Windows Audio Sucks Monkey Balls
There are two simple things that Windows should really be able to handle by now, but can't. (1) I have a Soundblaster card driving my external speakers, and a BitHead USB headphone amp for listening with cans. Switching between the two output devices involves going deep into Control Panel, then, when I finally switch devices (from speaker to headphones, say) I have to shut down the application I'm using, and restart it to get audio to "flip over". What's up with that? (2) I'd love to be able to set the audio level on an application by application basis - so that I can have Media Center playing in a window either muted or at low volume, while my browser is playing a video at full volume. How hard would that be? Amazing how poorly this works.
Wordpress Upgraded to 2.5.1
I upgraded Wordpress to 2.5.1 this morning. Seems like a pretty big upgrade, although the upgrade itself went smoothly. If you see any problems, or if you notice the RSS feed is broken, let me know.
World’s Largest Record Collection for Sale
I first heard this on NPR, but it looks like Wired has grabbed on to the story. The world's largest album collection is up for sale on eBay. It contains over 3,000,000 vinyl records (mostly 45 rpm singles) as well as over 300,000 CDs. Once the collection hit 160,000 records (or so) he had to move them to a warehouse. Once space was not longer an issue, he started buying albums by the tractor trailer load, usually as they were being returned from the distributor to the manufacturer as unsold. Minimum bid is a bargain at $3,000,000.
Serious ASCII Art
Can't say I care for the indenting style in this source code. But still, the result is cool.
LOST: Looks like a 12 episode season
With the writer's strike now over, there's rampant speculation on how much LOST we're going to see this season. According to Lost...Stuff, we can expect a 12 episode season. What remains to be seen is how long it will take to get the episodes in the can. LOST is a peculiar show - it has a history of finishing production within hours of show time. In one of the Lost podcasts, the producers describe one Wednesday night when they were prep'ing the ABC affiliate stations to substitute a repeat because that week's episode wasn't ready. The original episode was eventually shown - it was sent over the satellite 20 minutes before air-time!
Putting Things Off
I'm a big fan of lightweight productivity. I've seen David Allen live, and read 43folders on a regular basis. The trouble with the lightweight approach is that it substitutes rigid process for something I'm sorely lacking in - namely, willpower. Jotting all your open items down somewhere is fine as long as you have the discipline to actually do something with that information. So, imagine my delight when I came across Put Things Off - the laid-back productivity blog. To my dismay, there is no magic bullet that makes getting my act together as easy as getting a beer from the fridge - however, this site does a great job of putting the best GTD-like advice together in a very practical way. Nick Cernis covers the whole landscape of the web worker lifestyle in a very light, approachable style.
Wordpress 2.3.2
Upgraded the site to Wordpress 2.3.2. Had to upgrade most of the plug-ins as well, but it was time to do that anyway. As always, drop a comment if you notice anything odd about the site
htmlPlayground
htmlPlayground is a neat little site that allows you to learn about the different HTML tags both by reading and experimenting. Simply select a tag, see a description of the tag along with a table of HTML attributes that you can modify, and see the results as you tweak the attributes. Sample HTML code is shown demonstrating the code - which you can also edit to see what happens. I wasn't able to get the table of attributes to really work (using Firefox), but still very worthwhile.
Amazon Kindle
Amazon released it's long awaited Kindle e-book reader today. The best place to get a handle on what Kindle is all about is (no surprise) Amazon's web site. The Kindle product page has a six minute video that gives a pretty good overview of the features. Newsweek has a cover story by Steven Levy that discusses the implications of the Kindle on reading. Much of the article is a retreading from previous discussion on e-books, but the Amazon-centric focus of the article is interesting - the implication that if anyone can pull off an e-book reader, it's Jeff Bezos.
From my perspective, there's a few barriers to buying a Kindle. One is the price - like the iPhone, this is an unsubsidized electronic device. Four hundred dollars for an e-book reader is pretty steep. The biggest hurdle; however, is the stack of unread books I have purchased over the years that I plan to get around to reading someday. If I never bought another book again, I wouldn't run out of new books to read for at least a decade or more. Since many of these books came from Amazon, a cheap "upgrade" would be nice, but unlikely. Amazon is purportedly taking a loss on many of the books it is offering, as publishers haven't gone along with Amazon's contention that e-books should be less expensive than the dead tree version (duh).
A nice aspect of the Kindle is the wireless connectivity. Despite using a near-ubiquitous cellular data network, there is no burden on the Kindle user to subscribe to, or pay for, a data plan. Access to the network, and any cellular charges, are built into the price of the books and other content that are purchased. I haven't seen any mention of an alternative means of getting data onto the device - so if Kindle flames out and becomes an unsupported device, there may be many pissed off Kindle owners. I'm sure the hacking community will take care of that problem soon enough.
One thing I've been looking for and not finding is the opportunity to see one of these Kindle devices in person. It's not a visually attractive device - when I first saw pictures of the Kindle a few months ago I thought it was something left over from the 80's that someone was using as a joke prop. The video on Amazon's site does a much better job of demonstrating it's form factor - it's amazingly thin, and much of the clunkiness comes from making the device rugged.
I plan to take a pass on the Kindle for now, but will certainly keep an eye out for the second generation device. In the mean time, I need to get caught up on my dead tree books!
Wordpress 2.2 Upgrade
I upgraded this site to Wordpress 2.2 last night. As always, feel free to drop a comment if you see something that just doesn't look right. Of course, it's probably my fault and not WP's. Also, I added a new plug-in called Bad Behavior that purports to eliminate, well, bad behavior by such menaces as spam bots. Basically, it keeps them from crawling the site and posting comments, thus saving on web hosting traffic and my time managing the site. An interesting concept, and seems well worth experimenting with. If anyone has experience with Bad Behavior, post a comment and let me know how well it works.
