Tech

My opinions on all things tech related

There are 271 posts filed in Tech (this is page 22 of 28).

Fun with Amazon

Amazon has introduced a somewhat odd new feature.

On any page for a book included in the ‘search inside the book’ feature, you are presented with a list of Statistically Improbably Phrases.

SIPs, as Amazon calls them, are phrases unique to this particular book – they don’t show up very often in other works.

Sort of interesting to look at from a trivia standpoint, but I’m not sure of any practical uses.

Here’s the SIPs from a book I picked up used at Barnes and Noble tonight, The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century:

  • fire watch stone
  • churten theory
  • big extension cage
  • beacon chamber
  • antigravity beamers
  • transition chamber
  • temporal physics

Computer Rage

Read this interesting Washington Post article on “Computer Rage” and the booming industry of data recovery.

It’s amazing the things people don’t back up. The article even mentions one recovery of 12 unaired The Simpsons scripts!

It also amazes me that I do some of these tasks (only the basic ones of course) for a student worker’s salary, a tad less than the $2000 commanded by big time data recovery specialists. 🙂

AIM Triton

I just did a bit of experimenting with AOL IM’s new beta version, “Triton”.

How is it? Let’s just say its already off my computer.

I’ll keep in mind that this software is still an early beta, but a number of fundamental design elements just really bug me.

First of all, the banner ads. Using deadAIM and now Gaim has made a lack of ads in IM seem normal – there’s no way I’d go back. The ones that play audio are particularly bad.

Second, I got a popup ad from Triton. I haven’t seen a popup ad in who knows how long thanks to Firefox and previously the Google Toolbar. But 3 minutes after logging in, there one was.

Third, it installed other software along with Triton. I have no idea what it did. There was an AOL icon in my taskbar, which gave me the option to ‘Sign in to the AOL network’. This functionality seems to be completely unrelated to using Triton. I could be signed into one of the two and not the other. Very confusing.

Fourth, the interface seems to have been rearranged with no logic whatsoever. It took me close to a minute of poking around to figure out how to set an away message.

In summary, I’m not impressed. While gaim admittedly still has a few bugs (my buddy list tends to disappear into the system tray at random), it remains a superior product to Triton. AOL has some serious work to do in bringing Triton out of beta, if they want to recapture their own network’s power user software market.

MusicBrainz

Thanks to Greg’s most recent podcast, I learned about the existence of MusicBrainz. Essentially its an autotagging program for your mp3s! I’d been halfheartedly looking for such a program for a couple years now. It searches a collaboratively maintained database of ID3 tag info and picks the best match whenever possible. Sometimes you have to pick one from a list when the software can’t quite narrow it down.

While the program did crash on me quite a few times (until I learned not to tag songs while it was still searching for matches on other files), overall I liked it. I tagged my more than 1,000 files in just a couple hours of on and off effort! It’d be even simpler tagging a few files at a time as I find them.

Just wanted to make people aware.

TechTV – RIP… or Reborn?

I’ve never lived in a household that had an extraordinarily inclusive cable package. No problem there really, I rarely felt like I was missing anything. Most shows I watch are on the major networks and a sparse handful of other basic cable stations. While I lamented not having the SciFi channel in middle school, well soon after it showed up on our ‘regular’ cable.

The one channel I always wished we got, and never had fulfilled, was TechTV. Sadly, it no longer exists. G4 ‘merged’ with it, in reality renaming the station to G4 and replacing much of the quality content. G4 is very much a video game channel and very little a generic tech channel. A friend has the new G4, and it rarely equals the heights of programming I glimpsed on the old TechTV now and again.

The few times I did get to watch a program, more often than not it was The Screen Savers. I’m pretty sure that show was wiped off the schedule at the merger. But thankfully, the original hosts of the show have started a podcast!

“Revenge of The Screen Savers” had its inaugeral this last week, and plans on posting a new show every Sunday. I’m psyched! Finally I can get in on the fun.

Plus, its a great example of one potential of the ever-emerging internet: alternative methods of content distribution.

Flickr: Upgrade!

Word on the street is Flickr is announcing some changes. I haven’t gotten my official e-mail yet, but a friend has:

-Paid accounts now have 2gb of uploads per month
-Paid accounts now cost just $24.95 a year
-Free accounts now hold 200 pictures, not 100 anymore
-Best of all: Early adopters such as myself get a free extra year!

Score!

Flickr blog entry on the topic

edit: Got my e-mail! Also forgot to mention that Flickr generously gave me two one-year paid accounts to give to friends! I’d expect dozens to show up on Ebay shortly if you want an account cheap…

Permanency on the Web

A couple things I’ve seen recently on Google have given me pause to think. Both of the items in question exist because of the fact that my parents moved recently.

First, Google has a feature that lets you do a reverse lookup on phone numbers. My parents’ phone number still leads to their old address, even though the move happened eight months ago now.

Similarly, Google maps does not know that the neighborhood they live in now (it was newly built) even exists! Putting the street address into any online mapping service, not just Google, dumps you into the middle of the closest town, with not even an error message that the address couldn’t be found.

I can’t find any sort of policy that states how often these things get updated. And I’m sure these aren’t the only examples of such inaccurate data on the web. It’s all well and good to do an excellent job of putting traditionally print data online, but what if it never gets updated? A new phone book is sent out every year. I’ll be interested to see if the online equivalents do the same.

Flame Shields to Full!

I’m on my way to bed, but just ran across an article:

Primitivist OR Luddite AND Librarian

It’s rather… inflammatory to say the least.

Here’s the ending line:

“Perhaps it is time to throw the computers and the tech-savvy librarians out of our libraries.”

I’m not sure quite what to make of it yet, except to say that I obviously disagree. Still being in school, I’m probably not qualified to respond to many of the points anyway. So here’s some good responses from others wiser than I that I agree with 100%:

From Greg

From Steven

P.S. – I’ve updated my Permalink structure to something more logical. If you’ve got any links to entries saved, you’ll probably have to update them. Sorry! But now it’s a much clearer system I think.

Jybe redux

I had a nice brief e-mail exchange with one of the folks at Jybe the other day about some webmail issues. Brian seems like a genuinely good person, and I just wanted to toss another link their way. It’s an interesting little piece of co-browsing software, and I look forward to seeing where it goes.

Hope they can handle the thundering hordes of HP readers!