tech ronin

P800/P900 keyboard at last!

This is exciting! After six months of searching far and wide and finding no keyboards available for my otherwise awesome P800, an interesting piece of keyboard software has just been released by Symbitz. Called SeeThru Keyboard, you can see through the on-screen keyboard to whatever is underneath. In this screenshot example, you can see what you are typing underneath your fingers as you type (it's a little small here, but the full-sized version is on the Symbitz site. It works for any application as far as I can tell.

If you are a P800- or P900-er who wants a keyboard for your hot phone, you might want to head on over to Handango to download the free 30-day trial now! Even though this is not a QWERTY keyboard, I like Symbitz's innovative concept and really hope it is a winner. I love it when a developer swings out and tries something new. The price is a reasonable $14.95.

Net and iTunes in bed

Whoa! It's getting late on my Saturday morning. OK. I admit that it's 12:44 pm and I'm still in bed. How cool is this? I'm listening to great tunes compliments of my iPod, my recently purchased great music from the iTunes store and a good $100 set of computer speakers and subwoofer. My iPod is the computer that drives the speakers. It's great.

I returned my second Airport Extreme g basestation this last week (about 3 weeks after purchase) to the new Apple store in the Corte Madera Village. I didn't have the receipt with me and it was after the two week grace period for returns, but they were great about it. I paid a 10% restocking fee and got a store credit. That credit is burning a hole in my pocket but I've so far resisted picking up the Tungsten T3 that I spotted when I was returning the basestation.

With my old Snow basestation in my office, I'm getting 4 out of 4 bars of connectivity in bed (MacStumbler lists my signal strength as 56)! It makes a huge difference. It's not a struggle to get a connection.

One more thing. I stumbled across Steve Job's announcement of iTunes for Windows. It's excellent. It lasts about an hour and 15 minutes, so be warned. I watched the whole thing. Besides a great mini-tutorial on v2 of the iTunes store and updates on the success of the iPod and the store, Steve used iChat to bring in Bono, Dr. Dre and Mick Jagger. After that Sarah McLachlan performed live on stage. A treat for a Mac fan for sure.

Even though I had heard that the Apple store now has 5000 audiobooks, I didn't think much of it. You could already download audiobooks from Audible.com, so what was the big deal. Well... it's a big deal. Having the one-click buy button available is super convenient. I bought 9 downloads - all from NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Interviews with Emmylou Harris, Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, Ridley Scott, Aimee Mann, Ellen Degeneres and Jodie Foster! Each program was a $2.95 download. Not cheap, but well worth it from my point of view.

OK. It's 1:19 pm now. The First Cut is the Deepest by Sheryl Crow is playing and it's time to get up and enjoy the rest of my Saturday. Life is good.

Wi-fi *and* Cell combined

We're getting there to that best-for-now world of having both wi-fi and cellular access. You get the faster speed of wi-fi when it's available and fill in the gaps with the slower but more pervasive coverage of cellular. This Sony-Ericsson GC79 GPRS/wi-fi PC card rocks!

It's announced now. Where it's available, I don't know. I would much rather have one of these in my Powerbook than a simple wi-fi card. But, as usual, cost is an issue. I'm paying T-Mobile $20 for unlimited data access with my cell phone now. Plus I'm paying $20/month for T-Mobile wi-fi access at Starbucks et al. Seems like I'm paying enough already to T-Mobile. T-Mobile should be nice this time - no extra charges please? Probably, wishful thinking...

Digital Visions

At one time - eons ago, the anthem was *I want my MTV*. Things have changed. As I've been saying lately, I'm tired of waiting for the digital future to arrive. I wouldn't be so tired if it weren't for the fact that all the signals are out there blinking and honking. We've got plenty of computer power. We got broadband. We're close to ubiquitous wi-fi. It's so do-able, you can taste it. Downloadable music is legit. We've got web services. We've got social software. Here's what some futurists are predicting:

In the future information society, customers will require tailored ubiquitous services, guaranteed qualities, low costs, and a timely reaction to their changing requirements. Keywords in this context are information highways and universal personal communications. These approaches address the issue of universal connectivity and global access to information, regardless of the user's current location, or technical and network capabilities. Thus the vision for the future information society is "information at any time, at any place, in any form, and according to personal preferences.

[via Dan Gillmor]

The futurists are on board. My guess is that without the dotcom bust, this vision could have been funded and realized by now. Instead, we've got all these lean and mean little innovative efforts sprinkled around and long-term projects slogging along towards their digital visions. We are in one of those periods of discontinuity where anyone could come forward with the breakthrough that will break this new world out of the starting gates.

Power to the People!

Weblogs vs. Websites

Weblogs as online journals, are already just fine. TypePad is easy enough and quite full-featured and Blogger is ultra easy if not so full-featured. If all you want to do is blog, you are set. But, I'm self-employed. I work for a living - for myself. I need to have a web presence that does what websites do and the weblog is just part of what I need to do.

Now that I've been blogging for several months and reading lots of weblogs, I'm beginning to take for granted that I can cite a particular *chunk of information* specifically rather than an entire web *page*. I have two websites: tokerud.com and studio-manager.com plus one active weblog - this one. When I want to cite something on my web pages, I can only easily point to the page, not the exact *spot* on the page where the information I'm talking about is located. That doesn't work for me - anymore.

I want my websites to be organized by chunks and pieces just like my weblog is. In fact, I want more than what my weblog does. Because, on my website, I put mini-articles and little chunks of information in all three columns - not just the center column. How do I reference those? I know there are such things as anchors, but I don't think they work well in multi-columnar situations.

I'm a database developer, so I'm especially interested in information design. I want all those *chunks* of information to be cataloged and stored somewhere for easy access. I don't want my web pages to be *dumb* sheets of text. They could just as well be made of paper for as smart as they are right now. OK, they do have links on them and that warrants some acknowledgement. But, now that I've been using a weblog where each post is stored in a database and has its own URL and can be categorized and archived and displayed on a calendar, I expect more.

Websites need to be more like weblogs, but, weblogs need to be more like websites too. Websites are good for static content such as author profiles, archives of all your articles or newsletters. Pages devoted to any particular topic where a journal-dated format isn't appropriate.

Typepad is working great for me, but I would like a way to add an extra page and have templates of several possible formats for those pages. The first format should be for single articles that have appeared elsewhere. I can work around the problem by *posting* the article in my blog and then it will in effect have its own page. Maybe I don't want to do that. Can I create the same effect without having to post it first? Where do I put my list of all the songs I've bought on iTunes or all my CDs in my entire collection? It's too long to fit on a TypeList. Then what?

I want to drive my websites with TypePad or Movable Type so I get all the content-management benefits I get from a weblog. But I don't want to lose any of the flexibility I have with a website. That's where I'm going. I'm looking for easy ways to do this. If I bang my head up against the wall long enough and pore over my many tech books and experiment and tinker, I'll figure it out. OR, maybe someone can point me towards some answers that must be somewhere either in someone's head or already written up and perhaps even published somewhere.

Big honking web-making software packages like DreamWeaver need to help you build blogs into your websites. Or someone could create a little blog-helper program that works with these code monsters (I was going to say dinosaurs - oops!). Or maybe this blend of weblog and websites is only available to the hacker and the professionals who will do anything if you pay them enough. I'm also hoping that TypePad will keep giving us more capability and that Movable Type Pro will come out one of these days (the press release dated in February said it would be out in the Summer) with features that help us get to the holy grail between weblogs and websites.

My News-Books-Music, My Way

We certainly are not *there* yet when it comes to providing people a way to get the information they want - easily. I just bought Amazon Hacks. But, truly, I don't want to hack this myself.

Please hackers, come forward with better products. News aggregators may be going in the right direction. With NetNewsWire (NNW) I can pick webpages with an RSS feed and see what articles they've posted lately. But that's not what I want.

I want much smarter and better automation and personalization options. For example, with NNW, I asked for the ability to select a category and then view just the feeds for that category. Was that too much to ask?

At Amazon, I like the fact that they suggest books for me based on what? I don't know. The Amazon Hacks book is supposed to tell me how to hack things so that perhaps a better job is done in suggesting books or other products. How about square one? Just let me mark the books that I already own. Don't offer me books I already bought at Amazon or somewhere else. Give me an *Already got it* button. My wish list isn't even smart enough to notice when I acquire wish list items. Maybe I'm missing something, please let me know if I am.

We have a wealth of books, ezines, blogs and online music and we have great fast computers and great software to work with. This idea of recommending things based on analyzing what other people buy and the similarities between books, music, product isn't new. It's been around for *several* years now.

Of course, I prefer to have my own piece of desktop software that will do my bidding - like NetNewsWire except MUCH more powerful. I don't want to be dependent on what Amazon gives me. And I can't sit around and program this myself. And I don't want to have to use 20 different pieces of software and 20 websites and search engines to get the information I need and want. Anybody out there listening?

Ubiquitous Wi-Fi, at last

OK, ubiquitous on a small scale - my house. I'm really loving wi-fi now that I can get a strong signal anywhere in the house. This is what I call *trouble-free* wi-fi.

Before my recent upgrades, I mostly got bad reception which meant having to move, hold my Titanium Powerbook at various angles or connect to an ethernet cable to get a good connection, unless I was sitting in the livingroom near the airport base station (my favorite place for surfing). No more!

I work at home, so I'm at home a lot to enjoy the luxury of ubiquitous wi-fi with fast DSL. Here's what I did:

1. I removed my airport card and slid in a $79 MacWireless 802.11g PC card. Configured the card fine with just my airport software. This card alone could possibly have given me ubiquity.


2. But, no, I bought an Airport Extreme base station for $249 with the antenna port in case I needed to boost the signal and tried to get it to bridge to my existing Snow base station that I moved upstairs to my bedroom. No luck. Even though two Apple store staff said it would work... I should have known, they weren't "geniuses" just floor personnel.


3. It was starting to get expensive, but I went back and bought another Airport Extreme without the antenna port ($199). The two extreme base stations mated immediately - no problem.


4. I put the old snow in my home office. I'm getting a stronger signal from the snow b than the extreme g's. In fact, I can surf nicely on my snow in the home office downstairs from my upstairs bedroom and don't need the extra extreme g. Might sell it if I get a chance, but am enjoying the abundance of wi-fi for the moment.

I'm a big advocate of community wi-fi because it could be so cheap and fast. Ever since I talked with a guy at MacWorld last year who told me he *lit up* his whole town in Southern Cal with a $3000 antenna on his roof, I've been fantasizing.

After about a month of less than ideal surfing pleasure from my Sony Ericsson P800 cell phone, I just decided to start carrying my Titanium Powerbook whereever I go. Even on my 1-2 mile walks (2-4 roundtrip), I now take my Powerbook so, if I get inspired, I'll have my whole computer's worth of information plus my writing and drawing tools with me. And if I go to a Starbucks, Borders or other hotspot, I have wireless broadband Net access. All it took was spending $75 on a good computer backpack, Jansport Optimizer, at REI.

Vicarious Writing - NaNoWriMo

Richard MacManus, author of one of my current favorite weblogs, Read/Write Web, has me hooked. He decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month and attempt to write his first novel in 30 days. To finish successfully, you *just* need to have written a 50,000+ word *novel* in the month of November. You win if you do that - quality aside. Here's an informative interview with Chris Baty, the guy behind NaNoWriMo.

Richard is targeting 2,000 words a day and has hit that the first 4 days of November. Today, he has posted the draft of his novel online. It's a gas following his heroic effort, checking his blog every day and, now, reading what he's writing as he goes along. I'm into chapter two and really enjoying it. If you haven't checked Richard's blog and you are the least bit of a closet novelist, check it out!

$13 Music Binge

Wow! I love these iTunes music binges. The latest impetus for a music spree was my discovery of the Celebrity Playlists. I've been looking for a way to find the best songs on albums - not just the huge hits that I'm tired of - and this is one of those ways. You have to check these celeb playlists out. Sometimes the artist reviews every song in their playlist. Sometimes the playlists are 49 songs long!

My purchases tonight are:
Heroin - Lou Reed
Blue Light - Mazzy Star
Fade to Grey - Visage
Do You Realize? - Flaming Lips
Los Angeles - X
Tempted - Squeeze
The Rain (supa Dupa Fly) - Missy Elliott
Crying (Live) - K.D. Lang
Killing Me Softly - The Fugees
Undone (The Sweater Song) - Weezer
Heaven Tonight - Cheap Trick
Are You Happy Now? - Michelle Branch
Insanity - Liz Phair

Considering that I'm sampling and may discover new favorite artists in the process, this is quite a deal for 13 bucks! So far I've bought a total of 38 songs in the Apple Music Store. I've been very good so far and only bought single cuts. That way I can have all sorts of fun and not go broke.

My plan is to reserve my album purchases for CDs because I think there's a slight quality advantage with them. But I'm not willing to buy albums where I'm only going to like a couple songs - anymore! I'll burn a couple CDs with these *new* tunes on them for my car and my home stereo to complement playback on my iPod and computers.