AJAX: ajaxwrite on the web

AjaxWrite promises MS Word-like functionality in a web app. Very neat.

software: background switcher, project alternative

Our friend Big Poppa E has a Mac notebook computer. And mostly, we do not covet it. Except one night, we spied that it changes the background on his desktop every once in a while. We tend to think that things like that are distracting, but still, it would be nice to do.

Enter John’s Background Switcher, which does it for you, for free, on your Windows box. And it can poll from flickr, the web, or elsewhere on your computer. Neat!

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We cannot load up MS Project on our computer. We don’t know why, but we can’t. We have been using an open source project manager for a while, but it leaves much to be desired. But we found a nice free alternative, Open Workbench, that gives a lot of power and flexibility. Very nice.

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Bonus link: We work in a slightly-noise-but-not-so-horribly-noisy office. There is a dull background noise that varies just enough as to be noticeable. What’s a taco to do?

Pink Noise. Honestly, we thought pink noise was a joke we heard once on a Kleptone’s album. But it’s not. It’s not quite white noise. There is variance to it. And here comes the pink noise generator. These handly apps create a small section of pink noise that is easily looped. We prefer pink noise #1, which is 2 minutes long. The #3 loop is too long for us at 6 minutes.

myspace: the phone

Holy spit.

Yesterday, we talked about myspace and identity (see the danah boyd link). Then, while checking on something for Ed, we came across some information last night that sorta blows our socks off. There are going to be myspace telephones.

We admire this sort of convergance. In the back of our minds, we always wondered what the other side of a major media conglomerate owning a ppopular social networking site would be. Whoop, there it is. Earthlink and SK Telecom (South Korea) are putting together mobile phones that integrate fully with myspace. One can only assume that they work equally well as cellular phones. Or perhaps they land in our other favorite topic, mobile VOIP.

When we saw the mock-ups on benbarren’s flickr pages, we thought for sure they were just idle sketches. Because they look really neat. But surprise of surprises, that is what they really look like. Check out Helio, the company that is putting out the phones. We’d like ours in black, please.

the watchmaker’s notebook

This is one of those things we would like to keep to ourselves, it’s so wonderful. It’s beautifully wonderful, and we love it. It’s Ron DeCorte’s Notebook, a place where he examines the fine art of the tiny timepieces on our wrists. He takes apart finely made watches and explains what is so wonderful about them, what makes them unique, and points out the fine details that the common observer would most likely miss. And in addition to the individual timepieces he examines, he has a more generalized guide to watches called TimeZone’s Watch School. There, you can learn about the mechanics of watches, their pieces, and how they work.

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We are amazed with the rise of social networking software. There is so much of it, and it has really taken over as the BigApp of the day. No real big surprise there: humans are made to connect with each other. Even the early BBSes were about connecting with other people and sharing lives. The current category killer is MySpace, which took Friendster by surprise (though for those of us who were on Friendster at the time, not much of a surprise with it’s “who is going to buy it?” and “why the heck is it so slow?” discussions that were rampant). With MySpace, you know who owns it: Fox. It’s already a sell-out.

For millions of teens, that doesn’t matter. They are creating their identity through and with MySpace. Danah Boyd has an interesting article that discusses identity on MySpace.

The First Season of Grey’s Anatomy has a MySpace page. We think it’s disengenuous that it would try to friend us.

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And speaking of things that aren’t there, lifehacker (*heart*)  had a download of the day recently that was all about Microsoft’s Virtual PC. The Virtual PC allows one to run instances of applications without, theorhetically, messing up one’s own system. Joy.

Some software, of course, you don’t even have to install on your own machine. Richard MacManus just wrote an article of “best of breed” online office apps (that is not to say they are all “free”). We are willing to give writerly the old college try.

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And then there is productivity. At our company, we go to a lot of meetings. A lot. And they aren’t always wonderful sparkly good ones where information is generated and passed on. Of course not. Not every one is golden. But 43 folders has a nice article about 9 tips for making your meetings for productive. We know we need it. Because we Americans are working more, but getting less done. Ouch.

link grab bag

Lots of links on the dashboard today. And recently we read that clutter is a sign of procastination. Which is something we really need to get rid of (actually, both procrastination and clutter on that tip).

So let’s start. Psychology Today has an article entitled 10 things to know about procrastination. The first 5 weren’t that interesting… then we got to #6:

Procrastinators tell lies to themselves. Such as, “I’ll feel more like doing this tomorrow.” Or “I work best under pressure.” But in fact they do not get the urge the next day or work best under pressure. In addition, they protect their sense of self by saying “this isn’t important.” Another big lie procrastinators indulge is that time pressure makes them more creative. Unfortunately they do not turn out to be more creative; they only feel that way. They squander their resources.

Sound familiar? Ouch. One link down. See? We are getting to done even faster now.

Now we have a few tools that look interesting:

• Our first tool is a visualizer for your Windows directory. If you run TaskManager a lot as you plug away, this might be a good tool for you: WinDirStat.
• If you need to edit file properties for audio files, AudioShell might be a good tool for you. We didn’t need to fix up a lot of things until we found a set of mp3s that iTunes did not like, which we whittled down to the “Original” tag. If AudioShell can help you change that flag, then there isn’t anything you can’t iPod.
• The DIY Planner is a set of downloads that help you create planners on good old fashioned paper. If you are into that sort of thing.
• The Democracy video player touts itself as a supreme badass in playing videos. That is can download in the background and then play videos seems really promissing. But we aren’t holding our breathes. We still love the VLC player. Edit: BoingBoing explains that the video player for Democracy is the VLC player. Democracy just bundles it with RSS and BitTorrent sharing.
• Here’s an extension that is vitally important to GMail. This Greasemonkey script stops all that “add contact” popup nonsense that google recently added to their email app.
• And lastly in the tool department is an uber-collection, the TTCS OSSWIN open source “CD”. You might recall a few weeks back we talked about the OpenCD, which collects many of our favorite open-source apps, but the TTCS collection also looks promising.

Now that we are seguing into lists of links, we can’t leave without mentioning Yahoo’s “UI Library”, a collection of interactive and other AJAXy UI tools that one can use/mod for website deisgn.

GCast looks like a nice tool for creating podcasts. It might just even trump our other favorite podcasting software, Odeo. What we most especailly like about GCast is that it has a stand-alone player you can embed into your website. We like that. A lot. Plus, they tie in nicely with their (GCast’s) other service, GarageBand. And their connection helps you key into podcasting music. Which we also like.

Lastly today, we have the video eater site, VideoShift, which culls online video from GoogleVideo and YouTube and presents it in a digg-like format. OUr currentl favorite line of videos is the TechTalks at Google. (Oh, and that one about zero-config with Bonjour networking? Don’t believe it for a second.)

There. All done. That wasn’t so bad, was it?

thumb(driving) our way

Over the weekend, we got one of those portable USB Flash Drives that the cool kids have. And sure, we love the idea of quick portable media, but we got to wondering what else could one do with it?

The big dream of the thumbdrive world is booting from it. Of the installs we’ve driven by, Damn Small Linux looks the most promising. (On a sidenote, a few weeks ago, we tried downloading Knoppix on the promise that one could boot from CD, but it took up so much media — at least 3 CDs — that we feared our ability to boot easily from the disc.) Granted, we don’t know much about Linux, so we would rather screw up a tiny portable drive than our home drive.

2 “must have” apps are portable OpenOffice and portable Firefox. We once had OO exclusively on our home machine, but we admit we installed MSOffice once when a Word doc absolutely had to look a specific way when we translated it to PDF. That was with an earlier version of OO, and if they have gotten better at exporting, then we would be more than happy to return to the fold. As for FF, we might be one of the few people who like being able to differentiate between our home and work browsing.

There are some other apps we are looking forward to using: ReNamer — we seem to always need to do mass renaming of files at some point. We remember having some app at some work computer once that did this very cleanly and neatly…. But it would be nice to be able to carry this app around, to have it when we need it. WinMerge — another thing we need to do a lot of is comparing files, to see what is different in them across versions. Sure, we know Unix has some great tool we saw someone use once that made us green with envy, but we are not Unix wonks. So a small app like this we can easily use is key. Rainmeter — We mentioned before how we once tried Norton Systemworks. One of the nice things about it was its little meters reporting on how things are going. Rainmeter does all that and more without the Symantec overhead. NeoMem — this looked to be the best of the information management systems (and believe us, there are a lot, even for thumbdrives). It claims to be a cross between a word processor and a database, which sounds promising for storing lists, book titles, and phone numbers.

Then there are a few “nice to try” apps we are not sure we need, but they might be nice. DM2 — this one promises nice Windows enhancements, including floating icons and WinRoll’s great feature, roll up to titlebar. Imagenomic says it will clean up noise on pictures. And WhyReboot tells you what will happen when you reboot a system.

There are plenty more apps out there for thumbdrives. AskMetafilter has a great list of them and where to get them. And, as always, Lifehacker has a great collection of anythng you need to find.

Roll your own Windows

No, it’s probably not what you are thinking. We love WindowBlinds for a lot of things. Chief amongst them is that you can change around the metaphor (slightly) of your desktop. But second to the ability to roll up your windows.

Behold, where there’s a will, there is a freeware. WinRoll does an awesome job of rolling up your windows so that you just have the title bar floating in space. This is way better than minimizing them all the time. And you get the added bonus of people coming over and saying “How did you do that?” Just right-click on a title bar and voila! Smack your mama and call her Sally! Cuz that’s just how we roll.
Oh yes. One of the features we always liked in the otherwise destable Nortan SystemWorks is the ability to recall stuff that you might have accidentally lost or thrown out or otherwise cleared out of your recycle bin.

Behold (again): Restoration will scan your files and then make sure you don’t lose them. Plus, it won’t tell you have 250 errors on your machine when in fact your compy is just fine. W00t!

necessary software: the life hacker pack

We are big fans of The Open CD, which is a great collection of open source software for Windows machines. We found plenty of great software thourgh it, and consider much of it required software.

And, in response to the recent release of the Google Pack, our friends at Lifehacker have released their own collection of software they consider necessary, the lifehacker pack. And wouldn’t ya know it, much of it mirrors the Open CD. But we have to hand it to them, that VLC is one bad piece of — shut yo mouth — I’m talkin’ bout VLC, baby. We can dig it.

Audacity is new to us, though we see it pimped in both. We have been traveling with Total Recorder for a few years and have loved the heck out of it. And its 10 dollar price range was none too bad, either! But we will give Audacity a try.

Faststone looks interesting to us, as well. But we wonder if we will love it more than Picasa.

Perhaps the most interesting software there is 7-zip, which would be a good WinZip  replacement. We don’t think we’ve ever bought a WinZip license and have been using their “evaluation versions” for years. It would be nice to go “legal” with someone who doesn’t care if we’re not laying our money down.

gmail: are you deleting how we’re deleting?

2 weeks ago, we wrote about a great Greasemonkey hack for gmail: the delete button. Well, it turns out that Google really does listen and that you can move a sailing ship by a million people blowing on the sails. Today we saw in our own gmail account, gmail’s own delete button.

The sad part of it was that the Greasemonkey script no longer works, so it had to be uninstalled. (On our system it is the darker of the 2 buttons.) The delete button is gone! Long live the delete button.

We got pimped in lifehacker! =D

What it looks like to be you 2

In light of not being able to get all our Mac dreams to come true, we fell back on another solution.

Btw, if you use a 10-switch adapter to connect a VGA monitor to the Mac, the Belkin manual for their adapter is excellent. Mode 1 worked excellently for us.

We love snugtech’s Safari browser tester!It’s not as public as some other previewers we have come across and it’s dead easy. So, hooray.

What we love about snugtech is that it’s private. We have been racking our brains to find another site we saw once that previewed with Safari similarly, although (and this is a bad choice) it displays results publically. Behold, we have found it (when snugtech went offline for a bit): iCapture. Dan Vine, the creator of iCapture, also has a nice utility that allows you preview on IE, if you don’t have that browser (Mac users, I am looking at you): ieCapture (currently in alpha test).

Something we’d forgotten in terms of coding out a style sheet is making IE-specific attributes. Last year, we used Eric Meyers’ asterisk hack, and that is what we had forgotten. Today we used a variation on that theme from cavemonkey50, which he is calling an underscore hack. They have the same effect. In short, what you do is add a special character (say, an asterisk or an underscore) in front of an attribute, and only IE will read it.

How it works. Two things make it possible: 1) the cascade part of CSS, and 2) IE’s stupidity (to put it bluntly). So define your attribute for all browsers but IE first. Then redefinte your attribute with an underscore in front of it. Other browsers will see this as poorly formed and skip it. But IE will blindly read it, accept it as a redefinition in the cascade, and use the second malformed attribute instead.