Category: Pursuits

  • Can overhyped Flock deliver?

    Once upon a time, oh say, 6 months ago, the hypemiesters descended on a new browser called Flock that wasn’t quite ready for primetime leading to the inevitable backlash. Flock, based on open-source Firefox code, was supposed to have nifty integration with blogs and photo sites and other such socially-oriented web 2.0 stuff but it…

  • Canon wisely chooses to back down megapixels

    The bane of my existence, or at least the part of my life devoted to being a gadget hound and early adopter, is feature creep — the annoying tendency of tech companies to pile on feature after feature with each new iteration of a product until the original usefulness is buried. This tendency explains why…

  • Hooking up with Spam Karma 2

    All of a sudden, the bad guys have discovered my blog, the spam bad guys that is. Everything had been hunky-dory with this blog’s administration since I switched over to WordPress just about two months ago now. I set WordPress to email me every time I received a comment so I could moderate posts. Posts…

  • iPhoto 6 speed-up is real

    So says web developer Garrett Murray on his blog. Like Garrett, I buy the iLife suite updates almost exclusively for iPhoto so this is happy news: “Application Loading (from launch until all thumbnails appear) iPhoto 5: 14.1 seconds iPhoto 6: 3.0 seconds Application Closing (from quit command until gone) iPhoto 5: 9.4 seconds iPhoto 6:…

  • Google Earth is on the Mac – Now update my block!

    Thanks to my old boss, John Battelle, I learned that Google has finally released a Mac version of its useful and nifty mapping program, Google Earth, that lets you zoom all around satellite photos of the world, measure distances and generally get to know any place like the birds do. Downloaded to my 17″ Powerbook…

  • What we have here is a failure of redundancy

    I think it was scheduled maintenance or announced-in-advance downtime (or maybe it was just deja vu when I saw it), but Bloglines was offline for a while over the New Year’s weekend. I might never have known as I wasn’t online much but Monday night I fired up my trusty new feed reader,Netnewswire, and got…

  • Shrook, shrook not quite Shrook

    Well, the Shrook feed reading experiment is over and the NetNewsWire experiment begins. Shrook is an offline reader that synchronizes with its own online web-based reader. Re-inventing the wheel (in this case, re-inventing Bloglines) is not a winning strategy. Ah, but NetNewsWire, another offline reader, actually synchronizes with Bloglines. It also uses my .Mac account…

  • Good bye iBlog, hello WordPress

    Well, after making some changes in hosting plans, domain name pointers etc etc, it’s time to abandon the easy but less functional blogging program iBlog and switch to full-featured heaven aka WordPress running a site hosted by Bluehost. Couldn’t find a way to easily import the old entries (another weakness of iBlog?) so I’m reloading…

  • Is Shrook the great, hoped-for answer to reading RSS feeds?

    (Updated 9/23) I’ve been pretty happy keeping up with Blog RSS feeds using the online Bloglines service. It works from within any browser, updates feeds pretty frequently, lets me publish my subscription list on the web and allows easy export of my list for backup or to pull into another reader. The interface is excellent,…

  • Working with the e815 and photos – oy vey

    (Updated 1/25/07 on MicroSD) After a couple of weeks with my Verizon/Motorola e815, I have a few quirks and quibbles to report. Getting photos off the phone has been a mildly trying exercise since Verizon crippled the Bluetooth profile that would allow one to effortlessly and wirelessly move snapshots into iPhoto. You can upload photos…