In an effort to reduce the size however, Canon has in some ways downgraded the Eluras. The S-Video ports available on last year's Eluras have been removed from this year's models. Also, the hot accessory shoes found on last year's Elura 65 and Elura 70 have been replaced by cold shoes on this year's models. In a ways, the alterations made to last year's Eluras are similar to those made on the ZR series this year. Canon has removed some features in the interest of making these new models not only more affordable but also slightly smaller.Losing the S-video is a big deal for someone who wants to do digital passthrough. Amazon is discounting the older models. Looks like a good time to buy an Elura 70!
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Canon Downgrades Elura Camcorder Line
Canon Updates Elura Camcorder Line - News, Guides and Tips - Consumer Camcorders - Camcorderinfo.com:
Home Hacking Projects for Geeks - maybe it'll help me monitor for furnance outages ...
Boing Boing: Home Hacking Projects for Geeks: "O'Reilly Media has just published Home Hacking Projects for Geeks, featuring 13 fun home automation projects for your house..."
Nvu - FrontPage for the Mac/Linux and even Windows
Nvu - The Complete Web Authoring System for Linux
This is an open source project that extends Mozilla Composer. It doesn't really match the capabilities of FP 98 -- it's very document centric, not site-centric. It's more like the FrontPage Editor portion of FP 98. Still, that's very valuable.
It apparently runs "OK" on the Mac but you need to use the Ctrl key, not the Cmd key. It needs some more Mac work, but it's not out of beta yet. I'll try it out ...
Update: This really isn't too bad. It has some obvious bugs, but overall it works. It's not super-snappy, but I didn't run into much typelag in some quick testing. It looks like Mozilla and, yes, it's no FrontPage 98 (really the high point of FrontPage's life, later versions were inferior). The site management feature expects a real web site -- you need ftp access. There's no WebDav support. (whatever happened to WebDav, and, more importantly, why? Did WebDav die because of IP issues?)
I'll give this one some more use. I do need a viable replacement for FrontPage, though that will take a long time. (Document-centric low end web management and authoring is what's technically known as a Faughnan-market. That is, a market made up of John Faughnan and similar individuals. At last count there were five of us worldwide.)
This is an open source project that extends Mozilla Composer. It doesn't really match the capabilities of FP 98 -- it's very document centric, not site-centric. It's more like the FrontPage Editor portion of FP 98. Still, that's very valuable.
It apparently runs "OK" on the Mac but you need to use the Ctrl key, not the Cmd key. It needs some more Mac work, but it's not out of beta yet. I'll try it out ...
Update: This really isn't too bad. It has some obvious bugs, but overall it works. It's not super-snappy, but I didn't run into much typelag in some quick testing. It looks like Mozilla and, yes, it's no FrontPage 98 (really the high point of FrontPage's life, later versions were inferior). The site management feature expects a real web site -- you need ftp access. There's no WebDav support. (whatever happened to WebDav, and, more importantly, why? Did WebDav die because of IP issues?)
I'll give this one some more use. I do need a viable replacement for FrontPage, though that will take a long time. (Document-centric low end web management and authoring is what's technically known as a Faughnan-market. That is, a market made up of John Faughnan and similar individuals. At last count there were five of us worldwide.)
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
Firefox - Autoscroll is not broken, it's disabled
Firefox - Rediscover the web
This was very annoying. Firefox wasn't autoscrolling with my Intellimouse 5.2 drivers. I love autoscrolling. I had used the IM 5.2 driver application-specific configuration to set the middle button click to autoscroll. Still didn't work.
Turns out there's an option in Firefox to enable autoscroll. In my install it was unchecked! Also one for "smooth scrolling" which I think is a smarter form of scrolling (w/ acceleration).
I don't recall disabling those, I wonder if some extension turned 'em off.
Worth noting if your autoscroll isn't working as expected.
This was very annoying. Firefox wasn't autoscrolling with my Intellimouse 5.2 drivers. I love autoscrolling. I had used the IM 5.2 driver application-specific configuration to set the middle button click to autoscroll. Still didn't work.
Turns out there's an option in Firefox to enable autoscroll. In my install it was unchecked! Also one for "smooth scrolling" which I think is a smarter form of scrolling (w/ acceleration).
I don't recall disabling those, I wonder if some extension turned 'em off.
Worth noting if your autoscroll isn't working as expected.
Most web activity is now non-human - implications for personal web site traffic limits
MacInTouch Home Page
[Cameron Knowlton] ... The mass majority of web traffic is from non-human surfers, such as positioning agents and other such web goodies. Many sites are poorly designed to work only with IE/Windows... these sites detect the 'agent string' from the users browser, and work only when they see an expected agent string. Accordingly, developers of web agent software mimic the lowest common denominator browser -- IE/Windows. Even Safari is wired to do this.This is becoming a cost issue, as well as messing up data on what browsers are being used (suggests Firefox use may actualy be close to 10% of human web access). ISPs charge for bandwidth. I have a fair bit of data on my personal site, but most of it is of limited current interest. I keep it there for my purposes, and for archival retrieval by others. The bots don't know this however, and they suck the entire site. This adds up to hundreds of MBs of traffic a month; and that can start heading towards my ISP's traffic limits. Since I switched to LunarPages I've been ok, but if the trend continues I'll run into problmes there too.
Search engine marketing studies have estimated as much as 75% of search engine traffic is from non-humans... other web activity (email crawlers, web site crawlers, etc.) would be similarly skewed.
Palm Converter for OS X and JFile Companion
MacInTouch Home Page: "... Palm Converter 2.0.0a1 is an application that can read some of the files created on a Palm and transferred to your desktop when you HotSync, including MemoDB, Memo32DB, MobileDB, and other database files. This alpha release is a complete rewrite of the program to allow for expansion of translators. It also now exports to XML and exports ThoughtManager outlines to OPML. Palm Converter is free for Mac OS X and Mac OS 9."
This site also offers JFile Companion, a Mac product for manipulating PalmOS JFile databases.
This site also offers JFile Companion, a Mac product for manipulating PalmOS JFile databases.
Copernic/AOL: current leader in the sponsored (freebie) Windows desktop search race
Copernic Desktop Search - The Search Engine for Your PC
Updated 1/5/05 with, unsurprisingly, some more of the negatives.
Update 5/10/05: I think Yahoo Desktop Search (X1 freebie) is the best PC desktop search tool -- except it doesn't index Eudora. X1 commercial does -- for $80. There was rumor of a Google Desktop Search plugin, but it's not there yet. So, for home, where I use Eudora still on my PC, I'm going to try Copernic 1.5 again.
Introduction
I really like Lookout for searching and managing Outlook. I'm sticking with that one for now. I tried Google desktop search and a few others, including Lookout's desktop search -- didn't like 'em.
Since MSN search uses Microsoft's built-in indexing, which I don't like, I haven't tried it.
I think Yahoo/X1 will be interesting, but it's not a freebie yet.
Copernic/AOL is my latest. It looks good at first glance, but it has some fundamental deficits.
Some key features:
It's the best of a bad bunch, but I'm not impressed. I'll compare it to X1 when Yahoo launches it. For now I'm staying with Copernic (it beats Google Desktop!) but I still get more value from a directory string search I hacked together that emulates the immensely underappreciated Norton Change Directory feature of Norton Commander and Norton Utilities @ 1989.
Updated 1/5/05 with, unsurprisingly, some more of the negatives.
Update 5/10/05: I think Yahoo Desktop Search (X1 freebie) is the best PC desktop search tool -- except it doesn't index Eudora. X1 commercial does -- for $80. There was rumor of a Google Desktop Search plugin, but it's not there yet. So, for home, where I use Eudora still on my PC, I'm going to try Copernic 1.5 again.
Introduction
I really like Lookout for searching and managing Outlook. I'm sticking with that one for now. I tried Google desktop search and a few others, including Lookout's desktop search -- didn't like 'em.
Since MSN search uses Microsoft's built-in indexing, which I don't like, I haven't tried it.
I think Yahoo/X1 will be interesting, but it's not a freebie yet.
Copernic/AOL is my latest. It looks good at first glance, but it has some fundamental deficits.
Some key features:
- You can configure location of the indices. I store them in a folder that I exclude from backup, including backup via ConnectedTLM. You really don't want to backup search indices. All my various search indices tools store files in this folder.
- You can control readily what folders are indexed. I turned off Outlook search since I use Lookout.
- It indexes PDF.
- You can tell it not to index very large files.
- You can control when it builds the indices, including time of day scheduling. It will do low level background indexing (not a default). Index builds seem very fast and "smart".
- If you map a network share to a drive letter, it appears that it can index that drive. (Performance may be poor, I haven't pursued this capability as I don't need it at work.)
- It indexes folder names. (A major flaw in Lookout 1.2's file system search.)
- It's "stupid" in how it does search rankings. In particular it doesn't use NTFS file metadata it doesn't weight metadata >> folder name >> file name >> document content and it doesn't differentially weight aspects of documents (titles, early text, etc) .
(One of the reasons Lookout works so well for email search is that there's so much reich metadata available in Outlook. The typical PC document filestore has very little metadata. I'm very interested in the 2005 OS X Tiger search because of the way it uses metadata.)
- It doesn't return a folder or directory as a search result. The only search results are files. This throws away a lot of the intelligence and metadata that may exist in a file store.
- You can't search within a result set easily.
- You can't sort result sets by metadata (file size, type, date created, date modified, etc).
- The Help and Submit Bug buttons are broken. There's no documentation.
- Limited search to My Documents folder only. (Removed all other folders, for non-removables set to ignore via "modify" button.)
- Moved indices to my "Cache" folder (no backup).
- Update index daily at 1am.
- Max file size to index 10MB (I may shrink this further)
- Various other small tweaks to enhance performance.
It's the best of a bad bunch, but I'm not impressed. I'll compare it to X1 when Yahoo launches it. For now I'm staying with Copernic (it beats Google Desktop!) but I still get more value from a directory string search I hacked together that emulates the immensely underappreciated Norton Change Directory feature of Norton Commander and Norton Utilities @ 1989.
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