Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Twenty-five years ago today, Steve Jobs introduced the original Macintosh: “The computer for the rest of us.”

It’s funny to see just how much hasn’t changed in the past 25 years — especially Jobs’ consummate showmanship and flair — and how much has. That little machine that started it all is certainly a far cry from what’s being offered today, but it’s very easy to see how much today’s Mac still owes to the original, in everything from the interface to the advertising (I was really amused at how similar the two ads at the very end of the above clip are to many of today’s ads from Apple).

So happy birthday, Macintosh! And here’s to another 25 years to come!

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Twenty-five years ago today:

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Something that’s been fascinating me over the past few weeks during all the weather weirdness has been how incredibly valuable Twitter has been in keeping track of everything that’s happening. The #seatst (Seattle Twitter! Storm! Team!) and #pdxtst (Portland Twitter! Storm! Team!) tags were the single best sources for moment-by-moment information during the snowstorms, #waflood is still running strong for tracking flood info, and last night I was reading about an #earthquake in California just minutes after it happened. I’ve been enjoying Twitter for day-to-day trivialities and quick bursts of drivel that wouldn’t be worth making a full formal post for, but it’s Twitter’s growing usefulness as a crowdsourced quick-response news channel is mindblowing.

Of course, I’m far from the only person noticing this trend, and there’s a neat article at Publishing 2.0 (which I found via a #waflood tagged tweet from Evan Calkins this morning) looking into the creation, evolution, and use of the #waflood tag over the past few days.

The discussion about journalism’s future so often focuses on Big Changes — Kill the print edition! Flips for everyone! Reinvent business models NOW! — that it’s easy to forget how simple innovation can be.

Sometimes all you need is a few Tweets, a bunch of links, and some like-minded pioneers.

That’s how a quiet revolution began in Washington state Wednesday. Four journalists spontaneously launched one of the first experiments in collaborative (or networked) link journalism to cover a major local story.

But it gets better. Those four journalists weren’t in the same newsroom. In fact, they all work for different media companies. And here’s the best part: Some of them have never even met in person.

It’s a great look at how the collaboration allowed the journalists and their respective news organizations to stay on top of the stories, and put together stories and information pages that were far more comprehensive than if they’d each stuck to their own individual “old media style” resources.

The Washington link projects should serve as models for the entire news industry. They show that collaborative linking draws readers, is easy, and costs nothing more than time (and not even much of that).

Seth said the December snowstorm link roundup was on the homepage for three or four days — but it was the site’s most-trafficked story for the entire month.

[…]

This is the power of collaborative news networks. By forming a network, newsrooms can discover not just a greater volume of news, but a greater volume of relevant, high-quality news than one person, one newsroom, or one wire service could alone.

Compare the Washington group’s great waflood link roundup to a Google News search for “Washington flood” — I know which one I’d rather have as a resource if I lived in that area.

Neat stuff. Even though I’m “just” a consumer, not a journalist in any sense, and not involved with or affiliated with any of these organizations, I’m fascinated by the effects of the evolving connections that technology is making possible between the media and the public, and within and among the various media organizations themselves.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Looks like I’ve got my answer: our Limited Basic service shouldn’t change. Here are the relevant tweets:

@djwudi Limited basic will be channels below 30 will not need a box. What channel number are you concerned about? #

@djwudi This isn’t happening immediately; it’s where we’re eventually moving. As you said, it’s seperate from the FCC broadcast transition. #

@ShaunaCausey @comcastcares You two are fast! I know we’ll miss 99 (CBUT), they were great during the Olympics, and we’ve kept watching. #

@ShaunaCausey @comcastcares My concern: there aren’t many channels above 29 on Limited Basic, but having them go poof isn’t “unaffected”. #

@djwudi Good point. you will still get CBUT. If you are a “limited” customer, you will not lose any channels. 75-99 WILL still be there. #

Sounds like a good end to this particular adventure to me!

Update: There have been some additions to the Seattle Times article that cover this same information. Here’s the relevant sections of their article:

Q: What about public access channels above 29? (NEW)

A: Comcast must still offer a handful of public access channels in analog format, per its franchise agreements. Tony Perez of Seattle’s cable office said that in Seattle, those channels include 75 (KCTS Plus) 76 (UW 2 TV); 77 (SCAN, the public access channel) and perhaps a few more.

Q: What about Canadian public television channel 99 (CBUT)? (NEW)

A: It will remain available to “limited basic” customers, spokesman Steve Kipp said in an email: “In addition to C-SPAN, C-SPAN2, the local broadcast channels and the local government and education channels, the Limited Basic lineup includes: Northwest Cable News, ION, Discovery Channel, KMYQ, KBCB, KHCV, QVC, HSN, KWDK, Hallmark Channel, KTBW, TVW, Univision, The Weather Channel and CBUT.”

Kipp said the limited basic channel numbers won’t change: “As for channel locations here, they will remain the same so the Limited Basic channels that are in the 75 to 99 range would remain the same.”

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Well, maybe this transition thing isn’t as cleared up as I thought.

An update to the earlier article about Comcast’s transition to (nearly) all-digital broadcasting went online, and it seems to be contradicting what I was told earlier. Here’s the relevant part of the new article (added emphasis is mine):

Comcast is switching channels higher than 29 to digital format and requiring all televisions to have some sort of cable box to receive those channels. For “expanded basic” customers who don’t have cable boxes, the company will provide a free box. It also will provide two free adapters that expanded and digital customers can use on additional TVs that don’t have a box. Limited basic customers — who only receive channels 2 to 29 — won’t be affected.

This seems to agree with my initial interpretation from the first article: that there will be no change in service for Limited Basic subscribers, and it’s only Expanded Basic customers that will be receiving cable boxes and/or DTAs. Looking again at the tweets I received yesterday from Shauna, I wonder about the wording of this one (again with added emphasis):

@djwudi Hi,Re:Comcast—You will not lose channels, you will actually get more. If you have basic cable, we’ll give you very small conver … #

The problem I’m seeing, and the potential breakdown in communication, is that “basic cable” could be interpreted two ways: Limited Basic (the package I have), and Expanded Basic (the package planned to get the new boxes).

Under Comcast’s current channel line up (which I can’t link to, given the joys of Comcast’s website), Limited Basic customers get channels 2-29 as stated in the article, but they also get 75-79, 99, a run of HD channels (which you would need a $6.50/mo HD box to receive: 104-107, 109-111 and 113), and four high-digit channels (115-117 and 119) that I’ve never seen, so I don’t know if they’re HD or if my TV just doesn’t pick them up. Based on the information provided so far, I can’t find a situation where Limited Basic subscribers “won’t be affected,” as stated in both articles from the Seattle Times. There appear to be two possible situations:

1. As implied in my conversations on Twitter, Limited Basic customers will receive DTA boxes that will allow them to receive the current channel lineup, or

2. After the transition, Limited Basic service will actually be reduced to only channels 2-29.

I’m going to continue poking at Comcast to see if I can get a solid answer to this, but at the moment it’s a little confusing.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

As long as I’m babbling about the boob tube and whining about cable pricing, I might as well toss out my pie-in-the-sky, never-going-to-happen concept for what I want as an option. I actually have two possible concepts, both of which seem like they’d be very doable in the present or soon-to-exist all-digital world.

1. A-la-carte: Get rid of these ridiculous “bundles” that give me seven channels that I’d pay attention to and sixty-three that I’d ignore. Show me your lineup and let me put my own bundle together. Give me what I want to watch (local channels, Discovery, History, Sci-Fi, etc.), and don’t force me to pay for crap that I’ll never pay attention to (the six thousand variations of QVC, foreign language channels, etc.). I don’t have any issues with paying for content that I’m interested in, but I do have issues with paying for content that I’m not interested in.

2. TV as a Utility: Open the pipe and give me access to everything, but track what I watch and bill me for what I watch. Watching a few shows here and there is a small bill, feeling lonely and desperate for company and leaving the TV on 24/7 is a larger bill. Bill me for what I actually consume, not what you hope I might try to consume in my most desperate, anti-social, couch-potato moments of depression.

I don’t expect that either of these options are likely to appear anytime soon, if ever, but they make a lot more sense to me than any of the current pay-TV models do.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

For Christmas this year, Prairie and I have decided to treat ourselves and upgrade our TV set from the one I bought when I moved to Seattle seven and a half years ago (!!!!!). It’s a nice enough TV (a Sony Wega 27”), but it’s huge, heavy, and while still in good shape, it’s old tech. The original plan was to wait until it died, but between Sony’s generally good longevity (my parents had a little Sony 13” TV that went for almost thirty years) and my geeky techno-lust, Prairie surprised me by suggesting that we go ahead and upgrade to the new hotness.

So, the hunt is in progress. At this point, I’m pretty much decided on a 32” Samsung, most likely either the LN32A550 or the LN32A650, depending on where prices land in the weeks between Black Friday and Christmas.

Of course, with the jump to an HDTV comes the jump to HD programming. Day-to-day entertainment will come courtesy of Comcast — we’re already getting our cable through them, so we’ll just upgrade that to the minimum possible digital/HD package. For movies, though, we’re doing a bit of back-and-forth (though, to be honest, Prairie’s on the “back” — that is, staying with what we have — while I’m on the “forth” side of the discussion).

My movie-loving, technology-geeking little heart tends to go all a-pitter-pat at upgrading to Blu-Ray. I jumped onto the DVD bandwagon as soon as it dropped into the realm of affordability, loved the jump in video and audio quality from my old VHS tapes, and have been looking forward to the next step forward.

Prairie, however, doesn’t really see what all the fuss is about, and her approach is one that I’m having an amusingly tough time arguing against: if we can see the show and enjoy the story, than what’s the big deal? She never saw a big difference between VHS and DVD, doesn’t really care about surround sound (a moot point at the moment, as living in an apartment building means that standard stereo at reasonable levels is far more realistic than full surround and gut-thumping subwoofers — something we really wish our neighbors would realize…), and just doesn’t see the point in adding another piece of electronics and another remote to the stack we have to keep track of already.

I’ve gotta admit, it’s hard to really say, “But…it’s better!” without realizing just how foolish that sounds.

Not that I don’t try. I’d have my geek card revoked if I didn’t at least try.

(And on a not-unrelated-at-all side note, I think it works wonderfully that our respective geek levels generally balance out into reasonable end results. I don’t know how couples made of dual übergeeks can manage!)

In any case, I think part of the conversation is simply the fact that we don’t really know how much of a change we’re going to see when we upgrade. Sure, I’ve looked at all the numbers and can see the mathmatical difference between SD 640x480 and FullHD 1920x1080, I’ve done simple little experiments looking at resolution increases, and I’ve been working with digital photography long enough that I can get a feel for the difference betweeen a .3 megapixel image and a 2 megapixel image (the approximate difference between SD and FullHD). But running numbers and reading webpages is no substitute for actually seeing what happens when we plug it all together.

So I tried a little experiment today, and tossed out two questions on Twitter…

You who’ve moved from “old school” TV to a new HDTV (pref. w/some form of HD feed): is it really that big of a difference? Turned up to 11?

Same question, part 2: Along the same lines, how about the DVD to Blu-Ray transition? Again, is it that much visibly better?

…and got the following responses:

• axsdeny: DVD to Blu-Ray: yes. If you have even a 720p TV you can tell the difference. It’s beautiful.
• lyracole: i don’t notice the difference between my standard and hd, but sir does. also, fuck blu-ray.
• stoppableforce: w/r/t the difference between SDTV and HDTV: YES. YES. DEAR GOD YES. The difference in clarity is A-FUCKIN’-MAZING.
• stoppableforce: w/r/t the DVD-to-Blu-Ray thing: Not so much. We’ve got both, Blu-Ray looks slightly better, not enough to make me buy a PS3 yet.
• mellzah: I hate to admit it, but blu-ray looks great. DVDs don’t look sharp on my TV— non-HD projection 50ish inch—but Blu-Ray movies do!
• skyler: Huge difference. I attribute most of it to HDMI, actually. Clearer interference free signal. Xbox 360 + 1080p is great w/DVDs.
• antifuse: short answer? Yes. Longer answer? Depends what you watch. Plain DVDs upscaled by Blu ray look fab, and many shows look great too.
• wnalyd: Finally answering your HDTV question: Heck yeah there’s a difference bwtn HD + SD. Turned up to 17. Wouldn’t go back.

So the final consensus (admittedly, since I used Twitter, drawing from a very weighted sample of at least somewhat geeky-type people), while not clear-cut across the board, seems to be that yes, there is a difference, ranging from “better” to “A-FUCKIN’-MAZING”. We’ll just have to wait and see where we fall along that spectrum with the equipment we have (we’ll have the HDTV and HD cable from Comcast for the pretty pretty pixels, and a non-upconverting DVD/VHS combo deck for movies), and maybe see if I can find anyone with a Blu-Ray player for us to borrow for a night to help us decide if we want to add that piece, too (of course, if the Blu-Ray players don’t drop into affordability, that’ll make the whole point moot as well).

Did I miss anything?

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Over the course of the week, Newsweek has published a fascinating seven-part series called Secrets of the 2008 Campaign, an “in-depth look behind the scenes of the campaign, consisting of exclusive behind-the-scenes reporting from the McCain and Obama camps assembled by a special team of reporters who were granted year-long access on the condition that none of their findings appear until after Election Day.”

Since I wanted to read the whole thing, but have also been experimenting with reading eBooks on my iPod Touch, I figured this was as good a time as any to play with seeing what it would take to create an eBook. As it turns out, it’s not terribly difficult at all, at least as far as the .epub format goes. After some time with this tutorial and a little bit of minor troubleshooting, I had it all set up.

If you have an eBook reader that supports .epub files and would like to take a peek, here it is. It’s been working fine for me in both the desktop and iPhone versions of Stanza, but I can’t at this point vouch for any other eBook reader.

Obviously, seeing as how the only thing keeping me from breaking copyright criminally (rather than simply flagrantly, which is were I stand now) is that I’m not charging for this, so should Newsweek decide to give me the smackdown, this will be disappearing faster than Sarah Palin leaving the stage after McCain’s concession speech.

Still, it was a fun exercise in figuring out eBooks.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

I need a comment aggregator.

Between the number of people I “know” (in the modern, electronic, netspace version of the word) who have accounts scattered among various online services and my ongoing attempt to own myself by claiming my name (either given or the online pseudonym of ‘djwudi’) across the ‘net, I’ve ended up with accounts on a multitude of websites. In order to try to ensure that all of those various people have a fair chance of keeping up with whatever trivialities burble to the surface of my brain and escape out into the electronic aether, I use services like ping.fm, WordPress plugins, and RSS aggregation options to mirror my output across all of those websites.

The upside to this is that whether I’m posting a short tweet, a link to something neat, or actually writing a post to my blog, the content automagically appears in one form or another across the sites I belong to.

The downside is that I only have so much time to actually check into all those various sites. My weblog, Flickr and Twitter accounts get frequent attention, Facebook gets semi-regular attention, Friendfeed gets slightly more than occasional attention, and the rest tend to fall between the cracks, often not getting checked in with unless some automated message tells me that someone’s trying to get my attention, add me as a ‘friend,’ or some other sort of administrative fiddlybit. Then, when I do log into one or another of these sites, I often find a number of responses and comments that have been sitting ignored (unintentionally) since their appearance.

What I need, then, is some form of comment aggregator service that would track when a particular post (of any form) is made, monitor its status on each of the various services, then either collect any comments at a central location or even simply alert me when a comment is made.

While I doubt such a service could be effectively constructed, due to the number of competing services that would have to integrate in some form, part of me wonders if this could be added as some form of extention to the Ping.fm service: since I assume that ping.fm has to get some form of ‘ok’ response when it sends my content out to that service, if that ‘ok’ response could include a reference to the item ID on the target site, perhaps ping.fm could store links to those URIs along with the original item in the ‘Recent Posts’ tab. Some form of notification would be even better, so you didn’t have to go check the ‘Recent Posts’ tab to keep track.

I’m sure there’s a number of reasons why this wouldn’t work, but you get the idea.

How do other people handle their distributed conversations? Is there a magic button (other than the “off” button) that I haven’t stumbled across yet?

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

While there’s been some grousing about the accuracy of iTunes 8’s new Genius feature, I’m getting a kick out of playing with it. Sure, it’s not always spot-on (though Apple says that will change over time as their database grows and the matching AI improves), but that lends a certain entertainment value to the playlists it generates. When it works, though, it’s slick.

Here’s a playlist my iPod just put together (pulling only from songs that happened to be loaded at the time), seeding off of Tony Bennett’s take on “Steppin’ Out With My Baby”:

1. Tony Bennett, “Steppin’ Out With My Baby”
2. Frank Sinatra, “Nice ‘n’ Easy”
3. Bobby Darin, “More”
4. Johnny Mathis, “Chances Are”
5. Dean Martin, “You Belong to Me”
6. Fred Astaire, “The Way You Look Tonight”
7. The Andrews Sisters, “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”
8. Marilyn Monroe, “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend”
9. Billie Holiday, “All of Me”
10. Perry Como, “Magic Moments”
11. Louis Armstrong, “West End Blues”
12. Louis Jordan, “Let the Good Times Roll”
13. Benny Goodman, “Swingtime in the Rockies”
14. Frank Sinatra, “Witchcraft”
15. The Glenn Miller Orchestra, “At Last”
16. Bobby Darin, “Hello, Dolly!”
17. Billie Holiday, “Spreadin’ Rhythm Around (Remix)”
18. Tony Bennett, “(I Left My Heart In) San Francisco”
19. Dean Martin, “That’s Amore”
20. Louis Armstrong, “Ain’t Misbehavin’”
21. Duke Ellington, “Take the A-Train”
22. Judy Garland, “The Man That Got Away”
23. The Andrews Sisters, “Rum and Coca-Cola”
24. Billie Holiday, “God Bless the Child”
25. Frank Sinatra, “You Make Me Feel So Young”

Not bad at all, I’d say.

(I also love that I just happened to have the songs on my iPod to build that kind of playlist. It’s semi-randomly loaded, so there’s often no real telling what might be on there at any given time. Hmmm…it may be about time to do another “here’s how I organize my music” post….)

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

After finding this post, and being prompted by this post, I decided to update my geek code. Decode the following gibberish here:

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GAT d-(--) s:-- a35 C++(+++) U*++++ P+ L- E---
W+++ N+++ o K w--- O- M+++ V PS++ PE Y+ PGP t+(+++)
5 X+ R- tv b+(+++) DI++ D+ G e+ h--- r++ y++**
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Recommendations based purely on my own personal needs, wants, and desires. These are the applications I’ve installed on my iPod Touch that have managed to stick around for more than a few days of experimenting…

Applications:

Utilities

• WeatherBug: More information than the standard Weather app. I’ve put this on the home screen and moved Weather to a later page.

• Wordpress: I’ve hardly used it, as I’m usually close enough to my main ‘puter to blog from here, but it could come in quite handy the next time I travel.

• Kiwi: A nice simple Wikipedia interface.

• Google Mobile App: A one-stop shop for Google’s major offerings. Mostly just a launcher into their iPhone-optimized websites, but handy for using only one spot on the iTouch screen.

• Google Earth: A little slow, but lots of fun to play with. Nice use of the accelerometer for moving your view around also. Plus, it’s free and makes a good “wow!” tech demo.

• Amazon Mobile: Because I really, really need a way to make spending more money even easier!

Media/Entertainment

• Remote: I’m not using it much right now, but it’s fun to play with. It does make it tempting to put an Airport Express in the living room to pipe iTunes into the stereo there, though….

• Rowmote: Slick little companion piece/replacement for Remote that acts as a remote control over WiFi for a whole host of applications on the Mac. I’ve been using this to control the QuickTime player while Prairie and I watch TV episodes we’ve downloaded from Bittorrent, and it works great. Very handy!

• Pocketpedia: “I wonder if there’s a way for me to easily catalog my DVD collection and sync it with my iPod?” I said one day. A few minutes later, I had Pocketpedia on my iPod and DVDpedia (which generates this list) and Bookpedia on my Mac. Perfect!

• Now Playing (formerly Box Office): Movie listings at local theaters, reviews, even trailers, all in one slick little app.

• Stanza: An e-book reader that ties directly into Feedbooks, allowing you to download tons of free texts. I read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine over the past week on lunch, Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and a number of others. There’s also a desktop client, but I don’t think I’ll use that nearly as often, this is more for easy entertainment when I’ve got a few minutes to kill.

• Kindle for iPhone: I wouldn’t spend the money for an actual Kindle, but I’ve ended up spending enough time using Stanza for eBooks that I figured I’d give this a try as well. All I’ve picked up so far is the Stephen King short story ‘Ur’, and I haven’t even read it yet, but a few minutes of poking around leads me to believe that Kindle isn’t bad either.

Photography

• Darkslide: A beautiful interface to Flickr from the creator of the iPhoto and Aperture FlickrExport plugins. Free with ads, also available in an ad-free premium version

Social Networking

• Tweetie: I tried a few, and this is by far the best Twitter app I’ve found. Multiple accounts, saved searches, trend watching, and ping.fm integration. This is my #1 most-used 3rd party app.

• Facebook: I don’t really use it that often, but often enough that it’s stuck around. I’ve been using Facebook more often recently, and along with that, the Facebook app. Pretty slick, actually.

• Myspace Mobile: I still hate Myspace, but I have to admit, if their actual website worked half as well as their iPhone app, I might not hate them quite as much. Not bug-free, but so much more bug-free and pleasant to look at than the actual website that this is my preferred method of checking in on those friends who I can’t talk out of the MySpace ghetto.

• LinkedIn: I don’t stop by here as much, but if I need to, I’ve got the app to do it.

News

• Mobile News: AP’s news browser. When I just want a quick browse of major news stories, this is the way to do it. I especially like the localization options.

Games

• Boom!: Minesweeper. ‘Nuff said.

• Enigmo: I’m not entirely sold on this one. Neat and all, but the screen’s so small on the iPod/iTouch that I lose track of what objects have been placed where. I think I’d like this as a desktop game rather than in its mobile version.

• Quordy: A great little word game. Prairie and I have both had a lot of fun with this one — since the default is to start a game by shaking the iPod as if you were shaking a Yahtzee dice cup, if we’ve got a few minutes to kill somewhere, Prairie will just say “Shake it! Shake it!” and (rather than breaking into a dance, which I’m sure would be amusing as well) out comes Quordy.

• Aurora Feint: While I’m not putting a ton of time into the RPG aspect of the game, the Tetris-like game itself is fun enough to keep me engrossed.

• Jirbo Break: I’ve always liked Breakout clones, and this one works fine for me. I’d made it through all the levels, but they just released an update giving it 99 total levels. Guess I better get back to work!

• Cube Runner: Marvelously simple, engrossing, and a great demonstration of the accelerometer. Still one of my favorite games.

iPhone/iTouch Optimized Sites:

• Ping.fm: The dashboard interface to the Ping.fm one-update-does-all website. Now that Tweetie ties into ping.fm directly, I’ve removed this.

• Twitter: Since I use Ping.fm to update, I’m fine with using the Twitter mobile client to check updates. I do at times wish I could easily check @ replies, but not often enough to install Twitteriffic (which has just never quite felt “right” for me, in either its desktop or mobile incarnations) or another dedicated client. Tweetie to the rescue again!

• NewsGator: Even though there’s a well-regarded NetNewsWire app for the iPhone/iTouch, I still just use the NewsGator mobile site. It’s faster and easier to use than NNW mobile, and while I keep poking at NNW mobile, it still hasn’t been able to win me over. I’ve actually been pulled away from the NewsGator family, and now use the Google Reader mobile interface.

• CNN Moble: Not actually iPhone/iTouch optimized, and not terribly pretty, but works if I just want a quick look at “what’s happening now”.

• Metafilter: Read-only as far as I can tell, but a slick way to browse MeFi.

• IMDB Mobile: Again, just a nice way to dig through the IMDB. A little slow sometimes is about my only complaint, but since it’s not actually affiliated with IMDB, I can’t complain too much.

• Google Reader: Though I’m a long time NetNewsWire (and therefore NewsGator) user, I’m experimenting with Google Reader. Their iPhone/iTouch interface is as slick as their web interface, and definitely gives the Newsgator juggernaut some strong competition. Now if I could only sync Google Reader to NetNewsWire….

• Tricorder: Pure Star Trek silliness. Could really use being recreated as a standalone app so that it doesn’t have the annoying advertising at the bottom. Perhaps using the accelerometer to affect the displays?

And that’s it for me. Any other recommendations from all of you?

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Finally — after far too much sturm und drang — we’re back up and running! Well, mostly. The most important parts, at least.

As of the last major update, I’d told Speakeasy to take a flying leap. After getting done with that, I called Qwest to see what they could do directly (our other option is Comcast, who I just can’t trust my ‘net service to). Qwest was quite helpful, and told me that they’d be able to have a DSL ‘net connection and DirecTV service installed and active on Wednesday the 30th, with VoIP phone service up and running a few days after that. That sounded reasonable to me (it was the same timeframe Speakeasy would have given me if I’d been willing to give them yet another chance), so I gave it a go.

On Monday, Prairie and I got to talked, and decided that it’d be a good thing to make sure the DirecTV install tech was going to bring a tripod mount for the satellite dish, as we’re not allowed to mount anything directly to the building. I called DirecTV, verified that a tripod would be in the truck, and then the service rep told me that if I wanted, I could upgrade one of the DirecTV receivers to a DVR version for free. Free is always a nice price, so I said sure, go ahead.

Wednesday was supposed to be the “go” day: DirecTV between 8am and noon, a Qwest tech on site to do the physical connection by 5pm, and the DSL modem hardware arriving sometime that day (it’s sent directly from Qwest, rather than having the tech bring it with him). Prairie went off to work, and I sat here at home and waited for the DirecTV tech.

And waited. And waited. And eventually, noon came and went, and there’d been no sign of the tech. I called DirecTV, and things immediately went all pear-shaped, as the first person I talked to told me that she could find no record of me in the system, and dumped me off on someone else who was in another department and was of even less help. I called back, got a different representative, and they were able to find me — only to tell me that, though I hadn’t been informed of this during the call, when I upgraded to the DVR receiver, the rep had had to cancel my original install and reschedule it for Sunday, Aug. 3rd. There’s nothing I can do about this, unfortunately — and I was quite vocal about this being a pretty sour first experience with DirecTV — so that will be happening Sunday morning. Still, the TV is the least important of the three pieces of the communication puzzle.

After venting to Prairie for a few minutes, I took a walk to calm down and check the mail to see if the box from Qwest with the DSL modem had arrived. It wasn’t in the mail, but when I got back to the apartment, there was a Qwest truck sitting in our parking spot. The tech had just finished up hooking up the DSL connection, and he said that we were live, all we needed was the DSL modem. Qwest ships those by UPS, so it should show up before 5pm. So far so good — I knew that at least part of the process had worked correctly — so he went on his way, and I waited for UPS.

And waited. And waited. At 5pm, I went down to check to see if UPS had given them a box for me without putting a note on my door. Nope, no go. Back home, and by 5:30, I was back on the line with Qwest to see what the story was with the hardware. The guy on the phone clicks around a bit, and then tells me that there’d been “a delay” with the package, but it was in UPS’s hands and should be arriving Thursday (the next day). Well, okay — not terribly thrilling, but at least it was on the way, and he was able to give me a tracking number so that I could check up on it if I could find a way to get to Qwest’s website.

This morning, I used the WiFi network at Prairie’s office to check the tracking number. It turns out that according to UPS, they picked the package up at 7:35pm in Denver, CO. This would have been just after I got off the phone with the representative who’d told me there’d been a “delay” — apparently, the “delay” was simply not sending the package out on time, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’d been reading the tracking number to me off the bill on the package before running it down to the mailroom!

On the bright side, though, they did ship the box next day air, so it arrived at the apartment complex while I was coming back from Prairie’s office. As an added bonus, the box had the VoIP modem as well as the DSL modem, so after a few minutes plugging in cables and fiddling with configuration details, I was finally back online, and able to place telephone calls without chewing through the minutes on my pre-paid cell phone. It took two weeks after physically moving into the building (and a month and a half after starting the original service transfer process with Speakeasy), multiple friendly and not-so-friendly calls to the various companies dealing with various screwups, bailing out of one company and getting set up on another, and burning through at least $50 worth of pre-paid cell phone minutes, but it’s done.

So. Two pieces down — internet and telephone — and one to go — DirecTV. We’ll see how that goes come Sunday.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

As of a couple hours ago, for the first time since I moved down here and got myself online, I’m no longer a Speakeasy customer. At this point, I can strongly recommend against using Speakeasy for personal broadband service. Perhaps they’re still doing well at the business level, but from a customer point of view, they’re really not worth it.

Here’s a quick rundown of the current situation:

Because Speakeasy works with two other vendors for their installations — Qwest and Covad — it takes a bit longer to get set up with service through them, generally on the order of about a month. In the past, the service that Speakeasy provided made the extra wait worth it. Not so much anymore.

One month before we moved to our new apartment, I called Speakeasy and set up a new install at the new address. This gave plenty of time for them to get everything taken care of by our move-in date of the 18th.

Around the 12th — while Prairie and I were still packing up in North Seattle — Qwest arrived and completed the loop (whatever that means). On the 17th, the Covad tech called me to let me know that he was in the apartment to do the final install, but that he wasn’t getting a signal. After a little digging, he found that Speakeasy had given Qwest the wrong address, and they’d installed their loop at apartment D100 instead of K100 (not the real apartment numbers). There was nothing he could do, so he sent off his report, and I called Speakeasy.

Speakeasy told me that they didn’t know how this had happened, the address was entered correctly in their system, but whoever had sent the order to Qwest had mistyped it. Unfortunately, this meant that they had to cancel the order and start the entire process again. I made it known that I was pretty upset about facing another month wait to get online because they screwed up, and they said they’d try to escalate the process. I asked about canceling my Speakeasy account, but because our last move was only ten months ago, I was still two months shy of the end of my 12-month contract, and would be hit with a $300 early disconnect charge if I walked away. Eventually, they told me that they’d have Qwest out to the new apartment on the 21st to put the loop in the right spot, and Covad would be able to make it out on the 23rd.

Over the weekend, Prairie and I move everything out of the North Seattle apartment. We left the ‘net and phone hookup intact as long as we could, but eventually disconnected them, figuring we’d have just a couple days of using our emergency-only, pre-paid buy-the-minute cell phones.

Yesterday (the 23rd), the Covad tech calls me to tell me he’s on his way, and he just wanted to double-check the address he was driving to: Apartment D100. Um…no, K100, I say. He said that he hoped Qwest got it right, as did I. A few minutes later, he shows up at my door, shrugs, and tells me that once again, the loop was installed by Qwest, on Speakeasy’s instructions, at the wrong apartment.

I get back on the phone with Speakeasy, even more upset. More excuses come over the line — everybody pointing fingers at everyone else, while I’m the one without internet or telephone service. By this point, I’ve been on the phone fighting with Speakeasy so much that I’ve burned completely through the hours of time I’d put on my prepaid cell phone, and had to refill in the middle of one round with Speakeasy after getting cut off when the phone went dead. Eventually, they tell me that they’ll escalate another level, push to get Qwest out to to their loop in the right building the next day (Thursday, the 24th), have Covad out to do the final install the evening of the 24th or possibly Friday the 25th, and that they’ll have an update by 5pm at the latest on the 24th.

Just before 5pm today, I call them, since they’d not called me at any point during the day. At this point, I’m told that we’re “set for the 28th (Monday).” I’m not thrilled, not sure if I can trust them, and very vocal about this. I was about resigned to give them one last chance — though after the second screwup, they had finally allowed that should I leave, they would be able to waive the $300 early disconnect fee — when I thought to verify that the 28th was the date for the final install. No, actually, that’s the date for Qwest to come back and make a third try at putting in the loop, Covad wouldn’t be able to make it out to do the final install until the 30th, Wednesday. By now, I’m rapidly losing the ability to deal coherently or politely with any of this. The guy I’m talking to can tell that I’m very upset, says that he’ll do everything he can to help, and tells me that while his shift is up at 5pm and he’s about to go home, he will be working remotely, so if I want to drop him an e-mail that evening….

“What?” I paused for a moment. “Was that some sort of sick joke? Did you hear what you just said to me? If I could drop you an e-mail, we wouldn’t be having this conversation!”

And with that, I’m done with Speakeasy. I’ve cancelled this continually botched installation, I’ve cancelled the ‘net and VOIP hookup at the old address (which needed to stay active until the new install was up to avoid the early disconnect fee), and they — finally — decided their company wouldn’t tumble into bankruptcy without my $300 and waived the fee.

Of course, the downside to this is that we’re still without telephone or internet at the new apartment, and because we’re starting the process from scratch, it’ll probably be a week to ten days or so (rough guestimate) before we’re back up. Also, once we are back up, the phone number will change, so those of you that have our home phone number will need the new one. Still, at this point, we’re willing to chalk those up to minor frustrations in the grand scheme of things. I can find open WiFi points here and there that will allow me to check in every few days, and we’re looking at going with Qwest for our new service (on the assumption that it was Speakeasy giving Qwest the wrong address), who should be able to give us a faster DSL ‘net connection (3 MB downstream), the same VOIP service, and DirecTV for the same amount of money I was paying Speakeasy for 1.5 MB DSL and VOIP.

So, as has been the case, updates here are going to be few and far between until all the pieces finally fall into place. Now, at least, you know why.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

I’ll freely admit that, while geeky, I’m not one who will stand in line for hours for an item I can get faster and easier if I wait a few days. I’m less concerned with “firsties” than with my own convenience.

That said — I love the fact that the customer in this video actually calls the reporter on his idiotic “reporting.” I wish more people would do this — perhaps we’d actually get a bit more news in the news, instead of mindless fluff.

Probably not. But perhaps.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Another addition to the list of reasons why I’m going to hell, or, things I really shouldn’t find funny, but do. It’s not the following story that’s funny — to the contrary, it’s rather horrendous — but NetNewsWire’s ‘show corrections’ feature inadvertently had me snickering as my brain ignored the strikeouts and mashed together bits of the two versions of the story summary.

The bit that really kept getting me was that the man “has been sentenced to two life terms in bed, dead from apparent gunshot wounds.”

There’s something seriously wrong with me.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

One of the projects I’d like to tackle over the summer is redesigning my weblog. I’ve been using this design for a couple years now, and I’ve been thinking that I’m about ready for a change to something a bit cleaner and sparse.

However, as the major project over the next few weeks here at home needs to be packing things up and preparing for a move, I’ve settled for doing a bit of minor tweaking here and there to streamline things where I can.

To that end, here’s a quick rundown of the changes I’ve implemented:

• Upgraded to the most current version of WordPress. Admittedly, a behind-the-scenes change that won’t really make a difference to visitors, but it was time.

• The About page has been cleaned up a bit, removing the incomplete bulleted list of other places on the ‘net to find me with a simple in-paragraph listing that’s far more complete. I belong to far too many different networking websites.

• Rather than listing my tweets in a sidebar box, Twitter Tools and AsideShop will now be displaying them inline with weblog posts using their own lightweight display style. In order to keep my RSS feeds from getting too cluttered up, Advanced Category Excluder prevents tweets from showing up in syndication feeds.

• iWPhone has been installed so that iPhone/iPod Touch users will automatically get an optimized, lightweight layout.

• LiveJournal Crossposter has been upgraded, which should (I hope) fix the odd problem I was having with crossposts not appearing in LJ Friends pages. It’s also configured not to crosspost tweets, as they’re already crossposted by Ping.fm.

• Postalicious will be automatically posting my del.icio.us bookmarks daily around midnight, as long as there are five or more unposted and ready to go, otherwise it will wait until the next day. This allowed me to drop the (huge) ‘eclinkticism’ box out of the sidebar.

• In another behind-the-scenes change, the WPhone Admin Plugin gives me an iPhone/iPod Touch optimized administration interface, in case I ever need to do any posting or tweaking while on the go.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

A few weeks ago, Prairie and I got our TV Converter Box Coupons from the government, so that we could happily continue to pump propaganda into our brains watch our favorite shows after the analog stations are turned off in February. I wandered down to the seventh circle of Hell Best Buy and picked up two of the converter boxes (the Insignia NS-DXA1). Rather than hooking both up right off the bat (tempting as that was, since I was a geek with new toys), I just hooked up the larger living room TV. This made sense, as it’s the one that has all the other fancy gadgets on it and requires me being home to successfully juggle five remotes — Prairie just sticks to the little one in our bedroom that only uses two remotes.

After a few weeks of using it…well, much as I like the idea of digital TV, the reality — at least as far as over-the-air broadcast goes — is definitely a bit of a mixed bag.

The box itself is fairly nice: simple to set up and use, with only a few minor caveats. For some reason, in addition to the blue ‘on’ light that’s quite standard for electronics, this also has a bright red ‘off’ light that looks oddly like there’s a Cylon staring at you when you’re not watching TV (incidentally, this is another reason we’ve not hooked one up in the bedroom yet). The on-screen guide doesn’t always seem to be accurate, though that may be the fault of the local broadcasters. Aside from that, I’m quite happy with it — the image quality is nice, and a noticeable step up from analog broadcasts, and the audio, while limited to standard 2-channel stereo (one of the requirements of the coupon-eligible boxes), seems good enough to my ears. The box also allows you to choose how it sends the video to your TV screen: letterboxed to preserve the widescreen aspect ratio; cropped to fill the square screen at the expense of information on the sides; or ‘squeezed’, where the widescreen image fills the square screen, making everyone look really really skinny. This is actually my preferred method when a show is broadcast widescreen, as my TV (a Sony Wega KV-27FS17) has an ‘anamorphic’ mode that ‘squishes’ the ‘squeezed’ signal into a 16:9 area, increasing the resolution and quality of the displayed image (geeky tech-speak for “it looks better this way”).

However, our one big issue is simply this: when analog TV signals dropped or had some form of interference, you got a little bit of snow or static, but you could still watch the show. When digital TV signals drop or hit interference…well, if you’re lucky, you’ll just get some ‘blocking’ in the image, like when a video DVD has a fingerprint. More often, though, the signal drops so far that first the audio, then the video cuts out entirely. This ends up being far more frustrating than the old analog issues, as it’s a total disruption of the signal. As interference seems to depend a lot on weather, Prairie and I have taken to watching TV on the little 13” TV in the bedroom that still gets analog signals on rainy nights rather than even trying to watch the big TV with the digital receiver. A crystal-clear signal is only good when you get that signal, after all!

I keep finding myself wishing they’d tweaked the digital transmission standard so that the video was the first thing to go with a bad signal, rather than the audio. If the video cut out but the audio was still going, you could still follow along pretty well while the video did its little dance of cubist surrealism, but when the audio craps out, it’s just frustrating (especially when watching, say, a show like Jeopardy).

I’ve heard that a good antenna could alleviate the problems, but when we’re living in a rental apartment, there’s not much we can do on that score. Good old-fashioned rabbit ears will have to do.

So, in the end, it’s a mixed bag. It’s great when it works, but when it doesn’t work, it’s a lot more frustrating than the “old-n-busted” system ever was.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Netscape Navigator, one of the first ‘popular’ web browsers, is dead.

Navigator will continue to function should you happen to have a recent copy stashed away. But American Online, which has been Netscape’s guardian during its long, downward slide in popularity, will no longer support the browser and will stop releasing updates. Support for all versions of the software will be off-loaded to the Netscape community forum. Netscape.com will continue to live on as a web portal.

A sad, if unsurprising and inevitable end. One of my earliest web pages bills itself right at the top as being ‘Netscape 2.0 enhanced.’ Times gone by….

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

…but a solid F for practicality and safety. At least where my commute is concerned.

According to Google Transit, the best way for me to get from my apartment to North Seattle Community College involves grabbing a bus from the closest bus stop to the transit center just south of the Northgate Mall. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, after that, I need to walk a block, scale a chain-link fence, climb a hill, play Frogger across three lanes of northbound traffic, one express lane, and three lanes of southbound traffic on I-5, go down a hill, scale another chain link fence, hike through some woods, and swim across the lake on the NSCC grounds. Oh, and according to their estimates, it should take me nine minutes to do all this.

I think that I’ll stick to the Seattle Metro Trip Planner for now.

(Yes, I’m sure Google does much better in many circumstances. This one just gave me a good laugh.)