links for 2006-02-28
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Free tool that creates ISO files out of directories. Also includes a command line version of the utility.
February 28, 2006
February 27, 2006
links for 2006-02-27
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A site similar to TinyURL but that allows you to create human readable urls that have contextual meaning.
February 25, 2006
links for 2006-02-25
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How to make an ipod cover that looks like Domokun! Kawaii!
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A website that compiles links to free patterns and reviews of Japanese crafting books. Definitely a good resource for info discovery on Japanese crafts.
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Can’t paint the boring walls in your apartment? Defy your apartment manager’s self-expression squashing rules and dress them up with construction paper murals full of your personality. Link to tutorial at the bottom of the page.
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How to make that stuff on the commercials for about 95% less than it costs to buy it.
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A tutorial on how to make a laptop bag out of antistatic mats and neoprene. Interesting design, and doesn’t look TOO hard.
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Create wall art by putting the entire text of a book into shapes you design and printing it out. Cool idea.
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Cool site that has tutorial on using recyclable materials to make some new cool stuff. The soda bottle lamp looks awesome, and there are some cute projects with milk cartons (too bad I don’t drink milk!).
February 24, 2006
links for 2006-02-24
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Love this idea!! Now I have something to do with those old computer programming books that no one wants anymore (including the public library) that are sitting on my shelf… and be able to store my cds on my bookshelf! Very cool!
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3 extremely useful mods you can make to your moleskine (or any other non-spiral) notebook: a pen/pencil holder, postit tabs and pencil sharpener. Great ideas
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Cute idea… use a paperback book as an ipod case.
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Very cool idea… use the Make-a-Flake site to create customized flakes (like a person’s name) and then use the image it generates in Photoshop (or Illustrator) to create custom wrapping paper or other personalized crafts… neato.
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Build an interesting bookcase out of inexpensive materials quickly… Cool design… might be useful for some other projects on a smaller scale.
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A simple but different type of bookmark you can make. This site has a downloadble template to print out and cut them out, but the idea itself is the key. Use them to mark chapters in books for school or keep notes on them as you read…
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Tutorial on how to make an nteresting papercraft book that each page unfolds into a square. Not sure what to actually do with it once it’s made but it’s ripe with possibilities.
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Cool perspective art from Felice Varini. Rooms that are painted so that from a particular spot, things seem to “float” in the air.
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Chalk pavement art that, when viewed from the right perspective looks 3 dimensional. Awesome stuff…
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An online version of PowerPoint… one of the latest additions to the “Office Web 2.0″
February 22, 2006
links for 2006-02-22
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Podcasting/audio/video hosting service with reasonable pricing plans for people who want to distribute their audio/video files.
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A service that creates feeds for audio files that you can use to share with friends, family or the world. It doesn’t host your files but allows you to create channels for podcasts and such.
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Site with ratings of the stuff you see on TV. Just in case you’re really tempted to order…
February 21, 2006
links for 2006-02-21
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From TechCrunch: “a search engine for airline tickets that will change the way we all travel. Purchasing flights purely based on price has been around for a while, but the consumer has never had the power to quickly and at a glance evaluate the cheapest d
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Tutorial on how to make your own projection screen “tv” with a slide projector and cannabilized LCD screen.
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More truth in fiction. Ahh the life of a tech professional.
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A site about to be in beta which claims to help you organize and share your email, files, IM conversations, task lists, etc. Might be useful for the project I’m working on but doesn’t look like there’s a way to set up a database with custom data… still
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A couple of WordPress plugins to download and check out… one which I really need… an alternative way to include tags that are variations of the tags that you typically use as standards, specifically so that you can still hook into technorati without c
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Something to check out for MacroLinz… traffic sharing service.
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Parallel Path Electromagnetic Motors — A revolution in motion? - ( OSEN ) Open Source Energy NetworkUmmm… woah??? I’ve seen so many things like this come and go that it’s hard to believe one can be taken seriously, but one can always hope. If Boeing is interested, that’s a good sign.
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Design your own parts and have them built and mailed to you… interesting possibilities here. May have to try this out!!
February 18, 2006
links for 2006-02-18
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Free online Office-like tools: Excel, PowerPoint and Word clones as Java apps. Useful for doing stuff on the Mac or a Linux box. Also allows export to PDF.
February 17, 2006
Building a better link trap
I’m on an informatics kick lately. I’m working on a new PIM system that I’ll proably blog about soon but I’ve also been thinking about bookmarking. I am a compulsive bookmarker. I save almost everything. And most of the time I save it more than once depending on what it is because there’s not a single bookmark service that provides everything that I need. So I’m going to ask for one today!
If you’re a developer out there that wants an idea to work on to build the better bookmarking site, this post is for you!! If you’re a bookmarking service user like me, and you have suggestions for features that I didn’t ask for, please leave a comment! Hopefully someone will take a hint and build the ulitimate bookmark service and everyone will be so happy that all the world’s problems will be solved and we’ll live in peace forever after. Well, maybe not. But a better service would be nice.
The Basics
Listed to avoid forgetting the obvious, these are features/abilities that already exist in many if not all of the services out there right now.
- Save a URL with a title and description (duh!)
- Tags may be associated with the bookmark (hierarcy is dead!)
- A page listing all my bookmarks in archive
- Filter my own archive by my tags
- Search my bookmarks by description text and tags
- A page that ranks bookmarks by popularity
- A page that lists the latest public bookmarks
- Subscribe to my archive by RSS
The Not-So-Basics
These are abilities and features that are either not as common, or that I’ve seen in some services but not others. Here’s where some differentiation begins.
- Store private bookmarks
- Store a copy of the page privately so that if the site goes away you have a personal copy of the info
- Store parts of a page instead of or as a supplement to the whole page: to clip parts of a page
- When saving a bookmark, choose whether to store a copy, the clip, just the url or any combination of the three.
- Store optional keywords. These differ from tags in that they have words or phrases that are specific to that single bookmark to help you find it later. If you’re a tagger and you have hundreds of tags that you’ve only used 1 or 2 times, those are really keywords. Having keywords would help us unclutter our tag clouds. Tags are for generalization and classification, keywords are for uniqueness.
- The save post page should have an easy alternative to typing for me to be able to add tags to my post, a suggestion feature maybe, clickable tag list
- Search on text in your saved copies (full text search of the bookmarks, in other words)
- Limit the scope on your searches to entire user base, just personal, and search “within” a tag
- A public API to write programs to manipulate my archive
- Subscribe by RSS to any and all bookmark lists (mine, tag filter, searches, popular, latest, etc).
- A way to easily “copy” a bookmark on any page of the service site to my own archive
- A page with “suggested” bookmarks based on bookmarks that I already have that people who bookmark the same things as me have bookmarked that I haven’t
- A page with a list users who bookmark a lot of the same things that I do as a suggestion to subscribe to them because we have common interests
- Export my archive in an XML format that contains ALL the data that is in my archive
- Export my saved pages in a zipped format
- Sort my archive listing by Date or Title (alpha), or by the domain of the url.
- Create “groups” of users to share/suggest bookmarks with
- Subscribe to another user’s bookmarks
- Subscribe to tags
- View a bookmark’s history (other subscribers and their comments)
- Other users may comment on my bookmarks
- View all comments and descriptions for a bookmark/url (mine and other people’s) on one page
- Create topic lists/directories of bookmarks that others can add to and comment on. Different from groups of users…
- Rate my bookmarks
The Killer Features
Here’s where your new service will stand out from the pack (and it’s a large pack!)… These features are either rare or I have never seen anywhere. Offer these and you will have the edge on all the other services out there.
- Storing copies of the IMAGES from a bookmarked page! This is my number 1, absolute need to have requirement for a bookmarking service that I have only seen one place offer and it was a personal storage site, not a bookmarking service. Services that currently store copies of pages only store the HTML. I NEED THIS!! There’s no other way to preserve picture tutorials and inspirational website design type pages.
- When storing a bookmark to the first page in a series, a way to easily associate the rest of the pages in that series with the original bookmark (instead of necessarily creating a new bookmark for each page in the series). Saved copies should include the whole series, and the link should only show up once listed in my archive even though it points to multiple pages
- Enter markup into the description field: to be able to add links and lists in HTML format to the description
- Search by root url. If you want to see all the links you have for cnn.com, for example.
- A page for a bookmark to view my rating, the average rating of the same url for the people in my user groups, and the average rating of all ratings for the same url across the entire user base
- Create personal notes. This would just be a convenience, basically a bookmark post without a url, but something you can add a title and tags to.
- Create a native post automatically on my blog with the items that I have bookmarked that day
- Create a native post on my blog for every bookmark I save with a tag that I specify (allowing me to choose what items get posted to my blog instead of just the full day’s posting)
- Filter my bookmarks with tag queries (AND/OR/NOT/Like)
- Choose what delimiter I want to use when typing in tags: if I like space delimiters, or commas or semi colons, or whatever… or just have the UI be smart enough to parse them however I enter them as long as I am consistent with what I use
- Meta tag my tags. I want to be able to set up tags to be for source, object type, for, action, etc. Not sure how to do this easily, but it’s my wishlist so I can ask for it anyway
- Allow linking to files and resources other than web files, such as files on my computer, so that I can add descriptions and tags to these files and find them easily (these bookmarks would automatically be private since they’d only work if you were on that computer)
Anyone got any other great ideas? I’ll update this list as people suggest things that I like! And if someone out there decides to build this PLEASE, for goodness sake, let me be an alpha/beta tester!!
links for 2006-02-17
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Neato… fun idea! These things are so cheap now that there’s lots of cool possibilites…
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The next to last post on this page has the solution I’ve been looking for… forces you to the login page if you’re not already logged in, so you never see any page on the site unless you’re logged in. Yay!
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One more thing to prove the OS will soon be irrelavent.
Ma.gnolia and the hunt for a better bookmarking site
I have spent much time and looking for the perfect (at least for me) online bookmark archive and I still haven’t found it.
I received a beta invite to Ma.gnolia a few weeks ago and tried it out. My initial response was the same as Pete’s:
“So yes, it’s a good effort - but also a completely unimaginative one. ”
Ma.gnolia just doesn’t offer (at least yet) a lot to compel me to switch from the two main services that I already use the most (Del.icio.us and Furl).
But maybe there is some hope for Ma.gnolia.
Since I already know what I’m looking for in a bookmarking site, it didn’t take that long for me to check for some things and then send their tech support a pretty long email with questions and suggestions. A representative named Todd replied and his response was friendly. He seemd to genuinely appreciate the feedback and sounded like their team might actually take some of my recommendations into consideration. We’ll have to wait and see. I’m not ready to make the move yet until I see some innovation.
Ma.gnolia reminds me of Furl with tags instead of “topics” (folders). I give them major props for saving a private copy of the pages you bookmark, but that seems to be the main feature it offers that other services don’t (besides Furl and Clipmarks).
It’s not really designed for info-discovery, which is what Del.icio.us does a good job with. I think some of those info-discovery features are there, but they’re not promoted very well:
- The “latest” and “popular” lists of incoming links are in the sidebar on your main archive, under the space hogging “add a link” box (that should be less prominent because 99% of the time you’ll add links with the bookmarklet), and shown in small fonts, so I didn’t even see them until the second time I came to the site. There needs to be a separate space, a whole page with the ability to see older items as well, devoted to these things because they’re important… they’re not sidebar items.
- You can use a url to see a list of links under a tag and even a combination of tags like you can with del.icio.us (ex: http://ma.gnolia.com/tag/css+design) but nowhere on the site did I find information telling you that feature is available… I just tried it and it worked.
- They have a “group” feature that is relatively unique but no way to browse a list of all groups… you have to use the search and hope that you typed the right keyword.
- They have search, but no way to specify what kind of search… it searches everyone’s links… what if I am just searching in my own archive?
And my other beef (after asking in email) is that they aren’t planning on offering a browser toolbar like Furl (which is nice because it has a search bar right on it) or Clipmarks (which lets you choose parts of the page to save). The explanation was that toolbars aren’t available to everyone and they are often targets for hacks and exploits. While that may be true, they are also potentially incredibly useful depending on what you do with them and would be another thing to make Ma.gnolia’s service stand out from the pack. As for the bookmarklet that’s available to capture bookmarklets, there’s no innovation there either. You get can’t even really be put in a pop-up window like I prefer because the page isn’t laid out compactly so you have to scroll a lot to get to the entry fields and tags.
It’s unfortunate since I was really hoping there’d be more to set Ma.gnolia apart. Maybe now that they’re getting beta feedback their developers will try to add some more innovative features instead of just trying to depend on the fact that their site looks nice to entice people in. I’ll keep watching and hope it will continue to evolve.
February 16, 2006
links for 2006-02-16
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The first of 5 parts of an article on how Mr. Hesch used WordPress to set up his own PIM. I was thinking about doing this and found his article. Now I am for sure. This will solve a lot of problems, I think.
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A service that allows you to sign up for RSS feeds to be delivered by mail. Similar to R|Mail.
February 15, 2006
links for 2006-02-15
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Handy reference for writing batch files.
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There is much much much much truth in fiction.
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An ambigious beta site… Looks like a way to either discover experts or keep up with your contacts… We’ll have to wait and see.
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A photobook printing service with a software download that you use to compose your books. Looks similar to MyPublisher.com. Pricing for books is similar though it seems to have more “themes”, backgrounds and other “scrapbooking” type clipart you can use
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A Google Maps mashup that plots ATMs based on the ZipCode that you enter and can be filtered by Bank as well. Very nice! Why can’t we have this kind of thing for EVERYTHING??
February 14, 2006
links for 2006-02-14
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Cool service that lets you upload a series of pictures you’ve taken walking around something and turns it into a “3D” video of the object in rotation… neato.
February 13, 2006
links for 2006-02-13
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Tutorial on how to find and download recorded TV shows.
February 11, 2006
links for 2006-02-11
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A group-focused social networking site similar to LinkedIn but supposedly friendlier and more logically designed.
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A “search engine for developers” designed to search open source projects for code, samples, documentation on things you’re trying to figure out.
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A service that publishes books that you supply the content for… will even pull your blog into a book, as well as allow you to create photo books like iPhoto. Prices are reasonable, 1-40 pages = $29.99, 41-80 pages is just $32.99!
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A site similar in concept to Squidoo… want to see what will be different… currently in private beta.
February 10, 2006
links for 2006-02-10
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Software that is supposed to be able to reduce the filesize of your VM’s by up to 80%. Someone I work with says this works as do several people on the VMWare blog.
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Lakshmi’s blog
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A site that lets you create topic based lists of urls that can then be ranked within the list and the list itself can also be ranked to make the most relevant info float to the “top”.
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A forum thread on how to make a VM span multiple monitors like the “one desktop” option on Windows.
February 9, 2006
links for 2006-02-09
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An article on things to try when your harddrive dies and you don’t have backed up data. Also has a reference to the “freezer” method.
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An article on how to recover data if you’ve somehow screwed up your partitions on your harddrive and they appear to be “unformatted”.
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a free site recommended to me that “aggregates all your banks, credit cards, hotel points, airline points, car points, investments, bills, etc. into one view and it’s FREE. Other major companies use their technology. After setting up, you can easily see
February 8, 2006
links for 2006-02-08
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A tutorial on how to make the standard Shuttle mini-case look even more like a toaster
. Turning all surfaces into a highly polished mirror. Interesting in itself, but also a reference to keep for reviews of some good metal polishing tools/supplies. -
This is so freaking cool… a computer housed in a large whiskey bottle. Makes me want to figure out how to make computers out of other interesting containers…
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An interesting, if long winded, article on how we’re brought up to not believe we can or should enjoy our work and some general advice on how to change that mindset.
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A short video with clips of O-Sensei doing Aikido as well as a brief radio interview.
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Tutorial on how to reduce the size of a WinXP installed VM by up to 80%. Involves removing/disabling everything that’s “unnecessary” in Windows as in image files and temp installation files as well as using some freeware products to help optimize things.
February 7, 2006
Better Living Through Virtual Machines
When I got my new laptop a couple of months ago I decided that I would do things right this time. As a developer I have special needs out of my work computer. It has to be able to to support development on several different projects at a time, some of which have conflicting prerequisites as far as the environment is concerned. So I have begun using virtualization with VMWare as a way to make life easier.
This is very much still an experiment for me and I’m learning what works best as I go along. Creating a VM for each of my current projects was a no-brainer. I love working in the VMs for development for several reasons:
- Now it doesn’t take me 2 or 3 hours to reconfigure my laptop to switch tasks and work on that web project that has some 3rd party tools that conflict with that winform project that uses different versions of the framework they both share and the source control providers that they don’t. It’s just a two-minute procedure of suspending one machine and opening up up the other. Presto chango!
- It’s so nice at the end of the day to not have to shut down all my development tools (Visual Studio, Query Analyzer, Enterprise Explorer, etc…) and turn off the computer. I just suspend and close VMWare and shut down the host (which goes considerably faster since I don’t have 200 services running in the background like I do in a development environment). And when I come back the next day I start up literally exactly where I left off.
- Creating a new development environment takes so little time. I already have several “base” VMs with varying configurations that I can just clone and customize. And I don’t have to worry about any conflicts with what I already have installed.
- If I have to turn over development to someone else on my team, all I need to do is put the VM (or a copy of it) out on a directory where they can grab it and get started. No configuration issues of setting them up on their machine! (Note, this would probably end up being a temporary situation, such as when I’d go on vacation, since the OS is licensed to me, though it might not be an issue since everyone on my team has an MSDN subscription through our company…)
- Telecommuting without VPN access, (heck, without even lugging my laptop home) is easy now! I have all my VMs and shared data on an external portable 100GB harddrive. I just unplug that sucker and take it home. It’s light and almost small enough to fit in my purse. Then I just plug it in on my home computer and run the VMs from home! Fortunately I am not travelling out of town on this assignment but if I am later, this will definitely be nice for getting through airports. No laptop to be hassled with in the security checkpoints. Admittedly I have to make sure I have local copies of the databases that I need to develop against, but that hasn’t been an obstacle yet.
Figuring out what to do with my “office productivity” software and personally licensed software is another story. Contrary to Jeff Atwood’s interesting proposal that all software will eventually be packaged and run through VM’s I haven’t figured out how it will work for particular varieties of applications. (more…)
links for 2006-02-07
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A tutorial with code snippets on how to make a row uneditable on a WinForms Datagrid.
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How to get the currently selected row of data in a sorted Winforms DataGrid:
BindingManagerBase bm =
(BindingManagerBase)grid.BindingContext[grid.DataSource, grid.DataMember];
DataRowView view = (DataRowView)bm.Current;
DataRow row = view.Row; -
Tutorial on how to change the formatting at loadtime on any cell in a WinForms Datagrid. Requires creation of some subclasses on the EventArgs and datagrid text column. Downloadable sample project.
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KAWAII DESU NE!!!!
“At Cute Overload®, we scour the Web for only the finest in Cute Imagery™. Imagery that is Worth Your Internet Browsing Time. We offer an overwhelming amount of cuteness to fill your daily visual allowance. Drink it in!” -
A site with downloadable tiling patterns as bitmaps. Some really interesting and intricate stuff here.
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A site with reviews of 37 color tools
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Tutorial with pictures on how to make an illuminated mousepad out of plexiglass and some LEDs. Finally something to use that dremel tool on.
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A nice walkthrough on how to create pixel art, or “sprites”, including information on basic construction, coloring, shading and cleaning up.
February 6, 2006
20 Web-based Color Tools
Feeling grey today? Need a little color inspiration for that new web design? Here’s a list of 20 color palette tools and generators that will help you color your world (or at least your web pages) a little brighter.
- Well Styled - Color Generator 2
- This is one of my favorites to play with. I really like the way it is laid out and organized. Click on a color on the color wheel to have it generate a palette for you. There are controls for four different color relationships to experiment with as well as several different saturations, and even a checkbox to only show “web safe” colors and display the colors as viewed by people with different types of color vision disorders. There’s no way to export the palette but you can grab a permalink to it.
- Colr.org
- This one wins the award for tool you can lose the most time playing with. Its kind of like a socialware site for colors. A picture is displayed at the top of the page that you can change if you desire. You can grab a random color or a random palette from the image and then tag the color or palette. There’s also a running list of recently added/tagged palettes that you can select and add more tags to. And, of course, you can look up palettes by tags as well. Its total fun for the folksonomy addict.
- NetCocktail
- More of a place for inspiration than generation… This site looks at popular and “well designed” sites and creates a profile of their color palettes. Some interesting browsing and tangents to follow.
- Return of Design - Web Color Schemes
- Not as flashy as NetCocktail but also a repository of web schemes from popular and well designed websites. You can click on the palette in the list to get more detail and scheme variations. This page is part of a blog that has some other good design and color information.
- Color Blender
- This is another one of my favorites that I use a good bit. You enter two hex values and choose a number of stops and it will generate a list of that many the colors in between the original values. This is really invaluable when you have a color you need to make a little lighter or darker, just choose black or white as the second color.
- Style Phreak - Color Match Redux
- Simple, but handy, 9 color palette generator from either an RGB Slider or by entering a hex value. Palettes are exportable to Photoshop, Illustrator or plain text.
- ColorCombos.com
- This site has a “combo tester” where you can play with colors to come up with a pleasing palette, as well as a tool that will take a url and pull the predominant colors from it to construct a palette and also a library of all the palettes that have been generated or “lifted” on the site. You can also subscribe to the palettes as they are generated by RSS and search by tag.
- Spin the Color Wheel
- Gamble with your colors… Spin the wheel to select random colors which you can then “hold” or not and spin again. When you’ve found 3 you like, choose what they’d be used for on your web page and then see a preview of your new combination. Fun! Wish you could pick more than 3 though.
- Color Wheel
- Color Wheel generates sets of colors to use in a color scheme using a number of standard methods: Red/Green/Blue, Angle, and Tint/Shade.
- Color Whore
- Self proclaimed “Directory of nice colors”. You can browse colors that people have added and classified by main color family and saturation.
- Color Blender
- Create “blends” with a set of sliders and export them to Photoshop, Illustrator or email it to yourself. There are also tools to do Pantone matches.
- Red Alt: I Like Your Colors
- Enter a URL and it extracts the colors and their hex codes from the CSS stylesheet that was referenced as well as including a link to the file that it pulled the colors from.
- Steel Dolphin Color Scheme Tool
- Flash tool that generates a 5-color palette from the “seed” hex code you provide or by adjusting several different sliders.
- Color Palette Generator
- This tool lets you upload an image and generates a palette for you based on the colors that are predominant in the image. You can’t upload anything larger than 15K. You can also choose from other images/palettes that have already been uploaded. Nice tool.
- Color Schemer Online v2
- A 16-color palette explorer that I haven’t quite figured out yet. It’s not very clear how the colors relate to each other and 16 of them at about the same intensity is a little too much for a viable scheme, but here it is never-the-less.
- Color Schemer Gallery
- This site is related to the tool above. It is a gallery of schemes that have been created and uploaded by users of the Color Schemer software. Some nice schemes to browse through here, organized by tags. If you have the software you can download the schemes to use in your projects.
- 4096 Color Wheel
- This site allow you to hover over a color wheel and displays the web-safe, “web-smart” and unsafe hex versions of the color. Clicking on the wheel records the color to the palette on the left which can be saved as an image as export.
- Color Selector
- This page is a bit confusing but useful once you get the hang of it. Mousing over the numbers on the left side controls the background color. The right side controls the font color. The hex character positions are represented vertically on the page. The page referenced shows web-safe 216 colors, but there is also a page to play with 16 million colors.
- VisiBone Webmaster’s Color Lab
- Simple tool that lets you click on colors in the wheel to the top left and displays them to the right with all their information such as hex and RGB values. You can keep clicking on items until you’ve got a suitable scheme.
- CSS Color Chart
- Not so much a tool as a very handy reference. Lists the name, hex value and displays the color for all the “predefined” colors you can use with CSS. Definitely useful.
And as a bonus, here’s a few color web toys that I like to play with. They’re not really useful tools but good inspiration or just fun!
- Etsy’s #Goods
- A flash site that pulls up pictures of Etsy’s merchandise by color.
- Color Quiz
- This is a personality quiz where you pick the colors you’re most attracted to. I have taken it at several different points in my life and been amazed at how accurately it assessed my situation and mood. Definitely worth checking out.
- Colorstrology
- Similar to Astrology (and probably with as much credibility), this site analyzes your personality by your birthdate and the color supposedly associated with it. Maybe silly, but still interesting.
- Squared Circle Colr Pickr
- A nice Flicker based Flash app that pulls up pictures from the “Squared Circle” group that match the color you pick on the color wheel. A good way to kill some time browsing.
Enjoy!
Today at lunch I recieved this message from my fortune cookie: “Your existence contributes positively to mankind”. Hmmm…. well, I’m certainly glad that I’m not a detriment!!
Lindsay @ 1:03 pm | Comments (1)
links for 2006-02-06
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A flickr toy that lets you type in a tag or series of tags and brings back images (one at a time) that match your search.
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A blog about Ruby development and tools.
February 5, 2006
links for 2006-02-05
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A site that’s not public beta yet which allows you to directly bookmark video you find online… like a del.icio.us for video.
February 3, 2006
links for 2006-02-03
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I want one of these! Too bad they’re not available yet… looks like a lot of fun.
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Kawaii USB toys. Expensive but cute… and a source of inspiration for my own creations maybe…
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Hiding data files in images that can then be uploaded and stored on flickr… At first this sounds like a totally cool idea but it might violate the flickr ToS and it may also be nixed if people start “abusing” it… you might lose your data, account or b
February 2, 2006
links for 2006-02-02
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Donationware that allows you to save streaming Microsoft Multi-Media (MMS) protocol files that normally you can only view with Windows Media Player.
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Tutorial on how to connect to your home computer securely from work.
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Extremely useful tool for looking up the product keys for all the software installed on your Windows machine… Now you don’t have to be so afraid of losing that stupid cd case with the sticker on it!
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A tool that keeps a record of any urls you copy to your clipboard so that you can review them later. This will be useful for stripping urls out of emails.
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Article comparing the most popular bittorent clients.
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Handy tool for developing with the Flickr API. Allows you to test out parameters on a web form.
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A flickr app that displays the current time using images of numbers found on flickr.
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“randomly retrieves images from Flickr.com and creates an infinite film with a style that can vary between stream-of-consciousness, documentary or video clip.”
Resource intensive but definitely cool to watch. -
List of flickr apps, plugins and mashups
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Generate a color palette from the most prominent colors in an uploaded image. Cool tool.
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A way to browse flickr’s tagspace. Enter a tag and related tags are shown that you can click on to “open”. Similar to Tagnautica.
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This is a service that you can use to send SMS messages to any mobile phone without having to know the carrier or any of that info. Sends from an email client (computer to phone or phone to phone). Shouldn’t charge you to send from computer to phone, bu
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PDFs of several different versions and types of rulers. Useful when you don’t have a ruler handy. Make sure to turn off scaling when you print!
February 1, 2006
Microsoft is a-Live again
I’m excited about Microsoft again!
I used to be a total Microsoft advocate. I used to have long debates with people (including my husband) about why Microsoft was not an evil company and why I’d rather be an Microsoft developer than the other choices available. Having worked almost exclusively with Microsoft technologies for 12 years now, I was always impressed with the way they’ve treated developers, and with the quality of tools they provided, with the response to feedback in development and with the technology innovations that seemed to come out at a pace that was invigorating.
But for a while now I have been disappointed with Microsoft (to the point of actually starting to learn things like Ruby on Rails). Vista is delayed and stripped of much of the stuff that was going to make it worth upgrading to in the first place and Live.com doesn’t seem to offer anything groundbreaking or disruptive.
Times have changed and I’ve felt like Microsoft is missing the boat with the internet, moving way too slowly and focusing on the wrong things. The emergence of the not-well defined “Web 2.0″ has ushered in a much faster pace for innovations. New, facinating and useful applications are springing up on the web within mere months of conception and many of them are challenges to Microsoft’s software and general relevance to our “digital lives”. And apparently I’m not the only one who’s feeling this way…
Basically, everyone, both people working at Microsoft and outsiders, agrees that MS gets outdone by three-person startups that can be more nimble, more reckless and more innovative.
Fortunately, it looks like Microsoft has now caught the clue. I first noticed on Dion Hinchcliffe’s blog:
Simply stated, Microsoft sees that software is increasingly moving to the Web, just as the Web becomes a completely immersive, two way experience for more and more people. With the Internet becoming a major force for the democratization of information, tools, and resources, it’s triggering a revolution in the way that we live our lives. This revolution is dramatically shaping how “we create, share, and refine anything that can be digitally encoded, be it news and information, artistic forms, scientific breakthroughs, personal communications, economic transactions, and, yes, even software,” according to the Live Labs manifesto.
What is the “Live Labs manifesto“? It’s the vision and statement of purpose for Live Labs, Microsoft’s attempt to catch up with the web that’s leaving them behind. I didn’t pay much attention to Live Labs at first because I was underwhelmed with the Live.com offerings so far. But reading Dion’s article and the several others he has linked now has me interested.
Live Labs will be a start-up environment within Microsoft. Seeded with talent from Microsoft Research and MSN, they are also hiring new, fresh talent to bring in ideas from outside the box. Live Labs will intentionally not be using the established methodology and protocols for Microsoft’s internal product development and the focus will be on getting concepts fleshed out and presented for testing (beta releases) and refinement as soon as possible. There will also be some academic grants offered for developing search technologies (assumingly to compete with Google), but I think the “incubation” projects will be more successful.
One thing that I found very intriguing was this statement in the manifesto:
The long-term mission of Live Labs is far more ambitious, may take decades to realize, and necessitates that we extensively partner outside of Microsoft. We wish to generalize the virtuous cycle to the rest of society: empowering people to create in whatever domain they chose, facilitating the exchange of any digital artifact, and cultivating communities of all forms to the benefit of all.
What kind of partnerships outside are they referring to? Non-Microsoft platforms? Open Source projects or languages? W3Consortium or other standards bodies? I wish that there were more details.
Live Labs will be an interesting experiment and I hope that it will be successful. I’m just glad to have something to be excited about again!
links for 2006-02-01
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Quick and easy online form to test regular expressions.
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“Welcome to RegExLib.com, the Internet’s first Regular Expression Library. Currently we have indexed 1179 expressions from contributors around the world. We hope you’ll find this site useful and come back whenever you’re looking for an expression for a pa
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Article on how to build regular expressions and what the parts mean.
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“I have searched the web far and near for a good tutorial on PHP Regular Expressions and I have come up with a multitude of sites. However, I needed just a little bit of information from each of the sites and I ended up trying to move between 10 different
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Tutorial on using regular expressions mainly with examples in vb and javascript
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Cool generator that pulls back images from flickr of single letters to let you spell out words in pictures.
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“Three columns. One fixed-width sidebar for your navigation, another for, say, your Google Ads or your Flickr photos—and, as in a fancy truffle, a liquid center for the real substance. Its wide applicability in this golden age of blogging, along with it
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A Google map mashup of the locations of “Web 2.0 innovators” locations.
I want one of these new rubber bracelet USB devices. If only they came with at least 1GB of space instead of 256MB…
Lindsay @ 10:48 am | Comments (2)
