( four embedded videos after the cut... )
And for search engines and those who can't be bothered to dive into the cut, that was Sowelu's Mamoru Beki Mono, Bonnie Pink's Water Me, Ai Otsuka's Planetarium, and Namie Amuro's Can You Celebrate.
I think I just lost all my manly-man cred. Did I ever have any?
Anyway, in no particular order, here's what I want to get done:
Customize Twitter Friends Feed: I need to customize my twitter friends feed so that it won't spam my feed reader with @replies I don't care about. I need to set my preferences on a per-twitterer basis. I really enjoy all @replies from some of my friends, but not all. Maybe I'll break down and find an app that already has the feature, but I prefer having just one place aggregate all the feed activity I'm interested in. [Edit: Biz is going to do this himself!]Make a Dictionary Popup: I loved the DQSD mwd popup definition result. But merriam-webster.com has a history of changing the layout of their page so that maintaining the mwd.xml search became onerous. It's time to replace that popup definition with one from aonaware. Here's the API call I'm most interested in: DefineInDict, with "gcide" for the dictId. [Edit: Completed!]- iTunes library rsync with OpenTape: As originally hinted.
RSS and Atom feeds are a lot of fun! The most common use of these feeds is to subscribe to them in a feed reader so that you can browse through individual articles from multiple sources in chronological order.Another fun thing to do with them is to create a lifestream. That's a collection of feeds associated with a person. The first one that caught my attention was Jeremy Keith's. Mine is stylized identically to his, but the back-end is different, and the functionality is different. I'll cover that in a different post.
Creating my lifestream put me in a position to discover which tech companies provide the most and least useful services. For example, I think it's awesome that Hulu provides a feed for which videos I watch. It's also awesome that Netflix offers different feeds (sent/enqueued/etc.) for their users' queues.
Here are the three companies that I thought would get it, but really ended up frustrating me:
- Amazon does not provide an Atom or RSS feed for its users' wishlists.
- Shelfari (owned by Amazon) does not provide a feed for its users' shelves.
- YouTube does not provide a user-oriented feed for its users' favorited videos.
Their users want to draw attention to the best of the products these companies promote and offer. But Amazon, Shelfari and YouTube don't provide the mechanism. That's a bit like saying, "we don't want more eyeballs on our products."
Ideally, you could have a feed of the items you added to your Amazon wishlist, sorted chronologically by the date you added the item to your wishlist. Amazon doesn't provide that. That's really frustrating, because if you go to your wishlist page, it says, "added [date]" right there, next to each item.
http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Version=2006-06-07&Sort=DateAdded&
Service=AWSECommerceService&ResponseGroup=ListFull&Operation=ListLookup&
ListType=WishList&ListId=[id]&AssociateTag=[assoc]&AWSAccessKeyId=[key]
Extract item.Item.ItemAttributes.Title and item.DateAdded from each item, and insert them into a custom feed accordingly. Voila, the feed that Amazon should be providing itself.
Shelfari suffers from the same problem as with Amazon. You can get a widget. But you can't get a feed that says when you added the book to your shelf, or when you started reading it, or when you finished and reviewed the book. Users have been asking Shelfari for that for nine months.
I don't have a workaround for this one. It's better to just use a services that provides the right feeds, like librarything.com or goodreads.com.
YouTube has awesome feed support. That keyword support is brilliant. So it breaks my heart to say that they really missed the boat when it comes to favorited videos. YouTube does support a feed of video that have been favorited by a user.
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/
But the videos aren't sorted by when they were favorited. That's really frustrating, because when you go to your profile page, it says right there, when each video was favorited.
The profile page presents the info, but the favorites feed doesn't. Instead, they're sorted by when the videos were most recently commented upon.
If we're going to subscibe to a user's list of favorited videos, it's pretty safe to assume that we're interested in when that user favorited those videos. If they favorited something recently, we want it at the top of that feed. Simple.
My only workaround for the current feed involves parsing their feed, and comparing each item against a previously gathered list of known favorites. If there are any new favorites, add them with the current timestamp.
[Edit] Youtube eventually made the feed we need.
Summary
We, as users, shouldn't have to be coding around the services that these companies offer. The companies should recognize the obvious value inherent in useful user feeds that point to their most popular products.
C'mon, Amazon, Shelfari, and YouTube. Give us our feeds.
People who have been tagged must write their answers on their blogs & replace any question that they dislike with a new question formulated by themselves. Tag 8 people to do this quiz.1. What are your nicknames? Daddy, Honey, Worm. On-line: dblume
2. What do you do before bedtime?
One of:
- Program in Python/PHP/C++
- Watch a NetFlix Video. (Anime/Obscure Fiction/Documentary)
- Read Fiction/Manga/TPB/Wired/Play Magazine
3. What fandom(s) are you most into at the moment? Not regular fandoms, but: Focus, Viz Pictures
4. Favorite scent? Coffee, Irish coffee.
5. What skill are you developing right now? Practicing piano with my daughter, rock climbing, programming as a means to find a better visual display of quantative information.
6. What do you eat the most? I'll answer for treats: Men's Pocky on Friday is a special treat. Then there's a javachip frappucino on the weekend.
7. Do you trust easily? Yes.
8. What was your first big fandom? Anime in the '80s, Hong Kong Cinema in the '90s.
9. Is there anything that has made you unhappy these days? My mother's health.
10. Do you have a good body-image? Yes.
11. Is being tagged fun? Stop tagging me, everybody!
12. What websites do you visit daily? I'll let my lifestream answer that.
13. Who are currently the most important people to you? My family.
14. What kind of person do you think the person who tagged you is? Intelligent. (But who tagged me? Not who you think!)
15. What’s the last song that got stuck in your head? Namie Amuro's Can You Celebrate? (Just 'cause it's playing.)
16. What’s your favorite item of clothing? Life is Good clothing.
17. What's better, to give or to receive: They can each be pretty good!
18. What turns you on? The idea of my wife doing the Caramelldansen POPOTAN dance for me on the way to the bedroom.
19. What would you like to achieve within the next 3 years? Have the kids be confident and happy in school, play musical instruments, have good friends, and positive memories of / associations with their family.
20. What should you be doing right now? Finances. Transforming Bumblebee.
21. Do you always use conditioner when washing your hair? Please. With this head of hair?
Tagging others? How about: Pastilla, Zannah & Ninjanuity, Narilka and Zadesquideb. (Ha ha! Zadesquideb! Only seems right to throw you into the mix.) Anybody who's willing to share.
I'm pleased with the way Karma Medic has turned out. She help me and all her other friends. Since I created her, I also gave her my password and authorized her to post in my stead, when I'm away.
Suppose I die in the near future. I'll keep posting to Plurk (because she'll be doing it), and she'll keep replying to my posts, because it's her job to reply to her friends' plurks.
While I'm dead, I'll be having conversations with myself at Plurk.
Here are the three alternating things she'll do when she's plurking on my behalf:
- Post a line that I've queued for her ahead of time. (I've got a running set of these. Complete with online interface for adding more, whenever I think of it.)
- Post an image that flickr has determined to be very interesting.
- Post an interesting image from a specific tag group from flickr.
- awesome, dark
- awesome, light
- san francisco, beautiful
- robot, awesome
- steampunk, cool
- space, beautiful
- rock, climbing
- seattle, beautiful
I used to make lists with 3x5 index cards. (I have much love for that physical medium.) Then I wrote a bare-bones web 1.0 todo list. These things worked, but they had problems.
The 3x5 index cards aren't convenient for making my annual self-review at work. I'm not interested in sorting through the ones I kept. Besides, I like tossing them in the recycle bin when I'm done with them. It's rewarding.
The web service is under-featured, and I can't write any company proprietary tasks on it because it isn't contained within our intranet.
Enter TodoPaper.
A colleague at work uses the Macintosh product TaskPaper to keep himself on task at work. He showed me how simple it was to use, and I was instantly hooked with the utility of it. I thought about writing a Windows version of the product, but then I found TodoPaper.
Pure Utility
TaskPaper and TodoPaper use the same document format and data entry techniques. The document type is a plain text file, and formatting relies on simple rules. (Simpler than wiki markup.)
- Heading end with a colon.
- Tasks start with a hyphen.
- Tags start with an at sign (@).
- Tabs can be used to specify hierarchy. (Collapsible, too.)
Secret Project:
Structure:
- Basic element shape @done(2008-06-13)
- Programmatic generation of thrusters @done(2008-06-14)
- Home base coordinates
- Hit points @done(2008-06-13)
Behavior:
- Idle duration @done(2008-06-16)
- Wandering
- Target acquisition
- Chasing
Why didn't I write my own? Because Jordan Sherer already took care of the details. In addition to the basics mentioned here, which is mostly what I really need, he made the presentation very customizable, supports tagging, filtering and searching of the tasks, and even has some expert level features, like a quick-entry dialog that comes up when you press a keyboard shortcut in any other application.
TodoPaper even has an online forum, and Jordan's very active and responsive to his users' requests. I have every belief that he's going to continue to support and improve on the product. The product and its workflow has sold me.
Full disclosure: I should receive a free license to the application. I'd have written a positive review for it anyway.
I'm looking closely at LibraryThing (old, popular), Shelfari (newer, prettiest, not so fully featured), and Listal (newer, pretty, very general). It'd be fun to share and compare books. Do any of you use services like these?
Currently, there's an unfortunate bias in the results segregating Christian literature from others, but as more people provide their books, the Unsuggester will become even more useful and entertaining.
And let's not forget that Neil named his other daughter after a drag queen in a Lou Reed song, and she loves it.
I guess this saves me the trouble of doing it myself?
It's cool when an idea gets such traction that different people (Jeremy, Michael, Chris) can't help but implement it. (Kirstin and Chris are practically racing to flush it out. All I have to do is wait a day or two, and I'll get a mature product! :-) ) Now, who's going to monetize it?
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
narilka , yours is here), I've discovered Jeremy Keith's lifestream page, where he aggregates the feeds from all over the web that are generated from his online actions. He describes it over at his blog.I think it's brilliant, and I may do the same thing. (But the web isn't tracking me as closely as it is him, yet.)
Here are some present day options. This is a quickly expanding niche. Better solutions are on the horizon.
Single-Computer, Encrypted (disk and transfer): Mozy. I use this service for my primary computer, and I recommend it. It's only about safe, automatic backups. But that's a good thing, in and of itself.
Multiple-Computer, Encrypted (disk), Synchronizable: The September 2006 Dr. Dobb's has an article by Eric Bergman-Terrell about a home-grown solution that synchronizes files with .NET 2.0, Amazon's S3 and FTP. (There's also rsync, but on a Windows system, I don't think there's a TortoiseRsync. ^_^)
Multiple-Computer, Encrypted (transfer), Synchronizable and Regressable: Use a Subversion repository over https or svn+ssh. A few web hosting companies already provide single-click solutions for creating repositories. On Windows systems, TortoiseSVN with PuTTY's Pageant makes for a very nice, seamless experience.
TechCrunch reviewed online storage alternatives here.
Anywho, here's the best of what I've found:
You can't add a new series to your queue, and expect future episodes to magically appear when they get added to Netflix's database.
So, I have to keep a little journal around reminding me that at some point in the future, I have to revisit these series and add new DVDs to my queue. For example, today:
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: up to 5 available (of 7 total)
Samurai 7: up to 6 available (of 7)
Fullmetal Alchemist: up to 10 available (of 13+)
[Edit] This reveals way too much about myself. Luckily, I've already made my own little brood of people, and they have to love me, regardless of my taste in pop culture. :)
1. The Web's Visual Standards get Adapted
Microsoft's finally playing ball! The newest Internet Explorer will better support CSS and .png graphics. That makes maintaining the front end of our sites much easier! And that lets website designers spend their time making awesome sites, not resolving browser incompatibilities. Everybody already knows the buzz about the backend. I'm hyped about the front-end, that tip-of-the-iceberg that the user sees. The .png format is going to go a long way towards easing our lives, not to mention just one clean css file.
More visual standards will bubble to the top. It's nice that everyone, including Microsoft, is adapting the standard feed icon. That, and services like gravatar are making all the nice spots on the web feel comfortable. You recognize people and resources on any given website.
2. Mature Services, Freeware and Shareware
I've been using many things sourceforge for a very long time. There's always been a little pride and principle involved in my choice of software. But now, there are quite a few products that I prefer to their commercial bretheren based on feature-set alone. Props go out to WordPress (especially for the features in 2.0), LiveJournal (especially for the friends page, and seducing so many bloggers from their own hand-crafted sites), FileZilla (an ftp client), and 7-Zip (file compression/decompression). I don't see any compelling reason to buy their commercial counterparts.
3. Firefox AddOns
Life is further made easier by Firefox's AddOns, especially the del.icio.us addon, the bookmark synchronizer, and the web designer addon. Invaluable!
Pool Light, by Howard Schatz.
All the photos are quite graceful and inspiring. When my sister-in-law saw the book, she had to borrow it as inspiration for her own paintings.
I Feel Sick, by Jhonen Vasquez.
I never got into Jhonen's other works, Johnny or Invader. But I Feel Sick was just the right thing for me.
Expedition, by Wayne Douglas Barlowe
This book contains illustrations that might not be photo-realistic, but still have an element of believability to them.
The Hellboy TPBs illustrated by Mike Mignola.
There's something about Mike's artwork. His lines are simple and crisp. The artwork is not overproduced, and somehow it's very affecting.
The Sin City TPBs, by Frank Miller
More bold, simple lines, and great use of negative space. (Did I use that the right way?) The same can be said of the original TPB, The Dark Knight Returns.
