tech ronin

I'm tokerud on FriendFeed.com

Friendfeed.com launched today. It's been in Beta for a while. Very cool at least on first blush. It aggregates a whole bunch of posts according to your settings. I set my Friendfeed to show del.icio.us, flickr, tech ronin and twitter posts for openers.

The people behind this are from but not currently of Google. This is moving towards what will be better when OpenID gains adoption. Check it out!

[Book] The Black Swan Enlightens

I'm loving The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb! Really well written non-fiction. Somehow Mr. Taleb has made a complex non-fiction book into a page turner. This is a masterful book about how surprises can change everthing and how we understand the workings of our daily lives and the world much less than we think we do.

This delusion of certainty and knowledge can cause us regularly to make bad decisions in our lives. The whole housing and credit crunch mess is a perfect example.

Taleb argues that in simpler times things were more predictable and linear but now we live in a world where winner takes all or close to it. This is a complex argument and I'm not doing it justice.

Blogging beyond the diary-level is akin to trying to write a best-seller. According to Taleb, gaining wide readership is an endeavor with long odds. (Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail loves this book, by the way.)

Besides being a blogger with ambition albeit not a lot of time to invest, I'm also a software developer another occupation where The Black Swan holds sway.

A few will strike it rich with a software hit and the rest will labor in obscurity with dissappointing results. You don’t know whether you will get lucky one day and reach a tipping point that sweeps you into the bigtime. And even if you do get a hit, will you be a one-hit wonder? it seems a little like playing the lottery at the moment.

Please take a look at this book in your local bookstore and see if you don’t get drawn in.

Taleb is a quant trader who got fascinated by the unexpected and then went into a field where uncertainty reigns supreme. Then he started writing books about it. The Black Swan is currently 34 on the New York Times Bestseller list.

I'm Using MegaPhone to edit iPod touch and iPhone Notes on my Mac

MegaPhone used to be iPhoneDrive. MegaPhone 1.5, from Ecamm Network, finally lets you edit notes. There is a large caveat which is that it seems to need to reboot your iPhone or touch every time you edit an individual note. That's pretty inconvenient should you need to edit lots of notes. Each time you edit a note, prepare to wait 30 seconds or so while your device reboots.

Editing notes and pasting content from your Mac does work and that's the main thing for now. One interesting little extra. As soon as you are done editing notes or adding them by dragging or by using the copy to iPod (or iPhone) command, you can eject your iPhone or touch and you've got your new and newly edited notes with you.

The content you paste in will retain its font, color and style information. This means you can see color and different fonts and such in your iPhone or iPod touch notes.

You can copy PDF, RTF, RTFD and Word documents in as individual notes. Graphics will not make it over, RTFD and PDFs convert to RTF minus any graphics. I'm good with that. Graphics would be nice but that's not essential.

Thanks Ecamm!

I Want to Annotate My Online Banking Transactions

I was just reading over my Wells Fargo checking account online. And for the second time today, I wanted to make a note on a transaction. I saw gibberish and googled to see how I had spent $112 at an unrecognizable vendor. Well, I found out right away from my Google search and wanted then to annotate so that later I would remember what the transaction is.

We've all gotten used to the ability to see (read only) our bank transactions at our banks' online sites. How about let me annotate your often gibberish entries in a memo field and ideally categorize according to my categories? Now you are helping me. Why not?

This idea wouldn't occur to me if (1) it wasn't useful and (2) other programs weren't moving in this direction. Online is moving there. Let's go!

AT&T's free wi-fi at Starbucks is a Game Changer

Wow, this is huge and especially benefits Apple with its lead in the wi-fi-based mobile space. Steve got AT&T to support free wi-fi. How great. AT&T DSL customers get unlimited free wi-fi at Starbucks.

If you have a Starbucks debit card, you get 2 free hours a day. No more having to pay $20 or more a month to get free wi-fi at Starbucks. Keep in mind that Starbucks is the king of coffee. If they give out free wi-fi, doesn't that mean that all the other coffee places will need to provide free wi-fi to compete? The answer is yes.

If everyone was paying Verizon for 3G access (which is slower than wi-fi by the way), no one would need free wi-fi unless they were carrying a laptop which most people don't do.

This totally supports the iPod touch and significantly increases the value of its free wi-fi access. Remember that Apple kept mentioning the iPod touch as a wi-fi mobile device at their quarterly finance conference. Now we know why.

I've been saying all along that we need more free wi-fi. This is the best news ever on that front. The enemy of wi-fi is the cellular carrier. To get the biggest US cell carrier to give away wi-fi is huge.

This move also really helps the current iPhone which has wi-fi but not 3G. I've always wondered why people were so much in a big hurry about 3G on the iPhone because (1) I thought AT&T would charge more than $20/month for a 3G data plan - try $30 or $40 and (2) there is a good chance Apple would drop wi-fi capability once the iPhone is 3G.

Wi-fi is the populous choice. It allows the technology makers like Apple, cell phone makers like Nokia and little-guy-makers to freely create what they want and helps their strength vis-a-vis the carrier. All mobile phone makers get leverage with the carrier to the extent they can use wi-fi in place of cellular.

All along the carriers have been restricting trade in a monopolistic fashion (2-year contracts for example) and have been suppressing the expression of the mobile phone makers. Here's Steve rescuing the industry again if they could only admit it. He deserves some kudos.

Among others, Matt Hamblen at Computerworld has the full story.

Sunset iPhone/iPod touch RPG rocks

Wow! Those of you who have been waiting for an RPG shooter rejoice. This is a free, fun little web-base demonstration that will tide me over for a bit. Navigate to the Sunset game with your iPhone or iPod touch to play it. Made by Donald Hays.

On level 2. Took me a couple minutes to figure game play. Go to the site and start. Remember to save.

Got an EyeTV Hybrid, yay!

I'm not a big TV watcher. I've never owned a TIVO, I get the barebones cable with a few HD channels for about $25/month.

But, I did get a Sony 42" XBR TV this year and wanted something to take advantage of it and my iMac's 24" screen.

I've got the EyeTV Hybrid plugged into my iMac and a cable outlet. Without a cable box, I pay nothing for that extra cable connection.

Last night I recorded Lost episodes that were running back to back while watching a DVD on the TV. Nice. Full quality for this 3 hour program was 16 gigs. Not a problem with my 500 gig drive.

The recording looked awesome on my iMac. When I get an AppleTV, I'll try watching there.

I exported the recording to iPhone format and will be trying it out on my iPod touch. That 3 hour file will take up a little over 1 gig there.

For $100, this EyeTV Hybrid totally rocks!