also use daily to stay on top of things. Scott’s post is a must read to get some good ideas about tying disparate tools together. Although I don’t know if I’d use lastpass since I’m a long time user of 1Password, I do leverage Dropbox to make sure it’s always with me. I also hadn’t heard of FeedRinse which is now added to the top of my list of research links. Btw, if you haven’t been exposed to Dropbox and decide to add an account, feel free to use this referral link for extra space.
Ease of mini
I go through cycles of Firefox extension experimentation. Normally, I have 4 or 5 profiles setup, each with different sets of extensions targeting anything from alternate workflows to multiple ways of implementing userscripts for some of my favorite sites. This morning I took a quick look at the “Get Add-ons” tab for the first time in months and saw CoolPreviews listed. I guess I’ve been living under a rock considering Lifehacker covered it nearly 3 years ago.
I ordinarily open way too many tabs. I see a link that I might be interested in, I control/command-click it to open in the background and continue on the current page. Before long, I may have dozens of tabs that need follow-up. CoolPreviews will eliminate many of those by providing the smoothest implementation I’ve seen of popping up an embedded, scrollable window of any given link. A quick mouse over, scan and I can move on or continue with my ingrained research path.
That’s not all the extension accomplishes. You can create stacks of sites to step through as well as do preview searches of highlighted text at any number of differ sites.
CoolPreviews during post edit
So, for those of you that haven’t seen it, consider taking a look.
A number of months ago, an amazing blogger and friend of mine, Wesley Fryer and I were talking about the need to have a conference to initiate some and improve the skills of others in vid and podcasting. Little did we know that Chad Henderson was several steps ahead of us.
Fortunately Wes had need for a flexible place to work and I had the privilege of introducing him to the Oklahoma City Coworking Collaborative. While taking a tour of the office space we were told about a number of upcoming events being hosted at the location. When we heard about Throw Your Voice we both lit up. Now, Wes has been traveling the world espousing the benefits of new media within education and would be considered an expert (even his children podcast). I am quite the newbie just now breaking out of a shell to start putting thoughts on this site this past year. We both see this conference as a great opportunity. Experts can help others embrace new media production with refined skills, the rest of us will be surrounded by wonderful speakers as well as given the opportunity to provide our own insight. The conference is on track to be a fantastic event.
The event is this Saturday, October 3rd from 9am to 4pm. Thanks to Chad’s hard work and the contributions of a number of other great folks, it is sure to be a success. Rather than repeat much of what you’ll find at the site and since one of the talented speakers, Lane Fournerat of the event has already done a great and fun video highlighting the day, I figured I would just embed it below.
I’ve been spending a lot more time experimenting with FUSE on my Linux machines as well as on OSX. I especially appreciate how FUSE with encfs can open up a broad number of possibilities for relatively secure backups in a cloud. I won’t go into a lot of detail in this post about the projects but did want to give a note on yet another old news item. Snow Leopard rendered a straightforward Macfusion inoperable for me until I ran across the a great post at Rack Hacker to fix it.
Old news now, but was frustrating enough that I finally decided to say something. Google apparently decided that the Picasa installs by Linux users have been too low to justify rolling out the 3.5 version for Linux. It’s difficult to imagine why since it is basically the Windows version wrapped up with the appropriate Wine pieces to make everything work. It’s frustrating since I’ve only really used the software under Linux. Oh well, fortunately a number of good folks have rolled up instructions on how to manually get everything straightened out. Here is one from a blog that I’ve really begun to enjoy:
OMG! UBUNTU!: Install Picasa 3.5 In Linux
Hopefully leaving Linux behind won’t become a trend for Google.
Pond boarding? from James on Vimeo.
Turn the sound down as I haven’t edited and the wind was crazy. Ever seen anything like this?
Org-mode causing Emacs revisitation
I’ve been a vi guy since I first touched Linux in ‘91. Every few years, some bit of news or tip I run across causes me to load Emacs and attempt to wear out my fingers finding the right sets of sequences to do something that comes naturally to me with vi. The visit to Emacs tends to be short-lived and I return to the land of the home-keys.
Recently, I’ve been concerned with keeping better track of discoveries and activities. I currently use a mix of tools, most of which depend on a third-party to maintain a web-service. For instance, tasks are dumped into Toodledo and my research goes straight to Evernote. These are both fantastic tools I plan to continue to leverage but they don’t fulfill a need I can’t quite define. Essentially I want a way to take notes, highlight tasks with their contexts both within real space and within their relevant documents, and be in a form I wouldn’t mind sharing with others. Arguably there are a number of cloud tools that nearly do this, in fact either of the two mentioned above almost achieve this. However, I want something very cross-platform and also with me in the absence of any cloud.
Fortunately, Carsten Dominik and numerous others apparently have had similar needs and have developed Org-mode. Org-mode is a mode within Emacs that I couldn’t begin to outline in a post. Countless others already have and many are linked at the official site. I just want to set a trap for anyone that might be stumbling across this site by mentioning a tool that has been known to cause people to switch editors. I am simply amazed by the amount of thought and design put into the art of editing plain-text hierarchical documents. I’m fairly certain my visit to Emacs this go around will last much longer. Although, I may need to look into a more appropriate keyboard.