Hidden Peanuts

I was really excited to read that the town of Chapel Hill has a public wifi project! Combined with my own wireless router and the wifi access on campus at UNC, I’ll be spending almost my entire average weekday in areas with coverage.

Naturally, I’ll need a portable wifi device to take advantage of it. I love my laptop, but it is simply too bulky to haul around town every day. I started exploring other options. This list is a little abbreviated, but after searching around online I had essentially narrowed down my choices to:

1. An iPhone
2. An iPod touch
3. The DS browser cartridge

As much as I’d love an iPhone or an iPod touch, I can’t justify that level of expense right now (even if my much loved 4G iPod did just bite the dust…). I already own a DS Lite, so the DS browser’s $35 price tag was a very compelling advantage. But I really didn’t expect much out of the deal. Almost every review I read of the browser online was extremely negative. I was nervous, but the relatively low price sucked me in. I figured at worst I could resell it on Ebay at a minor loss.

What I got is much better than I expected! I think the people who wrote negative reviews are confused about what this browser is. It is NOT a desktop replacement. Regular web sites load very slowly when images are involved. There is javascript support but no flash, audio, or video. I found that all of the major drawbacks in usability can be solved pretty well by doing three simple things:

1. Disable images in the browser’s options. Load time will speed up dramatically.
2. Use sites designed for mobile browsers whenever possible, such as Google’s wap portal.
3. Don’t expect multimedia capabilities. I knew this going in.

After these steps, only one major drawback remains for me - the fact that there is no support for cookies or saving login information. You have to type everything out (via stylus qwerty keyboard or pretty solid handwriting recognition) every time you want to log in to a site. I don’t miss multimedia options at all; that isn’t what I wanted a mobile browser for. But I’ve been happily accomplishing basic online tasks like checking my e-mail, reading a few rss feeds, looking up addresses or phone numbers, and even a bit of slightly clunky IMing via http://www.ebuddy.com/

The browser itself has two main viewing modes. The first squishes all the content into one narrow column, spanning the DS’ two screens. In the case of sites designed for mobile use, this works very well. The second option, which I prefer for sites not designed for mobile viewing, displays a zoomed out overview of the site on the bottom screen. You can then use the stylus to select a portion of the site to show zoomed in on the top screen.

I particularly want to note that the DS browser DOES work on public wifi access points that require a clickthrough page. For example: Panera Bread, Brueggers, or many airports all require you to agree to some terms of service before gaining access to the web. I’ve seen erroneous posts elsewhere online that say this does not work on the DS browser. But I’ve tested it myself with no problems. When configuring the DS for the access point, an error appears about being unable to obtain an IP. Save the connection info anyway. Try to load any url, and you’ll be directed to the clickthrough page. Ta-da!

The DS browser comes with a memory expansion required for the cartridge to work. It fits in the GBA game slot on the bottom of your DS. There are two versions of the browser available, but the only difference is the size of this expansion module. One fits the DS lite while the other fits the older, larger original DS. Make sure you buy the right one.

Is the DS a perfect mobile browser? Certainly not. It is relatively bulky for the screen size when compared to an iPhone or other similar device, and is another device to carry in addition to my phone. But… I keep coming back to that price. At this point in my life I’d much rather have an extra $364 in my pocket than a low end iPhone. Have realistic expectations going in, and you won’t be disappointed.

Now if I can just get some homebrew PDA software up and running on my DS, the device’s domination will be complete!

…but I’m still intrigued.

Something went wrong in the office online game thing. If you still want to work me, you have to re-apply (your account info is still valid, just fill out the form with this new code):

Branch: Dothan, AL
Code: ded7o7f65x

Re-apply here: http://www.dundermifflininfinity.com/employees/register/

I’ve been playing around quite a bit with Spiralfrog recently. They’re in closed beta at the moment, but I like what I see so far. The quick description is that Spiralfrog lets users download music legally for free. Now don’t get too excited, the music has Microsoft DRM built in

Right now the site has a partnership with EMI and a bunch of smaller music labels. So while selection is a bit limited, there are albums worth downloading. I’ve gotten albums from Snow Patrol, U2, Spoon, Maroon 5, Queen, Nine Inch Nails, and a bunch of others. You won’t find every band you’ve ever liked, but there’s probably something for everyone. And the music does play on any any “PlaysForSure” certified portable device (almost anything but an iPod qualifies these days).

In return for the freeness, Spiralfrog asks that you fill out a survey every 30 days to keep your downloaded music active. Music videos are also available.

My one major complaint is that the download process is very clunky. You can’t just queue up a bunch of tracks and walk away - it is necessary to click a button to download the next track after each one finishes. This is such an obvious problem that I feel like it has to be in place on purpose, but I can’t quite figure out why. Maybe I see more ads this way? I also experience periodic errors that cause a track to not download for no apparent reason. The only fix I’ve found is to wait a while and try again.

I also question the accuracy of the top downloads list. The same Gwen Stefani song has been stuck at #1 since I signed up three weeks ago, and I haven’t noticed any changes in the lower ranks either…

So, Spiralfrog is very much a beta product. But I find that I don’t mind DRM quite so much when my music is free.

That went really well! I lost count of the number of positive comments we had from students, including “This is the best campus event I’ve ever been to!” Of course, there are some things that I’d do differently next time, but for first timers I think we did pretty well.

I think the main thing I’d do differently is spread out the console games around the room. We held the whole event in one large open room that usually have reserved for quiet study. For ease of keeping an eye on things, the console team (myself and one other person) had the three 42″ HDTVs lined up in a row. One was Guitar Hero 2, another was Halo 2, and a third was random open play on an Xbox 360 or Wii. Once the tournaments started, a sizeable crowd grew around each one and it was really hard for lots of people to see the screens at once. Putting one TV in each corner of the room, or maybe back to back, might have worked better.

I also learned that laying out specific rules for every possible eventuality is a necessity. I thought the rules I drew up based on other examples of tournaments were very clear, but the participants found many holes to poke in them and I had to make a lot up on the fly Thankfully everybody was very good natured about it and I heard almost no complaints at all. Above all, be consistent with the rules. Don’t start making exceptions, and it’ll all work out.

I also learned a little bit about game selection. While we had it available for free play, we did not have an organized Smash Brothers tournament. But people were asking for one constantly. Two different groups of students even brought their own TVs and gamecubes to play it on. So next time, we will definitely schedule that in.

Here’s the full Flickr picture set. At this point we are thinking of doing it again in the spring, or maybe sooner. But the setup was killer - we had to borrow tables and chairs from a church in town, which they very generously offered to us. But hauling them in and out of the U-Haul and the second floor of our building almost killed us. Next time I’d like to do the physical setup a day or more in advance if at all possible. I had a student ask if we could do it again next week, and my muscles instantly started aching.

I’m really, really happy with how successful this event was. Thank you to all our staff who were so willing to help set up, pick up, and stay until midnight.

I am way, way behind on this, but I’ve finally got my personal book collection up on LibraryThing:

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/chad.haefele

I haven’t done much tagging of my books yet, but for now you can see which of them are autographed.

The biggest barrier that kept me from doing it for so long was the prospect of typing in the ISBN numbers off of so many books (and my collection is downright tiny compared to some). I solved this problem by buying a Cuecat USB barcode scanner directly from LibraryThing. With that in hand, the data entry took me well under half an hour.
The Cuecat itself has a somewhat interesting history, worth a read.

Next up I’ll probably put the Cuecat to use with All My Movies, but I’ll be looking for something similar that’s online first. One of the main points of listing all my movies is that I want to be able to send a list to people easily. Any suggestions? I’d also like something similar that can handle my individual comic book issues.

In the most recent print issue of Wired (8/07, the article isn’t online yet), Frank Rose briefly discusses the apparent emptiness of Second Life’s landscape in an article called “Lonely Planet”.

Rose interviewed a number of corporate bigwigs responsible for their business’ Second Life presence - Coke, the NBA, etc. By and large, these places aren’t drawing the hordes of virtual visitors that the Second Life hype machine might suggest. This is all despite the fact that companies can spend upwards of $500,000 a year developing and maintaining their presences.

The article starts out with a pretty critical tone, implying that these companies are simply wasting their time and money. But towards the end Rose admits that there is potential in the idea - and nobody will realize what’s available without simply experimenting and playing around. Right now we see mostly what one ad exec refers to as thinking in analog - simply replicating the real world in the virtual. A virtual store serves as a counterpart of a physical one. But in time we’ll see more effective marketing use of the tools, making a full “conceptual leap”. Neither Rose nor the interviewees suggest what that leap might produce. But without playing today, we’ll never get there. Unfortunately, rose plays down this point and seems to ultimately suggest that Second Life is a waste of time as a business opportunity. I think it’s still way too early to call that decision.
The idea of playing, experimenting for the sake of experimenting, really resonates with me. As one of Coke’s marketing consultants says in the article, “The learning is now”. Play with this stuff, and you can’t help but learn. That’s the beauty of all this 2.0 stuff - you don’t have to be a professional developer to built anymore.

Anyway, I’m getting off topic. Summary: The article was a good read and made me think

I’ve spent a lot of time recently trying to make various library services play nicely with each other. I’ve had some success, but also can end up quite frustrated when a vendor doesn’t make the task easy.

Just a few years ago, some of these connections would have required entire departments of coders to get the job done. Today, very often one worker can figure it out. Library budgets and resources for these projects can be a bit limited, but now that doesn’t matter nearly as much - the doors are open to vast new areas.

Still, I’ve had to learn a lot of my knowledge in this area by trial and error. Do any library schools offer a class in this area? Hands-on experience with SOAP requests, XML, even simply how to hack apart and recombine a url for search plugins - all this should be covered.