I’ve been using Windows 7 Release Candidate exclusively on my work desktop since it came out on May 5, 2009. It runs great but I’ve encountered one problem that is extremely annoying. The windows behind the active window will flicker.
A video is worth a thousand flickers…
~ Posted by Al
The end with the koosh ball and Jello are very cool. You may want to click on the video to bring it up in the larger size on the Vimeo website.
I-Movix SprintCam v3 NAB 2009 showreel from David Coiffier on Vimeo.
I like Twitter (see this video that explains Twitter). I use it as a means of communication with my immediate family. I have also plugged into it as a source of news. Initially I was interested in tech news, comments, rumors, etc. While tech info is still a primary interest, I found myself expanding the people I follow o Twitter to others I found interesting regardless if they are marketers, lawyers, librarians, etc. Using TweetDeck I am able to follow a good number (albeit a relatively small number compared to hardcore Twitter users) of diverse people and grouping them into different categories. Using this approach I have a Family & Friends group, a Tech Heads group, and a Locals group which includes people from the Chicagoland, Rockford and southeast Wisconsin.
These groups allow me to see what’s going on in tech, in business and in the local area. It allowed me to get a feel for the extent of a recent power outage in McHenry county. When ex-Illinois governor “Blago” was impeached my Locals group was abuzz with the news.
Twitter is a great way for me to get regional, national and tech news. If I’m at a computer, I’ll typically have it running so I can stay plugged in. If I need to work without distraction I’ll turn it off, but I do feel disconnected.
Posted by Al Degutis (aka Frumpa on Twitter)
I picked up my copy of iLife 09 the day it came out, eager to try out iPhoto’s face recognition feature. After launching iPhoto for the first time, it took under an hour for it to process all the photos in the library, searching for faces. Once it identified most of the faces you start tagging them with names. As you are tagging names, the process becomes simpler because iPhoto appears to learn from what was being tagged and makes recommendations which you can accept or reject. It’s not perfect and at times suggests the wrong person, especially when it comes to toddlers and infants, but does a fairly good job.
An example of an accurate suggestion:
An example of an inaccurate suggestion:
iPhoto is also Linux friendly, well at least in terms of recognizing Tux:
iPhoto also likes to play Where’s Waldo:
Overall it is an impressive feature. I can’t speak to how it compares to the face recognition feature of Google’s Picasa, other than iPhoto does all the work locally whereas Picasa only provides face recognition on Picasa Web. I’m not about to upload my entire photo library to the web (with the exception of my Amazon S3 backup) so the local face recognition with name tagging is perfect for me.
Posted by Al Degutis
Twitter is a great, when it works. All it takes is a Steve Jobs keynote or a Presidential Inauguration to bring out the infamous Fail Whale. Unfortunately Twitter’s approach to deal with its up-time issues is to reduce functionality and limit developer access as explained in this Webware article.
The solution to fixing Twitter’s reliability and still allow developers to support its users is simple: Google should buy Twitter.
Why Google? No other company has the capacity to server up millions of people. Even the mighty Microsoft quickly ran out of bandwidth or server capacity to accommodate all the people interested in downloading released the Windows 7 Beta. Only Google can serve the masses reliably.
I like Twitter. I’d like to see some new features such as group messaging. I don’t want to see developers throttled. Unfortunately, Twitter cannot fix this problem themselves. They need Google.
~Posted by Al Degutis
I’ve wanted to experiment with Photosynth some more, so I decided to try a 360 degree synth of Judy’s Mickey Mouse Christmas Tree. I set up a backdrop behind the tree, put the camera on a tripod and snapped 26 pictures while slightly rotating the tree in between shots. About half way through I realized that as I rotated the tree, I was also inching it forward and to the left so I started inching it back during the remaining shots. I’m not sure how much the movement affected the results, but my goal of having a photo that you can “scroll around” didn’t work out. I also wonder if the problem was the backdrop which kept the background the same. My thought was to keep the background neutral so it only saw changes in the tree. At this point I’m uncertain if the problem was my technique or Photosynth’s limitations.
It claims to have used all 26 photos but I don’t see how they’ve been synth’d. Here’s the result, which unfortunately require Internet Explorer on a Windows PC:
Here are all of my attempt at Photosynth:
I’ve used various interfaces for Twitter, including the Twitter.com website itself. As the number of people I follow grew from a handful to dozens and now a couple hundred, I found that only one Twitter app works best for me: TweetDeck. TweetDeck has a number of useful features, but the one that made me use it almost exclusively is Groups. You can create your own groups, as many as you’d like, selecting which of the people that you follow and they’re Twitter updates (”tweets”) appear in their own column. I’ve created groups for Family and Friends, Locals (geographically), and Tech Heads. This allows me to quick browse through tweets in each category.
The problem I have with TweetDeck is how much screen real estate it takes up to display the various columns which includes All Messages, Replies and Direct Messages, plus my groups. I end up scrolling back-and-forth to see the various columns to frequently. It’s my understanding that a future release will allow you to resize the columns, which will be an improvement. I’d like to offer up two other suggestions. Let me preface these ideas by saying I have no idea if either of these are technically possible, nor how challenging it would be.
First, it would be nice if each column could be standalone, free-floating columns or connected. A great example of this is the Google Chrome browser in which you can take a tab and separate it from the main browser window to stand on it’s own, or drop a standalone browser window onto another one to insert it as a tab. Even if it is not possible to do the attach/detach action, just having separate, free-floating columns would be beneficial. Using Twhirl with my various accounts as an example, this screen shot illustrates how this might look:
I have the Twhirl windows stacked in this example, but normally they’re a little more spread out. The key here is to allow me to control their placement including the possibility to overlap them to save screen space.
My second thought on how to manage the multiple columns is to use a side tab approach. In this case, TweetDeck would have its All Tweets column with vertical tabs on the side for the additional columns. When you click on a tab, it would slide out that second column next to the All Tweets columns as illustrated below.
Alternately, it could slide out that tab into the single All Tweets column, replacing it and keeping it one column wide:
The space required to display the tabs could easily run out depending on the number of groups you create. This could be handled by 1) using abbreviations such as Tweets for All Tweets, DM for Direct Messages, @ for Replies and 2) allowing the list of tabs to scroll up and down.
Again, I cannot speak to the technical challenges to implementing either of these interfaces, but I hope that I’ve provided some ideas that may help improve this great Twitter client.
~ Posted by Al Degutis
About 30 minutes after I received my real spam quarantine digest, I received an email claiming to be a spam quarantine digest. It was obvious to me that it was a fake, but looking closer showed that the spammer did a very poor job crafting this fake. Unfortunately, the everyday computer user may not notice these mistakes. Here’s a screen shot of the message via my webmail interface:
The sender (From: line) lists a .local domain which is not a valid top level domain (e.g. .com, .net, .org, etc). When you hover over the “Click here to access you spam quarantine” link the browser exposes that the link is to https://192.168.1.50:442/quarantine/manageuser… The 192.168.1.50 address is not a valid public IP address. It is part of a block of IP addresses (192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255) used for internal, private networks and is not routable (i.e. sent) across the Internet.
Posted by Al Degutis
It took only 1 hour to import our DVD and CD library (169, 191 respectively) into Delicious Library, a great and easy to use Apple app. It makes the job of importing items by scaning the item’s barcode using the iSight camera then looking up the item in Amazon, pulling in tons of data on the item. I found it faster to use my camcorder connected via firewire because it did a better job focusing on the various barcode sizes. I’ve never noticed how small some of the barcodes are. Some of our music CDs are sooo old they don’t have barcodes. Remember back in the day, when you bought something and it had to have a price tag or label? You know, those pre-barcode days. Some people may be too young to know what I’m talking about.
Our collection of items can be viewed as shelves or lists.
An example of the details it automatically pulls from Amazon to populate into the database:
Next up, importing our books.
- Al Degutis
I like Google’s Chrome browser, maybe more than Google does. I use Chrome on my Windows computer and am impatiently waiting for a version for the Mac. It’s a frustrating wait because Chrome was developed using WebKit, the system framework version of the engine that’s used by Safari.
While ads for Google Chrome have been spotted on YouTube and Linked In, I think the excitement for Chrome as dimished. Could part of that be because Google itself is doing such a poor job of supporting its own product? The Internets are all abuzz about the new GMail Themes and Colors. Seriously? Anyway, being the lemming that I am, I checked them out myseft and found that they don’t display properly in Chrome.
Here is how Firefox and Chrome display the same theme in Gmail.
Yes, I know that Chrome is still in beta, but what Google product isn’t? See right there in the image under the letters “i l” in GMail, it says beta. After four years, GMail is still in beta which either means a) Google doesn’t understand the beta testing cycle, or b) Google doesn’t care.
I’ll continue to use Chrome on the limited systems it’s available and I’ll continue to shake my head in disbelief when I come across this annoyances.
As for the GMail themes and colors, meh.
- Al
