iPod Battery Pack and more on San Francisco
Posted on January 31, 2006
Filed Under Macintosh | Leave a Comment
While in San Francisco last week, I was outside of the San Francisco Marriott for all of about 4 hours. Turns out, the hotel was a mere block away from the San Francisco Apple Store. Of course, I had to stop in. This was my first time in one of Apple’s two-story outlets with the glass staircase.
It was crowded, but had a much better selection of iPod accessories (duh!) than other stores. A nice selection on both floors, as a matter of fact.
I wasn’t planning to buy anything, but I did walk out with the Belkin Battery Pack and I’m glad I did.
On the flight to San Francisco, my iPod battery gave out about halfway there. This Belkin do-dad allowed me to watch video on the iPod for as many hours as I had regular old AA batteries to feed it. It’s a bit bulky so I wouldn’t recommend this device when jogging or walking around, but who watches video when they’re running around anyway? It was perfectly comfortable in my hand on the plane.
So now the battery pack sits in my purse, and I never have to ask myself “is this video-worthy?” again, worried that I didn’t have enough of a charge to watch the entire podcast or episode.
Speak of San Francisco…the homeless problem is much worse than in any other city I’ve been in, including New York. I guess the combination of unreal housing prices and mild temperatures are partly to blame. While walking around the downtown area mid afternoon, dressed in my corporate-like attire (so I stood out like a sore thumb), I couldn’t go more than 1/2 a block without being approached for money. Finally, I plugged up with my iPod headphones so as not to be bothered as much. I felt so bad for these people, but there was nothing I could do at that moment to help them.
Oh, and I highly recommend Millennium restaurant. I guess the description on the website says it best:
Millennium Restaurant is dedicated to supporting the essential earthly concepts of organic food production, small farms, sustainable agriculture, recycling and composting. We cook with fresh produce delivered every day, and choose organic whenever possible. We believe that a gourmet dining experience can be created out of vegetarian, healthy, and environmentally friendly foods. We are proud to state that our restaurant is completely free of genetically modified foods.
It sounds artsy-fartsy, but the decor is upscale and eclectic and the food is fantastic. Not cheap, but not ridiculously overpriced either. It’s the one expensive meal I had there.
Cloudmark Desktop spam filter: so far so good
Posted on January 31, 2006
Filed Under Internet & Technology | Leave a Comment
10 days ago, I blogged that I started using Cloudmark Desktop as my email spam filter again.
I’m incredibly pleased with it so far. See for yourself:
Emails processed to date 2,285 Spam caught to date 1,156 Spam I’ve blocked to date 23
50% of my incoming mail is spam and Cloudmark is getting it at 99% accuracy. I have yet to catch a false positive. I’ve set spam to go to the deleted items folder marked as read. Sometimes I scan the folder, for the past few days I haven’t bothered. I have mail set to stay on the server for a week and all email, spam and all, is automatically forwarded to Gmail. If anything gets dumped from Outlook that shouldn’t, I can still get it back.
Spam is almost a non-issue to me again. Hasn’t been this good since SpamSieve.
iTunes slloooowwww downloads
Posted on January 31, 2006
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Hmmm…wish I could figure this out. I’ve Googled and looked through the Apple support boards and while others are reporting similar issues, it’s not close enough for me to nail down the cause.
iTunes 6.0.2 on my dual 2Ghz G5 downloads very slowly. It can take hours to get a podcast. I know that’s dependent on the remote server speed. But sites that used to be very fast are now painfully slow.
More often than not, iTunes is checking for new podcasts before it has finished updating from the last sweep.
Before I left for San Francisco, I purchased an episode of Commander in Chief that I missed, hoping to watch it on the plane. Three hours later, I had to disconnect my iPod without the episode because it was still downloading. That’s just not right.
My computer is connected to a cable modem through a Linksys router. FTP and HTTP downloads are fast as normal. It’s just iTunes that drags. And I think it’s only been since iTunes 6.01 or 6.02.
Unofficial LOST podcast goes off the air
Posted on January 31, 2006
Filed Under Entertainment | 1 Comment
Bummer. One of my favorite “guilty pleasure” podcasts, LOST: The Transmission is going off the air. Each week, this married Hawaiian couple would recap and dissect each episode of Lost. It was a lot more entertaining than it sounds. Their podcast had gotten incredibly popular and it was taking so much of their lives that they decided to call it quits.
It draws attention to the fact that while folks have figured out a way to monetize blogs, the same can’t be said for podcasts. You can put ads all over a website. You can join a blog network. Ads and content can co-exist easily on a website. On a podcast, you can only have one message at a time. There are only 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day. That’s a lot of noise competing for precious little time with your ears. If you have a minute of advertising, that’s a minute less of ad-free content. Compared to something like AdWords, effective podcast advertising is out of the reach of most businesses which leaves the average mid-sized podcast little chance of income to make the time investment worth it.
A place for your stuff
Posted on January 30, 2006
Filed Under Misc. | 2 Comments
If you’re a PC user…it’s Onfolio:
If you’re a Mac user, an answer appears to be Yojimbo:
I’m just playing with the Yojimbo demo now, but on first glance they seem to be invested in a similar space. These applications recognize that the reality is that your input isn’t that neat and organized. Sometimes you have a file, sometimes you have a link, sometimes you have a PDF or an email message. You have to store that information in some logical system that lets you search and pull out what you need when you need it.
Onfolio is more expensive, but it’s also far more complex. In addition to just collecting information, you can also publish what you’ve stored in a variety of ways and you can add a lot of information about your material in such a way that an academic or researcher would need. Onfolio also gives you the option to store a bookmark as a link or as a complete local copy of the page. This is helpful if you think the page may change later and you have to capture it exactly as it currently appears. Onfolio can run as a stand-alone application and in a sidebar in both Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Yojimbo’s main advantage (besides bringing this kind of cataloging to OS X) is that it’s by the fine folks at Barebones. They make good stuff. But since I’ve already purchased Onfolio I’m not seeing a compelling reason to spend $39 to have a similar basket on OS X. I would love something like this that was cross-platform/server-based so I could store information in a central location (on a LAN, not the Internet), regardless of the computer that originally contained it.
