Call Recorder for Skype

I tried using Audio Hijack Pro once to record a Skype call. It as a real nuiscance.

So this interests me: Ecamm Network: Call Recorder for Skype - Automatically Record Calls On Your Mac. I own AHP and know it, so I might not buy this, but if it works it would have real value.

Nikon 18-200, Canon ???

My friend torments me by flaunting this Nikon lens - he knows I have a Canon D-SLR. The Amazon review, sorted as always by lowest to highest, are very positive. It's dirt cheap by lens standards - $700.00. The vibration damping at 200 mm is astounding.

Canon doesn't have anything to match it. Hmpph. Canon, have you no sense of shame?

OS X Leopard: my one wish

Leopard will be preannounced in the next few months. I have only one wish for it. No, not XP virtualization -- we have Parallels and that will suffice for me.

I want a remote access capability that's at least as good as Microsoft's ancient remote desktop protocol. This is a capability Windows has had built-in (XP Pro) for eons. True, Apple has something called 'Apple Remote Desktop', but I've never seen it in action. I don't have a trusted source to tell me if it really works for remote control. Not to mention that it costs more than a new version of OS X.

I believe Jobs has decided not to do this (ever?), and I expect to be disappointed. Other than that, there's not much in Leopard I'm likely to care about. (Vista? Surely you jest.)

Phil Bradley on search engines - from Exalead to Grokker

Phil Bradley is a Library science guy who blogs about libraries and search. I've read him for years, he's great. Now that Google's Firefox sync has made bookmarks useful again I'm using his web pages to rebuild my collection of search engine links. I always start with Google, but if Google and Google Scholar and Google Government disappoint, where should one go next? (Ok, so he doesn't discuss Bloglines Search yet ...).

Phil has two great resource pages on this topic:

• Search Engines on Squidoo: Squidoo is some kind of social network ranking site ...
• tabular representation: Same material, very succinct presentation.

I'm picking a few of my favorites from the collection, like Exalead (Bradley's fave), Brainboost, MSN Encarta Search, Dogpile, Thumbshots, Clusty, Ask.com, Wisenut, Yahoo Mindset and Grokker.

Update: Turns out I've written about this before! What's new is I can now sync these bookmarks across four machines - painlessly.

Bloglines Advanced Search: this is very cool

Bloglines was acquired a while ago by Ask.com, a 2nd tier search engine. Bloglines has its issues, but it's never sunk to the level of Blogger. It remains my primary blog tracking and reading tool.

Today they announced a new blog search suite, including Bloglines | Advanced Search. The neat part is they've delivered something I once asked Alta Vista to do -- back before there was a Google. The key is constraining search to a trusted subset of sites. If Alta Vista had followed my advice they might been able to fight off Google!

Bloglines offers the option of restricting search to one's blogroll. In other words, instead of searching all blogs, you get to search the blogs you like. No spam blogs of course. This is so valuable I may add back some of the very geeky blogs that I quit a while back. For pre-purchase reviews of technical products, in particular, this may be significantly better than a Google search. I'm going to see if I can embed the search box into my blog pages.

Replacing a defective Tungsten E2 with an old Samsung i500

My Tungsten E2 is dying - 10 days past the 90 day warranty. The Amazon reviews of the T/E 2 are scathing, and there's no shortage of quality issues with the Palm TX (1 year warranty) either. I'm disgusted. The PDA marketplace is dying -- what's a geek to do?

Reminds me of the Newton users gasping until the Palm arrived. Windows Mobile has always been awful and I don't want anything to do with the "modern" Palm hardware or software. I might try BlackBerry, but in the meantime I've an ancient smartphone (Samsung i500) that runs PalmOS 4.1 (the last good version).

I'm thinking that since DataViz's BeyondContacts will work on a Samsung i500 I'll dump ePocrates and squeeze my data onto that old Smartphone. Then I'll exercise my AMEX extended warranty and get the money back for my Tungsten E2.

Maybe I can limp along with that praying that Apple brings their smartphone to market before 2020, if the Samsung dies I'll just have to survive with a Blackberry.

Embedding a public events calendar in a website

Google's Calendar can be embedded within a public site. A nice complement to Google Spreadsheet for a sports/events site.