« July 2005 | Main | September 2005 »
August 29, 2005
UMD sales take off [via Ars Technica]
i agree with Elle in this story in Ars Technica about how UMD sales are surprising. i personally see the price tag at about $10 more for a UMD than a DVD and wonder why I would buy one...yet i am intrigued. i want to watch movies on my PSP, and yes, i'm sure i can find any one of 10 software packages that will rip them to a memory stick - so why can't Sony make these things cheaper? at any rate, i didn't expect sales to take off like this but if you go to target these days, the selections of UMDs are starting to look pretty impressive. and when i was recently in Tokyo, you should see the music video releases that have come out on UMD.
netflix, will you please carry UMDs?
Posted by Steve at 10:06 PM | Comments (1742)
August 28, 2005
etymology lesson for the day: biscuits
biscuits comes from the latin - "bi" meaning two and "cuits" meaning cooked. so it roughly means "cooked twice".
most people don't put together the italian "biscotti" with "buscuits" - but of course the two words are pretty much cognates.
ever see how you cook biscotti? you cook them once in a loaf, cut them into slices, and cook them again. yep, you cook them twice.
Posted by Steve at 10:45 PM | Comments (4018)
August 26, 2005
a moment of silence for the Rio brand
a agree with Gizmodo. i feel a little sad about Rio music players going away, simply because my old Diamond Rio PMP 300 was my first, and i played the shit out of that thing, even with only 32 MB of RAM.
that said, i wouldn't buy one of these players today, as they just aren't up to snuff with what Apple and Samsung are offering. Hold the consolation gifts; I'll get over it.
Posted by Steve at 01:46 PM | Comments (0)
our own rick klau in information week on podcasting
more coverage on podcasting, this time in information week. it sure is the hot topic these days. it's funny - at foo camp, i heard so many comments about "why would anyone ever listen to a podcast? why would anyone do a podcast?"
i tried to explain - podcasters are totally different animals than bloggers. for one, they pick up the phone and call us when they can't figure things out. bloggers, never, ever, do that. second, they couldn't care less about "the blogosphere" and all that it entails. they just want to broadcast. third, yes, most of these people seem to have faces for radio :)
seriously, i'm one of those people who doesn't get why anyone would ever listen to one, but it's a real phenonomenon for sure. in many languages besides english too...
i can rationalize it. i don't listen to talk radio, and i don't listen to audio books. i also have terrible listening comprehension. i slept through most of my schooling. but i also realize for some other group of people, perhaps the majority, listening is how they learn and comprehend. i have to see something to comprehend it UNLESS it is music. go figure. a study for some academics to do somewhere.
Posted by Steve at 12:11 PM | Comments (0)
August 24, 2005
"we are the missing link" - FeedBurner on TV
our very own Matt Shobe was featured on the Chicago ABC news last night titled "The Power of Podcasting". i think they maybe spent 2 hours in the conference room shooting matt's 10 seconds but it's entertaining to watch. i'm sure all podcasters stand around a mic like they are shooting a guns 'n roses video while recording their shows. just like matt sits in the dark with that one incandescent light over his desk every day. wait a minute...
this is a transcript but there's a link to the video there
Posted by Steve at 09:20 PM | Comments (8)
August 22, 2005
filefeed by box.net
filefeed is a service by box.net that allows you to share files via RSS. you upload files, and it creates an RSS feed for all those subscribing.
it's probably comatible with our SmartCast service, but I haven't tried it.
Posted by Steve at 05:53 PM | Comments (1)
OS/2: dead, alive, or in jail?
answer: alive. but soon to be dead.
who knew? not i.
Posted by Steve at 04:22 PM | Comments (3)
how was foo camp, you ask?
since i have a lot of people asking me "how was foo camp?" i decided it would just be best to talk briefly about the experience here!
well...it was great - what a great change of pace. by choice, i mostly do "business" stuff these days, but this was a great chance to sit back and "geek out" for awhile.
things like ...
- sitting in on a very enlightening conversation about greasemonkey between aaron boodman(google) and mark pilgrim (dive into *, looking for opps).
- meeting and talking to the creators of some of the great scripting languages of our time larry wall (perl) and guido van rossum (python). i actually stepped on larry wall's foot which is how i got to talking with him.
- reminiscing over my days of quake addiction with squirrel eiserloh (counterstrike, currently working on quake 4) and don macaskill (smugmug.com) - where don told me about the night he intoduced thresh to john romero (thresh later won one of romero's ferraris from him) - and how "romero's [virtual] feet never touched the ground. thresh would bounce a rocket launcher to his feet, jump and spin, switching weapons in mid-air and gib him before he hit the ground." i was starting to see CTF levels in my head all over again.
- and many, many, more...
unfortunately, i wasn't able to stay the whole weekend, so i'm sure i missed out on more, but rael - thanks for the experience!
Posted by Steve at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)
August 21, 2005
Y! has 2006 World Cup Alerts already
It's pretty cool that Yahoo! already has an alerts system for World Cup 2006. You can sign up for them here.
I can tell you from my days at spyonit - the best alerts are the ones you setup and forget about, and then one day, you get totally surprised. We'll see how these act...
Posted by Steve at 10:12 PM | Comments (1)
my view of the new feedburner office
Posted by Steve at 09:08 PM | Comments (6)
August 19, 2005
search engines from the air
flying out to FOO camp... can YHOO and GOOG from the air in one shot. cool.
Posted by Steve at 10:28 AM | Comments (2)
search engines from the air
flying out to FOO camp... can YHOO and GOOG from the air in one shot. cool.Posted by Steve at 10:25 AM | Comments (1)
August 16, 2005
Samsung Series 60 phones
Akihabara news, ironically, in english and french - currently my favorite gadget site beating the pant off engadget and gizmodo - has a good link the the new Samsung Series 60 phones that will soon be released. i'm definitely interested in seeing these phones, as i do like series 60, but am tired of some of the nokia phone shenanigans.
in general i like what i've seen out of samsung lately. their mp3 players are pretty damn cool as well.
Posted by Steve at 08:21 AM | Comments (41)
August 15, 2005
Sun releases Java Wireless Toolkit 2.3 Beta
Sun has released a 2.3 Beta version of the Java Wireless Toolkit wih support for the Location API and Content Handler API.
The Content Handler API allows a MIDlet to register itself as the handler for a specific URI content-type. For instance, a MIDlet browser could launch when an html page is encountered, or a MIDlet music player could launch when a music file is encountered from the xHTML browser.
As of now, this privilege has been limited to those apps that were able to utilize native OS API calls, of which J2ME cannot.
Posted by Steve at 10:12 AM | Comments (14)
aol mobile launches
AOL launched AOL mobile this morning, which is a new storefront and portal for their mobile users.
AOL I think was the first portal to integrate their IM into SMS, which I used on the T-Mobile network for a really long time. Now of course, you can get a rich IM application, to do this and a lot more on all the major portals.
AOL is probably a couple of years behind yahoo! here, but they've done a good job of organizing their apps:
Mobile AIM
Mobile AOL Mail
Ringtones
Wallpapers
MapQuest Mobile
MapQuest Traffic
etc.
When you select your device (assuming your device is there) you get a cool "My Mobile Dashboard" which has a bunch of settings for whether or not to forward IMs to your mobile, as well as a catalog of apps to buy, of course.
Posted by Steve at 08:35 AM | Comments (204)
August 10, 2005
Ask Jeeves Sponsored Listings
The gay butler plans to launch it's own competitor to AdSense, Overture, and Microsoft "moonshot".
Coming next week.
If viewing this blog via the site, you've probably noticed I've started testing Y! ads. good stuff so far.
Posted by Steve at 09:06 AM | Comments (2040) | TrackBack
tommy lee - tommyland: the ride
with a yahoo! music unlimited subscription, why not? I probably would never ever buy this album, but it sure is worth the rental. Want to get inside the mind of a rockstar? Let's go for a ride in Tommyland.
Try Tired with the refrain "Well, Tommy got tired of Pamela/Ed got tired of Salma/Puffy got tired of J.Lo and Ben did too"
and the bridge
"Some day i will find the one /she'll be my best friend and make me cum/she'll love everything i love to do, and when i find her, i'll take two!" Corny for most, but this is Tommy Lee, and you don't doubt for a second that won't take two. Only in Tommyland.
This is one of those few rockstar solo records out there that seems to shine a little brighter, not unlike Dave Navarro's solo record (who btw, also plays on this album).
Seriously though, this is a pretty good recording all around, with more guest cameos than an episode of Fantasy Island.
Give it a listen.
Posted by Steve at 08:48 AM | Comments (820) | TrackBack
August 09, 2005
soft porn wallpapers, $12 per month
okay, maybe this did arrive as spam, and it caught my eye.
katazo offers some traffic stopping wallpapers, sent to your phone weekly. I wish i had the ballz to start a business like this. you think there isn't a huge market for this? you are nutz.
Posted by Steve at 08:50 PM | Comments (831) | TrackBack
August 08, 2005
the perfect y! music player, almost...
i purchased a cool new mp3 player today, the Samsung YP-F1, thinking it would be absolutely perfect to accompany my new attachment to yahoo! music unlimited. EXCEPT, it doesn't support playsforsure subscription mode! only download! bad Samsung!
any chance a firmware upgrade will solve this? if not, back to the store it goes...
Posted by Steve at 11:55 PM | Comments (3102) | TrackBack
MyWeb 2.0 Boost
another use for BuzzBoost - syndicate your Yahoo! MyWeb 2.0 feeds:
and if you'd like to subscribe to my bookmarks, they are here:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/YahooMyWeb20BetaSteveosPages
I'm not huge on bookmark splicing into my main feed. different strokes...
Posted by Steve at 10:51 PM | Comments (3642) | TrackBack
statcounter.com
I've been testing a number of different web statistics tools, and the current king of the mountain is statcounter.com. This is the first web stats product i've seen that presents a very clear interface, uses some AJAX, and comes from a SEO mentality, which I think is super important.
I was using nedstadt forever, but it seemed to be getting sluggish, and saw absolutley no innovation in the last two years, so I knew it was time to look elsewhere. The in-built typepad stats aren't that useful and I'm really looking for one place to track the stats for all my blogs.
I used MyBlogLog, which is getting some hype, for about 2 days, but tracking only outbound links I found pretty useless, so I got rid of it.
I like statcounter.com because after putting it on my blogs and waiting about an hour, I was able to get pretty much all the detail I was looking for about keywords, geography, number of hits, etc. And they say outbound links is coming soon for those who are wondering!
I also love the fact you can have multiple "projects" all in one place. This is something that was really lacking in netstadt. At any rate, this is the first stats product I've seen that I would consider upgrading to a "pro" level.
screenshots below (click to see larger view)
Posted by Steve at 08:36 PM | Comments (426) | TrackBack
yahoo! / nokia mobile search
Nokia and Yahoo have released a mobile search application for the Nokia 6630, 6680, and 6681. This is a native Symbian app that again shows how an application can provide an alternative experience to XHTML. The search experience is clearly faster than the mobile browser experience, but doesn't for example limit the results to XHTML compatible results as the Google application does.
Nevertheless, if given the choice, I will reach for this app every time over the browser!
text results for "dogs"
an image search result for "dogs"
Posted by Steve at 06:29 PM | Comments (269) | TrackBack
August 05, 2005
Vanity Boost
At spyonit.com (no longer around, but basically what yahoo!, msn, and googles alerts is today) our most popular alert was called the Vanity Spy. It basically looked for new Google results for your name, and alerted you via email, IM, or wireless when there were new results.
with that in mind, i thought it appro pro to create the "Vanity Boost" - a mix of old and new.
1. Create an rss search feed for yourself at Yahoo!, e.g.:
http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=steve+olechowski&ei=UTF-8
2. Go to FeedBurner, and burn that feed.
3. hit the "Publicize" link, and create a Buzz Boost.
4. Paste the JavaScript on your blog, it will look like this:
(NOTE: if viewing in a feed reader, you probably won't be able to see this since it is JavaScript - you gotta click through)
Posted by Steve at 10:04 PM | Comments (3376) | TrackBack
August 03, 2005
bob mould - body of song
let me just get this out of the way: body of song is in my opinion bob mould's best work in years. like his blog, it's clearly a personal album with his politics and id worn on his sleeve. but not so much that it gets in the way. bob is gay, i am not - yet i can still find his love songs applicable between a man and woman even if they were not written with that in mind.
the music itself definitely has traces of his electronica projects as well as a little sugar on top, but mostly his guitar work shines though. there's plenty of layers here and a bit too much vocoder for my tastes (think cher: "do you believe in love after love? (love) (love)" ) but if you used to be a fan of bob/sugar/husker du i can't recommend body of song more.
Posted by Steve at 03:47 PM | Comments (208) | TrackBack
cellphone signal repeaters
I think it's pretty cool that you can purchase cell phone repeaters for your home or office. This actually isn't a bad solution if you want to get rid of the landline but have crummy reception in your hacienda.
CellAntenna.com sells these things and I don't think the prices are that unreasonable.
these things are what they install at trade shows so you can get reception in the basement of the Sands hotel in Las Vegas, etc.
this is certainly a little bit gearhead but could be the answer to all your problems.
Posted by Steve at 02:20 PM | Comments (96) | TrackBack
August 01, 2005
firefly mobile
I walked into Target last week, walked into the PSP and iPod section, and was greeted by a nice friendly display from "Firefly Mobile." I guess they have been reported on before, but i missed it, so I was surprised to find an MVNO targeted at parents of small kids.
Firefly sells exactly one device, a simple phone with a small screen and only a few buttons: Mom, Dad, Emergency, and phone book in addition to call and hangup. The phone book apparently has to be programmed by parents.
The device itself is $99, and the service is pre-paid on what looks like the Cingular network (it's GSM 850/1900). The firefly marketing is equal opportunity English and Spanish from the get-go, which is interesting.
An interesting idea. I wonder what the age is in which a kid can carry one of these without getting made fun of? Maybe, a 6-10 year old can carry one of these?
Posted by Steve at 08:21 AM | Comments (3678) | TrackBack