“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.”
I need to find the context for this: is it a good thing or a bad thing, the unlived life?
Month: November 2004
Campaign Desk refocuses, but stays on the job
Now that the election is more than two weeks past, we’re overdue to introduce you to our new name and explain a bit of our expanded mission.
Welcome to CJR Daily — emphasis on the word “daily” — an outgrowth of Campaign Desk. Our intent is to critique press performance in real time, day in and day out, and along the way to examine the forces — political, economic, technological, social, legal — that affect that performance.
Good for them (and us). Campaign Desk was a must-read during the campaign and I’m glad they’re going to stay on task. The mainstream news let us down: this is one way we can demand better from them.
wrapper script for converting streams to iPod-available files
This is cool, but looking through it, it’s really just an automation of this post from the ever-itchy PDP-XI.
I’ve cobbled together a server app, RadioPod, to record streaming radio stations, convert them to MP3s, and then provide an RSS 2.0 feed for a PodCasting application to download and then throw into iTunes ready for my iPod. I’m using it for The Today Programme off BBC Radio 4 every morning. It’s jolly nice to walk the dogs and listen to James Naughtie.
Ok, it’s barely any code at all right now. What is, right now? But give me a few weeks to get this book finished along with it (more on that later) and we’ll have the web interface up and released, and we won’t have to use cron and suchlike. Meantime, it’s all on SourceForge. Anyone can have CVS that wants it, and everything’s in the public domain.
I’ve got a project on Sourceforge. I feel all grown up now.
Just goes to show that the same itch is often scratched by more than one person.
quick! what would you call it?!
So what should I call the medium — or, as Eric Hanson says, the genre — that I’ve been developing? TechSmith, the company that makes Camtasia Studio, calls it screen recording. Microsoft calls it screen capture. Qarbon uses the term viewlet. The generic term I’ve been using until now is screen video.
* screensharing
* democasting
* demosharing
* udelling
CafePress merch starting to sell
Someone just grabbed one of these shirts:
I need to come up with some more ideas, more funny, less mean (but I yam what I yam: sometimes I’m meaner than I am funny. I need to work on that.)
music, atoms, bits
Wired News: ‘Music Is Not a Loaf of Bread’:
Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy: What if there was a movement to shut down libraries because book publishers and authors were up in arms over the idea that people are reading books for free? It would send a message that books are only for the elite who can afford them.
[ . . . ]
I’m not interested in selling pieces of plastic.
More here.
where do they find these reporters?
The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Gates vs. Jobs: The Rematch:
“If you sit down next to me and say you have 1,000 songs and you pay $10 a month, how cool will I feel to say I paid $1,000 for 1,000 songs,” asked Jonathan Sasse, the president of iRiver America, a subsidiary of ReignCom, a Korean maker of portable players that has endorsed Microsoft’s format for subscription services.
How cool will you feel when I tell you I already owned all the music on my iPod and didn’t pay anything for it?
Still, dethroning the iPod won’t be easy. One reason is that none of the rival electronics companies have made a player that is nearly as attractive and easy to use. “It is not an MP3 player; it is just an iPod, and it’s only made by Apple,” said Frank Sadowski, the head of Amazon.com’s consumer electronics department. The proportion of Amazon.com customers who buy iPods continues to increase, he added.
The iPod is not an MP3 player? Well, if you insert the word “just” after “not” you would be correct. But yes, it is an MP3 player, MP3 being just one of the formats supported by the iPod.
It’s articles like this that make you wonder how well the Times covered the election or the war: the iPod is not just a standalone player. the iTunes application adds quite a bit of value, and I can understand the people at iRiver not mentioning it. But the Times reporter should know enough (perhaps he owns one or knows someone who does?) to realize the customer experience aspect of iTunes and the iPod.
File under: why would anyone try this?
using an etch-a-sketch is hard, hooking it up to a mouse might seem harder, but in the end, likely more appropriate
and accurate. here comes the electr-o-sketch—hack a mouse to control and draw on the classic and ever present
etch-a-sketch.
Jeez, I have no idea why anyone would try this. I see cool and compelling ideas most days (I have the feed in NetNewsWire) but this is just too odd.
getting with the program
It looks like the end of the line for FreeBSD 4.x, now that the 5.x branch has stabilized with 5.3. Upgrading to 5.x on production systems has not been recommended before now, but the procedure seems pretty severe all the same.
FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE Migration Guide:
Probably the most straightforward approach is that of “backup everything, reformat, reinstall, and restore user data”. This eliminates problems of incompatible or obsolete executables and configuration files polluting the new system. It allows new file systems to be created to take advantage of new functionality (most notably, the UFS2 defaults).
Sensible, though. The lazy man’s way would be to install on a new disk in a spare chassis (I have an old Pentium II that would work) and then just swap it in to minimize downtime and add storage into the bargain. Time to sniff around on eBay and see what’s available.
Bluetooth pondering
Motorola Wireless Adapter DC600 – S9874 ($39.95 list, a cheap as $24.99 on eBay).
I have an option to upgrade my wireless phone — $100 credit against whatever Verizon offers — but they only have one Bluetooth phone and it’s not in my price range (ie, free).
A little research tells me I can add Bluetooth to my current handset (the venerable V120) for a lot less than buying a new handset would cost, and it looks like it works with a lot of Moto handsets.
Of course, this one is kind of appealing. No built-in Bluetooth but a color screen, smaller size, and the camera (are these really worth it?) could be fun. When I look around at all the Google flotsam around Bluetooth and Verizon, no one mentions this adapter: it might be that it’s new (webloggers rarely hold their tongues about products they find unsatisfying).