Altoid speakers

The winner of "McGyver contest" to find a creative use of Altoid tins produced mini speakers using materials I have. I'll have to try this. Found via Engadget and they quoted the original site in saying the sound from these is tinny. Ugh.

Extensions for Mozilla Firexfox

For those of you already using Mozilla or Mozilla Firefox instead of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, you should take a look at some of the extensions available. You can view the full list from the source. Or, start with two articles from wired.com -- the first gives an overview and the second is the author's response to all the email she received about favorite extensions overlooked in the first article.

For those of you who are still using Internet Explorer, please take a little time to read more about what Firefox has to offer and read how the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team recommends using an alternate browser to reduce exposure to IE vulnerabilities.

Which way to TiVo?

Every few months I think about getting TiVo. Sometimes it's when I forget to set my VCR for a regular episode of The West Wing, sometimes it's when I want to record something and don't want to take the time to hunt for a tape with available space (and then again when I am trying to find the tape to watch the recorded show). My primary interest is the convenience of the digital recorder itself, but I like the TiVo service's Wish List and Season Pass features, too.

I started thinking about this again recently with TiVo's announcement that they'll more easily support network connectivity. This is kind of nice in that I could stream music from PCs and do remote programming... but, I've also considered the DirecTV option which doesn't do the network stuff, but it's all in one convenient box. On the other hand, if I drop my current cable provider for the TV feed, I'll have to pay an extra $10/mo. for the cable modem.

I've started to explore these options by scanning the boards over at tivocommunity.com, but, like most very active forum sites, it's a little overwhelming for the casual reader*. Electrophobia's TiVo Wiring Guide proves that just about any setup will work -- I just need help deciding.

So, my TiVo-enabled friends, if you were to start today, what would you do? Standalone series 2 TiVo? DirecTiVo? Second-hand TiVo?

* When shopping for noise-reducing headphones I was astounded by the level of passion some people have for headphones over at head-fi.org. I was astounded, but I shouldn't have been -- this is, after all, the internet.

Gmail update

Two of my earlier gripes about gmail have been fixed. When viewing a message there's now a "Add sender to contacts list" link and I've learned today that it is now possible to import addresses into gmail .

Marney & Costello

How things can go awry when trying to help a toddler perfect her language usage:

Me: Marney, do you remember who is coming to visit tomorrow?
Marney: What?
Me: No, who
Marney: I don't know.

Moleskine mania

While in Germany, I purchased a pocket Moleskine notebook. Thinking that this would be a good gift for somebody, I did a little searching and found that much like everything else these days, there's a weblog devoted to these notebooks.

Greetings from Germany

I'm writing this from a lovely place where I've been attending a conference with some high-falutin speakers. It's been quite interesting.

Monster trucks and slashdot

"What's huge, slow, and capable of hauling up to 400 tons of bullshit? While my first response would probably be Slashdot, too in this case we're describing the Liebherr T 282B truck, a 224 ton monster with a massive 3650-horsepower diesel engine."
I don't think really, really huge trucks are so exciting, but this introduction made me laugh out loud.

Fun with iTunes

A couple months ago, I wrote about using JuK and how "I've read rumors that it's similar to iTunes, but I have no experience with that". Well, I've been using Windows quite a bit lately, so I've installed iTunes (free download) and loaded my music into its library. It's pretty cool.

Down at the bottom of the main window it says: "1326 songs, 3.4 days, 4.36 GB" and yes, I own the CDs for all of these (or at least 1300 of them).

There's a "Party Shuffle" option. I've done no extra configuration on this, so it's shuffling through all my music. This produces interesting musical transitions such as this sequence:

• A track from Mozart's Don Giovanni
• "Born Under Punches" from the Talking Heads' Remain in Light
• "Black and Blue" from Lyle Lovett's Pontiac
• The opening number from Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods
• "Roxanne'97-Puff Daddy Remix" from Sting's album 1997 - The Best Of Sting & The Police
• "Purple Toupee" from They Might Be Giants' Lincoln (what kind of geek would I be without TMBG in my library?)
• Variation 9 from Glenn Gould's recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations

That's fun for a while, but iTunes does make it easy to listen to more coherent playlists. I've created smart playlists for "Classic Rock" and other genres just by specifying the genre as the criteria. When I import another album in the genre, it's automatically added to the playlist. As I wrote with JuK, this is dependent on having good ID3 tags on the mp3 files. I used ID3-TagIT (freeware) to clean up some of my library. (This was especially important for some more recently ripped music since iTunes doesn't seem to recognize version 2.4 of ID3 tags and ID3-TagIT let me easily write version 2.3 instead.)

I don't use the iTunes music store and I don't have an iPod to sync this with. It's just a nice way to play music through my computer (and through my new noise-cancelling headphones).

News on web stats

Since my post last month about gmail, I've been getting more traffic from more different people. This lead to requests for gmail invitations. When I started asking how they found my site, most responded like this one:

While I'd like to say it was something noble or a bit more interesting, I found it by searching on google for "gmail invitation." Your website was buried on page 39 I believe but I clicked on a lot of the links. I know it sounds like "he's only interested in gmail" and while I'm tempted to say "I'm an avid fan of your blog and just saw the post!" I'll be honest and just say I found it while scouring google for gmail invitations.

In order to get more information, I've since signed up for a free web stats account with statcounter.com. Now I know that Cognitive Overflow has been found via searches for "lord's prayer in l33t speak slashdot", "kyte database independence", "i need a lot of money how", and, of course, many for "gmail", "gmail invitation" and the like.

Finally, check out this article at wired.com to read about VisitorVille, a service which displays traffic information in a SimCity-like way. Pages are portrayed as buildings, with the more popular pages being larger buildings. Visitors are shown as people and those who are referred by Google are shown arriving via the Google bus.

Al-Qaeda Planning Attack

"Those terrorists don't scare me. At least not without the help of my government."
  --from the What do you think? feature in this week's edition of America's Finest News Source(tm)

Cute things kids say

Our three year old has been enjoying the extra attention she's been getting with grandparents staying here to help us with the new baby. One recent morning Grandma got up with her and they had been playing in the basement by the time I came downstairs. I heard Marney shout up the stairs "I want juice!" Being the annoying sort of dad who is always trying to teach my kids, I responded "That's not a very nice way to ask. Can you ask more nicely?" Marney paused a moment as she considered her response before yelling "I want Grandma!"