Take for example this Pedometer. Center the map on the area you’d like to measure, set it in record mode, then double click on the start point and then each additional point. The system will provide a total distance travelled as you add each point. Simple and useful and two thumbs up from me. It turns out my walk from the office to the post office is a mile longer than I thought at a little over 3 miles, as compared to the ~2 miles my car’s odometer was reporting.

It’s too bad that it wasn’t possible to keep the distance measuring tool found in the code google modeled their map system on (maps24) but this is the next best thing to it that I’ve come across.

If you’re in the market for an LCD monitor for your computer and you’d like to do a little comparison shopping, check out this super-handy collection of charts and diagrams that someone from bensbargains.net has put together.

Skype’s taken off bigtime in terms of popularity, and I’ve been considering switching over to it and ditching my cell and land line phones. Skype has one huge problem though, which is that it’s based on proprietary, closed source systems. If they become the predominant Voip provider we will have effectively switched from one proprietary vendor (the existing phone companies) to another, and we’ll confront the same sorts of issues with pricing and features that we have now. Enter Gizmo, which is based on the SIP standard that providers like Vonage use. Gizmo works on Macs and Win32 out of the box, with a linux version on the way. It’s free to download and comes with voicemail that Skype charges for, as well as conferencing and recording features. The downsides are that it’s still a little flaky, their callin (where you get a local number folks with regular phones can use to call you) service has fairly limited coverage right now, and most importantly it lacks the broad installed base that skype already has. In an effort to fix that, I encourage you to go download a copy. You might also find this piece which compares skype to gizmo and goes into more detail as to why we don’t want a repeat of history with the phone monopolies. My account name is the oh-so appropriate ‘davidhamilton,’ which leads to another observation – it pays to register these kinds of services quick so you can reserve your chosen identity.

Long ago there was a tool called Composer which came bundled with Netscape. For a lot of people it was the first html editing tool they tried. I hated it – it encouraged folks to write terrible font-tag laden html. Years later and the folks from Linspire have taken the remnants of Composer and turned it into Nvu, a free, cross platform, open source html editor. It’s relatively lightweight, works everywhere, and in comparison to the now bloated beyond belief Dreamweaver it’s a joy to use. This is not a tool for professionals who spend their days writing html, but it’s the perfect tool for that departmental coordinator who needs to occasionally edit an html page, or the class of students who need to build websites as part of their coursework. We’re using Nvu on the Skidmore campus to replace Dreamweaver in a lot of contexts – the public labs, for student use, and even for some departmental web development work. You can still end up with font tag laden html but it’s actually cleaner than the junked up code the average user is producing with Dreamweaver these days.

I happened across another decent free weblog editor for windows today, qumana. It’s got a nicer interface than w.bloggar and it’s no strings attached free. Definitely worth considering if you’re on windows and looking for something better than w.bloggar or the abysmal windows ecto client. On a mac, as before I still say nothing is better than ecto.

Because this was driving me fricking insane today, and because my google searches weren’t helping – if you’re using osx and following someone else’s tutorial in an effort to add additional directories to your path, say for example because you’ve installed the portage system and you need the port command to be in your path, then ignore what 99% of what folks are saying – all my efforts to use the .bashrc file to do this led to nothing but me swearing colorfully. Simply cp’ing .bashrc to .bash_profile did the trick though. Why no one, including me, is stating this obviously I have no idea. I’m no bash expert. All I can say is making my edits in .bash_profile works and .bashrc did not.

I inferred the answer from this handy bash tutorial.

Oh and if you’re like me and you never want to see an ls without an -al, add this to your .bash_profile: alias “ls”=”ls -al”

I posted about jotspot months ago – they had great buzz in the wiki community and I’ve been trying to get in on the beta ever since I heard of it. Anyway they’re finally live with their product and it is simply fantastic. It distinguishes itself from other wiki engines in a number of ways, most interesting being the way that you can construct new applications from your wiki using a set of simple tags. There are some great examples to be found on their site – anyone with moderate computer skills could build things like a task list or simple project management tools using jot, and they have a library of off the shelf tools to choose from too. They’ve also built in gui editing tools and the ability to use email to publish to the system, and they’ve stitched RSS into the system. The one downside is cost – this is a commercial endeavor. For free you get a wiki with a max page count of 50 and only a few users. This is sufficient for personal use in a variety of ways, but you won’t be able to scale up without running into the need to purchase a license, and they start at $9 a month. I don’t begrudge them the need to make money but I’m majorly bummed that this makes it unlikely I’ll roll this out at skidmore in anything beyond testing. I’ll be keeping my eyes on them to see how things evolve, maybe they’ll ad an academic pricing model. Oh, and you can check out dlh.jot.com – most of it is hidden away right now but if you want to join in the fun let me know.

I posted about the Mediagate MG-25 a few months ago. We got one in-house for testing at skidmore. We concluded it wasn’t appropriate for instructor use at the school because it’s a little touchy and the hardware doesn’t feel all that solid, though if you’re computer literate and looking to get content out to your television the thing is excellent and is a great value. Anyway I happened across another candidate, the Rapsody RSH-100k, which uses the more common 3.5 hard drive, has an internal display, serves as a USB host so you can copy materials to it directly using thumb drives or various other flash memory cards, can stream music to your stereo using an integrated FM transmitter (not that I would advise actually doing that), and costs around $200. The primary flaw is a lack of network connectivity, if it had it this thing would be perfect, feature-wise. One thing that puzzles me a bit is why these devices aren’t making their way to the US, you’d think there would be a big market for them if they were available and advertised. Most folks in north america don’t even realize they exist, meanwhile in asia, Europe and Russia these are common, judging by what I am turning up in google searches on them. I’ll keep pointing them out as they ship, hopefully they’ll take off here. There’s a possible version of the future where I don’t need the equivalent of a tivo attached to my tv, I just need a device like this that’s being filled via RSS and torrents from my subscription list/s.

Check out the uber-slick Giant-Ass image viewer. If you’ve seen google maps you have the general idea how this works, though it’s not (yet) feature comparable to google’s interface. This could be immediately useful to anyone modestly computer literate who needs to make large format images available over the web, and if the developer sticks with it and does everything he hopes to, this is going to end up being an enormously useful tool. I could have used this at Bowdoin on a number of projects, including The Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan site I worked on over the years.

Pawfaliki is one of the easiest server-based wikis to get going – it’s a single php file and yet it’s very featureful – RSS feed, table of contents, access control and more. Chances are very good that if your webhost supports php, all you need do is upload this single file to their server and you’re in business.