Microsoft WorldWide Telescope's Mac support

Microsoft Research's WWT has Mac support ...

WorldWide Telescope

For Mac:

Microsoft® XP SP2 (minimum), Windows® Vista® (recommended) with BootCamp...

Not.

Ah well, it's hard to complain too much. It is Microsoft Research after all.

I'll try out WWT on my XP box. If/when I get around to installing XP SP2 and VMWare Fusion I might try it on my MacBook too.

Project Eggplant - Google Sites example

Google has a few sample Google Sites projects online. I liked Project Eggplant best. Evidently there's a way to eliminate the "comments" footers from a Sites page. I hadn't figured out how to do that in my small Sites experiments, but now I see it can be done. I might have to RTFM.

Walkabout camera: DP-1, Richo GX or Canon G9?

Nice discussion of high end walkabout cameras ...

Out In The Streets - Inside Aperture

... I left out the Leica M8 as I think that for $5500 (for the body alone) the camera just isn’t there yet. The perfect camera for me is really a Leica M9, with a full frame BEAUTIFUL sensor, and all the ergonomics of its film predecessors. Until that model exists, I can’t see myself investing that much money in something substandard.

The G9 will have to do for now. Hopefully it will fill that void between the little camera in my iPhone that I ALWAYS have with me, and my DSLR, that I just don’t like to lug around with me anymore unless I have to. Either way, these three cameras really do point toward a new class of camera. A 'street-able,' compact camera, pocket sized, that shoots RAW, works with Aperture, has a wide and fast lens (fixed is fine with me) and can produce large prints that I can hang on the wall.

I'm surprised the G9 is considered pocket sized! I had a Canon G2 and liked it quite a bit, but Canon lost its way with the subsequent models in that series. Nice to know the G9 has a following.

Macintouch likes the Amazon Kindle

Macintouch has the best and most positive Amazon Kindle Review I've read.

I think Paul Krugman is also a fan.

Interesting comment -- the author felt the ideal audience is people who are running out of book shelf space, rather than people who read books then give them away. (We're more the latter.)

On the other hand the Kindle is Windows centric. The Audible support requires a Winbox.

I'm impressed. I was skeptical about the Kindle at launch time, but it does look like a real success. (You were right Andrew!).

I'll keep an eye out for Kindle 2.0 -- and for Apple's rumored challenger. There are still a ways to go before it passes the four tests.

CEIVA digital photo frames

I've not paid much attention to digital photo frames. The ones I've seen in stores looked pretty crummy.

Then I read in Macintouch that Ceiva has produced an iPhoto plug-in. That's a step above the pack.

It's about $180 for a 7" CEIVA.

There's no CEIVA on my acquisition list yet, but I'll keep one eye open. The CEIVA still has to pass the four tests of acquisition.

OmniFocus iPhone sync - on track?

I've been wondering if Apple was going to give iPhone developers the ability to sync through the dock connector.

I don't know the answer of course, but OmniFocus Sync development is apparently on track.

Yeah, the post doesn't mention the iPhone, but the "redacted" and "censored" and blurred iPhone-shaped icon aren't there to conceal plans to sync with Palm PDAs.

OmniFocus get a tepid Neuberg review, but I'll overlook some rough edges if they get iPhone sync working.

Google Alerts: tracking usenet topics w/ Bloglines email notifications

I've started using Google Alerts to track usenet (Google Groups) posts on topics of interests, and all posts that contain a unique string I attach to my usenet posts as a "tag" [1]. Alert search scope can be restricted to Groups, Blogs, Web, News and (shudder) Video.

Alerts appear in the form of emails however, and that's intensely annoying. I prefer to use email for communication, not as a general notification engine.

The cure is to provide Google Alerts a Bloglines' disposable feed reader integrated email address ...

Bloglines FAQ

...Bloglines free email accounts allow people to receive email newsletter subscriptions within their MyBloglines page. This helps to reduce traffic through your primary email inbox and helps to contain the spam menace. A Bloglines email account gives you a trump card when a newsletter breaks the rules of opt-in marketing. When you unsubscribe from a Bloglines email subscription, the email address disappears. You never have to worry about trying to find the unsubscribe instructions for an unwanted mailing list.

So the results of my alerts show up in my bloglines feed reader as event notifications, which is exactly what I want.

[1] I've done this since the launch of the original DejaNews in the 1990s. My usenet posts contain a unique string as a "tag" (keyword, meta term). I search on the string to find all related posts. The functional result is rather like a blog, but this method worked long before blogs existed.

Gordon's Tech: Monitoring Dyer with ChangeDetection.com vs. Page2RSS

Gwynne Dyer, an iconoclastic journalist and historian, notifies readers of new articles by updating his web page. He typically adds 4-5 articles every 3-7 weeks; the linked articles are the published as .txt files -- not HTML.

Yes, Firefox will render .txt files.

I've been tracking changes with ChangeDetection.com and receiving feed reader notifications through Bloglines email subscriptions. This has been working well, but now Phil Bradley tells us that Page2RSS will create a custom RSS feed for pages like this.

I'm running a side-by-side comparison, after a month or two I aim to return and update this post with my preference.

Update 5/16/08: Page2RSS is really neat ... so far!

Update 5/18/08: A comment on Gordon's Notes also suggests Feedity. Feedity also supports feed merges, Yahoo Pipes does this and more.

Update 6/3/08: On one page I was monitoring Feedity sent me a high volume of false notifications (false positives). On the same page Page2RSS sent me only one update, and that one was correct. So I'm favoring Page2RSS.

Gmail doesn't allow multiple people for one email address

You can't have two contact list entries with the same email address:

Error saving data: Contact already exists with the given email

I wanted to create entries for our baseball players, but the email is, of course, their parents.

Another annoying Gmail limitation. I would really prefer that Google fix their existing products rather than create new ones.

Gmail's Contact Import/Export - designed by Yahoo?

I challenge anyone to deny that Gmail's contact management UI is absolutely dreadful.

We ought to be able to post any one of several valid collections of names and email addresses into a text box and have Gmail chew them up and generate contacts.

Instead we have to craft a .CSV file to load contacts -- and there's NO process for uploading a group membership list.

The secret to the .CSV file, btw, is to fill out the fields on a Gmail contact, then add it to a new list, then export the list as CSV. That's now the template for your imports.

In my case I made a mistake on my first data load. I loaded all my list members -- but with NULL email addresses. The corrected upload was rejected because the names already existed.

Microsoft, lately, does much better web work than this. Heck, the original Gmail contact management/group management UI was far better than the current mess.

Only Yahoo! functions at this level.

Yahoo! must have build Gmail's contact and group management UI.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6: unacceptable

Bizarre, but true. Adobe's latest verison of Photoshop Elements still requires users to run as administrator.

macosxhints.com - Run Photoshop Elements 6 under a non-admin account:

... Version 6.0 of Adobe's Photoshop Elements still has problems when running under non-admin accounts. On my computer, none of the effects or layer styles would appear in the Effects palette. It appears that PSE6 needs to write to a file called MediaDatabase.db3 in order to load the effects...

There's allegedly a fairly simple workaround for this problem, but that only lowers my opinion of Adobe.

Running as an administrator is like having an alligator filled moat around your castle -- and then draining it and eating the alligators. Nobody should run as Admin in 2008.

Adobe is not your friend. Heck, Adobe is working for the bad guys. Adobe is your enemy.

Don't buy Adobe products.

Survey of Outlook/Google Calendar sync solutions

Calendar Swamp: Which Outlook/Google Calendar sync is best? is a good summary of the options. The poll shows that Google's solution is the #1 choice of the readers of this hard core calendaring blog.

The Google solution works pretty well for me, though it can sometimes mess up all day events. I've read that this is related to an ancient bug in the way Outlook handles all day events. I haven't read the details, but I'm guessing that there's an old design flaw in outlook, such that an 'all day event' is really a midnight-to-midnight event rather than a 'day event'. This means that a time zone or savings time glitch will cause some events to spill over into another day.

The shocking news about our new Digital-TV converter

I'm stunned.

It actually worked with our old rabbit ear antenna.

I was sure it wouldn't. I've been mentally composing and revising a blog post about political white lies and the analog to digital TV conversion. The dirty little secret, I was convinced, was that the subsidized Digital-TV converters would require a costly and fiddly outdoor antenna. That's what the directions for our $60 Digital Stream DTX9900 (RadioShack) said -- outdoor antenna.

So I plugged in my primeval $8.00 rabbit ears, expecting to get nothing at all. Instead I found we have two or three times the number of TV channels we used to have. (Ok, we'll never watch 90% of them -- but they exist. We just need a sports show for when my son earns TV time.)

Yes, I have to tweak the antenna for one or two of those channels, but I've needed considerably more gyrations to get a fuzzy analog signal. Our tiny little 12" TV now has a (relatively) stunning high quality image.

To add bemusement to astonishment, this is the first non-trivial device I've bought from Radio Shack that actually worked.

The rabbit ear has the flat connector prongs, so I have an RF plug adapter at the end of the rabbit ears. The RF adapter brings the digital antenna signal into the DTX9900, then a RCA component adapter carries the analog signal to our (half-broken) VHS/DVD player. From there another component connector goes to the TV.

The TV is set to get signal from video (it's just modern enough to have that option), the VHS/DVD deck gets its signal from 'L1' (the input from the DTX9900). So the tuner in the VHS deck is no longer in use, channel control is through the DTX9900 remote. The digital remote also provides some kind of program listing, the time of day, information on shows, and a volume control.

Note that you really don't want to lose or break the remote. Without the remote you can turn on the device and move up or down the channel list -- that's all.

Rare bird: a useful widget

I've not found widgets all that useful. For one thing, they're slow to open. I can get weather faster from a browser shortcut than from a widget.

Timers, though -- they make good widgets. This one is particularly good: Widget Watch: Minutes 2.0.1 - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Neuberg on OmniFocus

Matt Neuberg brings a career of writing and contemplating information management to a deeply thoughtful analysis of the OmniGroup's OmniFocus Getting Things Done application.

The OmiGroup is drinking heavily tonight.

It's not that Matt dislikes OmniFocus, it's rather that he exposed lots of significant design issues. His conclusion ...

... If OmniFocus were a public beta, I'd be unhesitating: "Go for it!" I'd cry ... But OmniFocus isn't a beta, and its price seems out of proportion to the state of its development.

Ouch! I've been hoping the OmniGroup would implement a great iPhone OmniFocus client with sync support (assuming Apple allows it) to desktop OmniFocus. Matt's review sets that hope back a bit.

The good news is that he had lots of serious suggestions. The next version of OmniFocus might be a great improvement.

(PS. Matt, before there was In Control there was GrandView - the preeminent app combining columns and outlines. I think in the early days of dBase Borland's Reflex had some similar tricks, but I don't see that mentioned in a delightfully old review -- those were the days.)