… on the question of the existence of God, this is a good read:
We stand awed at the heights our people have achieved
Link removed, since the original source “scienceblogs.com” now seems to be a spam site. Here is a book written by the blog author for your consideration.
Lots of new stuff to talk about…
I picked up the Opera web browser for the DS a couple of days ago. It’s an odd mixture. I think they’ve done an excellent job of tuning the experience for the DS’s two small screens + pen. However, it can’t handle a lot of content (Flash, PDF, etc.) so it’s still closer to being a “mobile” browser than a real one. It’s no fun entering data on the tap keyboard either; I haven’t tried using the character recognition. Over all, it’s an acceptable tool for light browsing in the bathtub — yes, I do this — but that’s about all.
Last night, while helping Heila — Randy’s character? — grind some quests, I ding’ed 70. I’d love to say it was at the end of some extremely heroic effort, but it happened while killing yet-another-Ogre. Heila didn’t even notice until I pointed it out when we were logging off. 🙁 Oh well, time to start saving for my flying mount.
I sprung for Version 6 of Missing Sync for Palm OS last night. It has a few nice tweaks that together added enough value to make it worth the upgrade for me. The highlights are mostly new features for Treos: video import and export, call logging and SMS message history. The biggest win for me is the new Notebook app, which finally gives us Note import/export on the Mac.
I have been using Parallels at work for a while now, so that I can run Lotus Notes on Windows, but use the Mac for everything else. There’s a new version out which again adds some nice tweaks, plus one huge win: 3d acceleration. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but my friend Pookzilla has tried Half-Life 2 on it and claims very positive results. I’m going to have to grab some of my back catalog of old games and try them out; It will be interesting to see how compatible it is.
Well, there’s still no commenting at Ken’s place, but he just posted a note to say that his son got his Black Belt. Way to go, Shane! Now you get to start learning the interesting stuff. 😉
As long as I’ve been tracking the Palm world, their motto has seemed to me to be “Do something that’s (just) good enough.”. I can remember thinking “Who would buy this Palm Pilot thing; it’s so much less than a Newton?”, but people did buy them, and in retrospect it was obvious why: Palm had identified a real need (i.e. find a way to get peoples’ increasingly computer based personal data into something that replaced their filofax) and built it cheaply enough that they could hit a price point that made sense to people.
Since then however, they really haven’t come up with anything as ground breaking.
Now let’s be clear about this: Palms don’t suck. I have had some form of Palm device since the Pilot came out, and I’m still using a Treo 680. It’s just that it seems like they’ve been following that “just good enough” mantra too long.
So here we are, with the announcement of the new Palm Foleo, and I just can’t seem to shake the feeling that this is more of the same. As far as I can tell, it’s a low spec laptop, that runs some flavour of Linux. It can browse the web and read email, and has some MS Office editing capabilities (but not using OpenOffice [not enough horsepower?]). They’ve got bluetooth sync capability, but it’s not targetted specifically at Palm phones, so we’ll have to see how good that can be. The $500 pricepoint is believable, I guess, but it’s too much for an impulse buy, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why I wouldn’t just get a $500 real laptop computer instead.
Ah well, as Michael Mace over at Mobile Opportunity says:
I think Foleo will eventually live or die based on whether it attracts a lot of third party applications that do interesting things you can’t do with a notebook PC.
We’ll just have to see.
The 1.8 patch for the PS3 has enabled new uPnP AV capabilities, which theoretically should allow me to play content from the G5 server on the TV in my living room. This would be great, since I lost the minimal capabilities I had (i.e. Airtunes) when I hooked the PS3 up to the wire in the living room instead of my Airport Express.
The problem is, the formats that the PS3 can currently understand appear to be severely limited, so ideally you would want a uPnP server that supported transcoding. Apparently, Nero 7 Ultra supports this, but it is a PC only product. In the Mac world, I found two uPnP servers that sort of work with the PS3: Elgato’s EyeConnect and TwonkyVision’s TwonkyMedia.
Based on what I have read on the net, TwonkyMedia seems to currently be slightly ahead on features, and is a more solid host for the PS3. But it does not integrate as well with the Mac (the GUI is a webserver running on a random port), is more difficult to configure (than EyeConnect) and can be difficult to uninstall.
On the other hand EyeConnect installs as a System Preference Panel, is easy to uninstall and is built by the company that makes EyeTV, which I am currently running to record live TV. It also supports a plug-in architecture that has transcoders for “Audio to WAV/LPCM” and “Picture to JPEG/BMP”. I’m hoping this means that they will extend this set over time. [Note: TwonkyMedia probably has these too.]
As you can probably guess, I went with EyeConnect, since I know it will provide the best integration with EyeTV. The company also seems to get the Mac design ethic, and I appreciate that enough to want to support them… and to be honest, I really had trouble taking a company called “Twonky” seriously.
Unfortunately, the current version of EyeConnect (1.1) isn’t a great experience when talking to the PS3. The single most significant problem appears to be that it has trouble maintaining the network connection. Almost every time you access content you get some kind of error displayed on the TV screen — variations on “Connection lost” or “Access denied. Oddly, the PS3 seems to still be able to play the content. I also noticed that folders that contained a lot of data (e.g. the entire iTunes Library) were truncated.
Another problem is in the way iTunes music is served: It doesn’t appear to currently be able to give you anything except playlists and the entire library. For this to be useful, it desperately needs “by artist” and “by album” categorizations.
However, despite these limitations, I was able to successfully view some of my photos, music and movies on the PS3, so I know we’re on the right track. The limited formats supported by the PS3 meant that I could only play music in MP3 format and Movies in MPEG-2 format. Some of my old music was ripped as MP3s, but I didn’t have any MP-2 movies lying around. VisualHub solved that problem for me. On the recommendation of a forum comment I read, I used the “MPEG” tab with the TIVO profile, which worked well, displaying a 1.1Meg movie surprisingly clearly at 42″ resolution.
I wrote to Elgato about the problems I was having and received this reply:
Thank you for contacting Elgato Systems.
The new PlayStation 3 firmware does offer the opportunity for software like EyeConnect to send data to it.
However, EyeConnect is not yet optimized for the PS3. This would explain the problems a few users have seen.
So, we will test EyeConnect with the PS3, and adjust EyeConnect software as needed.
Hopefully we can have our tests done soon, but we have no specific data to share about when this additional functionality might be ready.
Now, I’m a bit suspicious of the “problems a few users have seen” comment, since I couldn’t find anyone on the net who claimed that they had no problems, but it looks like they are aware of the issues and hopefully things will improve.
The other thing we need is for the PS3 to get a more reasonable list of supported formats. Supporting only a handful is just about unforgivable, given the absolute wealth of available codecs they could be using. (Hint: It’s been years since I found something VLC couldn’t play.)
Anyway, somewhere between new versions of EyeConnect and new revisions of the PS3 firmware, I expect this is all going to work out and I may finally have found a good reason for buying a PS3. 😉
I think I have found the new home of that site, and have updated the link appropriately. It’s hard to tell without having access to the original site.
I’m actually quite a fan of papercraft models. Here’s a new site I found with some excellent SF based ones:
The AT-AT is amazing, but I’ve got a particular soft spot for the Huey, Duey, and Luie models.
I know this isn’t new, but now that I have a Treo 680, I have been playing around with SplashBlog. SplashBlog is basically a photo sharing site (a la Flickr), but with the added twist that it supports PDA/smartphone synchronization. Here’s what Six Apart says:
SplashBlog lets you instantly publish photos from your smartphone to an online photo album (photoblog) to share with others. SplashBlog includes everything you need to share your photos, including software for your smartphone and a free online photoblog account at splashblog.com. Just install the FREE software on your smartphone, create your free splashblog.com account and start photoblogging!
At some level, this is the killer app for a smartphone. Wherever you are, whenever something cool happens, you can snap a picture and push it to the web in about 30 seconds. You don’t even have to describe the picture before posting it, because you can go back afterwards (either on the phone or via their web client) and fill in the details. Of course, it eats data charges faster than Lucky can eat his supper, but it’s still very cool.
Once I could upload pictures effortlessly, I wanted to make it equally easy to share them with my friends, so I started looking around for a way to display them at NfGCW. I figured I was on the right track when I found “district 30″‘s Photo Sidebar widget but, unfortunately, this doesn’t support SplashBlog out of the box. It was trivial to add the support, however, by including…
elseif (strpos($item["link"], "http://www.splashblog.com/") >= 0) {
//SplashBlog
$item_url = $item["description"];
$start_pos = strpos($item_url , "<img src=")+10;
$end_pos = strpos($item_url , """, $start_pos);
$item_url = substr($item_url, $start_pos, $end_pos-$start_pos);
}
… in the code that decides how to pull out the picture URL (i.e. $item_url) based on the different feed types. I also bashed the code to remove the randomization of the order that the pictures are returned. Given the way SplashBlog works, it seems like showing the most recent photos is more interesting.
All in all, a fun bit of hacking for a Saturday morning. If you haven’t noticed already, you can check the side bar of the main page to see my latest images. Apologies for the portrait shots being displayed sideways. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to fix them at SplashBlog, so I’ll just have to remember not to hold the Treo sideways when I take them.
Btw, if you do want to check out all the pictures on my SplashBlog site, you can go to:
McQ’s Treo Shots
SplashBlog is gone now, of course, so my Treo Shots site is too.
I’m not going to try to be eloquent about this, but I thought I should write something here, just so everyone is on the same page…
Last night, my family went out for supper. When we got home, we found Sunshine, one of our dogs, in severe distress in our front hallway. We rushed her to the emergency veterinary clinic, where we found out that she had had a grand mal seizure. The vet told us that sometimes this can happen only once, sometimes it will happen every few weeks or months, and sometimes it will happen effectively continuously unless it can be managed. They did blood tests, and kept her there. We went home.
This morning the vet called us at 7am and told us that Sunshine had had 2 more seizures during the night. We rapidly dressed and went to see her. When we got there, she was quite doped up, but we did get to pet her and talk to her. The vet told us that the blood tests had all come back negative, and that given her age, it was likely not epilepsy. The doctor felt that whatever was causing the seizures was probably something intrusive, like a brain tumor, and that although it might be possible to control the seizures, her life expectancy was low.
As a family, we decided that we wanted to save Sunshine from the pain and confusion that she would have to go through, just so that we could keep her with us for a few more weeks/months, so we had her put down.
She will be sorely missed by all of us, but we take comfort in knowing that her legacy lives on in the many sons and daughters that she had, and that we gave her a good life despite the very rough times she had before we got her from the humane society. She was a very good dog.
The rest of us in the family (Deb, Dennis, Lucky and I) will be sad for quite a while, but we know that the love we feel for each other will pull us through. If you would like to commemorate Sunshine’s passing, please donate something to the Humane Society; they gave us a good friend for eight good years. Thanks.
Here’s a link-of-the-day worth considering… I found this excerpt from Al Gore’s new book The Assault on Reason at the Time Magazine site. As a non-US citizen, my perception of the situation in the States matches Mr. Gore’s quite closely. Turning a critical eye on Canada, I can see we’re on the same path. This is ++ungood, people. What are we going to do about it?
The excerpt was no longer available at the Time Magazine site, but I did find it at Penguin Random House, so I updated the link.
A couple of quick pics from our traditional family Mothers’ Day outing: A trip to the Quilt Show (on the Saturday before) so mom can pick out gifts that we all know she’ll like. As an added bonus this year, Stacey came along to celebrate her birthday.
But here’s the good picture: Proof that Dennis will do whatever it takes for his mom (even if he doesn’t enjoy it).
