Category: Technology

Technology Fair & Student Showcase

If you get the chance today take a trip up to the Tom Ridge Center at Presque Isle. Northwest Pennsylvania Association of Educational Communications and Technology (NPAECT) is holding its 14th Annual Technology Fair and Student Showcase from 3:00 to 7:00 pm. The Technology Fair and Student Showcase is a celebration of the wonderful technology projects involving students from the tri-county area. The fair is free and open to public, so come and see what the students are doing with technology in their school.

AJSPS

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No Ring, Small Cars, iPod Dilemma

Yesterday on Salisbury and Rosenbloom, they discussed an article on askmen.com, Top 10 Athletes Without Championships. And of course on the top of the list my favorite football player Dan Marino. Of course this spurred the discussion of who should have been on the list included on the list were Charles Barkley and Karl Malone. Left of the list NBA stars John Stockton and Patrick Ewing. I think I know why I dislike the NBA so much now none of my favorite teams or players ever won a championship. Other names I think they left off Dan Fouts and Fran Tarkenton.

GM to preview a trio smaller designs at the New York Auto Show this coming week.

GM’s bread-and-butter Chevrolet division will unveil the three Korean-designed minis—named the Trax, the Beat, and the Groove—in a play to prove that it can make stylish, fuel-efficient cars just like Honda (HMC) and Toyota (TM). The big picture for these small cars: Chevy wants to show that its brand stands for more than just trucks like the brawny Silverado pickup and gas-guzzling Suburban. Business Week

I don’t mind small; I just don’t want to see another round of 80s bland boxes.

A previous co-worker of mine just recently purchased his first iPod. He bought the all out 60 GB version. Two days ago I got a call from him while driving home. Let me just say his experience thus far has been anything but enjoyable. Upon receiving his iPod, he installed iTunes on his Gateway laptop (not going there.. yet). He had been previously using Windows Media Player. Loaded all his music into iTunes and began the long painful task cleaning up his music library, downloading album art, and inserting album artist to get around the featuring issue that crops with the mainly hip hop music he listens to. Much to his astonishment on the iPod when he went to select his favorite artist he got not one but many tupacs.
This surprised me as well seeing how I have a nano, my entire music collection won’t fit. I use a sophisticated system of genre and rating based smart playlist and live my life on shuffle. Hence going to find music by artist would be pointless because I never know who maybe on my ipod at any given time.
Back to the story though to make things worse if he open media player it would screw up changes he had made in iTunes because they were still sharing the same files. To solve his artist issue he began the tedious task removing any featuring artist form the artist field in his some 4800 songs. About when he got half way through the hard drive on the gateway decided to crap out. That is Gateway equipment for you. So then he tried installing iTunes on his desktop. iTunes’ typical install searches your entire computer for music well he had his external hard drive plugged in as well and it pulled in everyone of his songs twice, those on the desktop and his backup on the external drive. Now is that an ordeal or what? He is on his way now but I just can’t believe that Apple hasn’t enabled the ability to add album artist on the iPod. It just seems so obvious.

AJSPS

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Don’t hesitate buy that song

If you have went on to iTunes went to buy a song you liked but then hesitated because you thought you might eventually buy the entire album and didn’t want to have to pay for a song twice. Fear no more iTunes [article] now discounts albums in which you have already purchased a song from. Not only that it is retroactive so it already knows the songs you currently own from iTunes. Could we be one step closer to being able to re-download songs we have already purchased as well?

AJSPS

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Didn’t get around to it.

Here are a number of things I was going to blog about but didn’t get around to it.

  • 3/8 – Jordan’s King Abdullah II pushing for renewed US peace efforts in the Palestine. Update throughout March the King has been pushing for other middle east countries to move toward peace, meeting with Talabani, Lebanese Prime Minister, King Hamad, Massoud Barzani, Saudi King Abdul Aziz, and today Condoleezza Rice. Jordan has long been one of most stable countries in the middle east. It is good to see Jordan taking a forward stance in Peace efforts.
  • 3/8 – Jennie Finch, former olympic team softball pitcher, was on Mike & Mike. She has taken over ESPN’s Fantasy Baseball outlook.
  • 3/9 – Longar Longar, Oklahmoma University Center, how cruel is this kids parents not bad enough that his last name is Longar they gave him the same first name.
  • 3/10 – Erie bowler Mike Machuga’s Machuga flop was on the popular video blog Rocketboom.
  • 3/13 – Penguins are staying Pittsburgh.
  • 3/22 – New York Times Columnist David Pogue, featured Grand Central in his column very slick.
  • 3/22 – Stephon Marbury’s $15 shoes Starbury. available at Steve & Barry’s. In the world of $100 shoes how awesome is this.
  • 3/22 – Sleeping in Space just plain cool check it out on Science Friday.
  • 3/22 – Scratchless CDs

Hope you enjoy these better late than nevers.

AJSPS

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Loving Yojimbo

I recently discovered the Yojimbo organizational software by Bare Bones Software, the makers of BBEdit, and I am loving it. There are not too many tools out there that will just slip right into your workflow, make life ten times easier, and not skip a beat. I honestly don’t know how lived with out this tool. I am very much a scatter brain type worker. Many of my documents don’t get anymore organized than on the desktop or in the documents folder. And just as Spotlight and OS X Smart folders have solved my document problem Yojimbo has solved my ideas problem. No more scraps of paper, bookmarks on ten different sites, browsers, or computers, and I never could use stickies they just got in the way. Yojimbo also does passwords and serial numbers. Music & Videos iTunes, Documents Spotlight, Photos iPhoto, and now ideas Yojimbo. Something tells me that Bare Bones should be careful this seems like a prime location for Apple to move into just as they did to Konfabulator with Dashboard. Not that Yojimbo isn’t already with out its competitors. I have found two Wallet by Waterfall Software and Notebook by Circus Ponies.

Where Yojimbo is more idea centric powered by Text Editor, Wallet is more data centric like a more powerful Address Book. Wallet’s strength is that you can make as many of these data collection as you like with what ever fields you like. Where as in Yojimbo you are locked into serial numbers, passwords, or bookmarks and anything else has to be a note. That said Wallet doesn’t have the collection style setup nor the freedom you find in Yojimbo. Also, I don’t believe it has the .mac integration.

Notebook on the other hand is idea centric but also idea specific. The way this program is setup is very inventive. It is just like having an actual paper style organizer on your computer with different section, little tabs, and indices. In other words if you where one of super organized kids in school with one of those multifaceted notebooks for each subject and now that you are in computer world need that same environment this is the tool for you. On the other hand if you are like me and the those multifaceted things did absolutely nothing for you in high school, it isn’t going to help now either.

Even still Yojimbo still has room to grow. Here are a few suggestions that I have come up with. First and for most Automator actions, this list could be a lot longer but as long as they add in a few Automator actions I am sure I could do it myself. Own Smart collections right now it is limited to Flagged Items and Recent Items. and you can create Tag Collections. I would really like to be able create collections based on any field similar to iTunes. Tag Collection Auto Drops – be able to add Tag Collections to the Auto Drop so that when used it will automatically add those tags to the new item. Support for images, not talking iPhoto style organization, more along the lines of that is a really neat image I might want to use that in my blog. .Mac Access online, syncing is nice but online access would be awesome especially for bookmarks. Dashboard Widget – despise the fact that I always have to have Yojimbo open would love a Dashboard Widget. Oh please, oh please, oh please develop an iPhone version. Multiple Flags similar to Outlook alarm red is nice but caution yellow, don’t worry green or handled it check mark would be nice. And finally more options or ability to create your own types like Wallet. I really want to create a grocery items type.

If you own a mac take a look at Yojimbo, if you own multiple macs and have a .Mac Account Get Yojimbo.

AJSPS

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Ahh Snap! New Start Page Technologies look to over through Yahoo!

Back in the day when AOL was just starting to fall off and mp3 were found via ftp aggregate sites and run by Winamp. The internet boom was in full thralls, google was but a glimpse still a student project and Yahoo! and MSN had yet to start their buying binge of upstarts. There was a great site called snap.com. Snap was years ahead of the rest internet start pages and let user configure just about everything and let the user decide exactly what content to view. Like most upstarts though it was bought out, and NBC to its detriment had no clue why it was so popular. Soon the site was covered with ads content was limited to NBC affiliates and they changed the name to NBCi with a lame TV campaign to go with it. I mourned snap for long time (quick note it seems the snap.com namespace has since been bought by a new search start up) and jumped from aggregate site to aggregate site tried netscape, msn, excite, go. None of them had the usability of snap. I finally settled on Yahoo but was never satisfied. Two new startups though have now entered the battle with clean design tons of options Netvibes and PageFlakes utilizes modules to direct content from social network sites, news feeds, blogs, and custom content. Plus they allow sharing of custom design pages. Check out my Erie tabs NV | PF . In my use Netvibes seems to be a little more user friendly interface but PageFlakes has some more power features. I.E. the global pages work much nicer and you can allow additional user to modify the page. According to Wall Street Journal today, Yahoo! is in the process of revamping there MyYahoo! service to answer these newcomers.

AJSPS

P.S. I obviously don’t know what thralls means but it sounded right. Maybe I was thinking throngs I don’t know.

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