Now this is useful. A clever hacker has put together RSS feeds for tv listings. Big deal you say? Imagine using the ‘watches’ feature of FeedDemon to build your own customized news feed that automatically makes you aware of, oh, say, every mention of the NY Giants football team, or Lucille Ball or every episode of Law and Order (wait, strike that, too many episodes ;-)…anyway, then using a little more imagination, stitch this into your handy RSS Calendar and you’ve got….something cool? Too much TV to the detriment of your reading habits? I’ll vote for something cool and never miss an episode of Cowboy Beebop again.

If you’re like me, you’ve got gigs of mp3 on your hard drive, and perhaps you’ve been a little lax in terms of making sure the id3 tags are accurate when you ripped the music from your cd collection. Or maybe you’re grabbing a lot of it off of edonkey/dc++/usenet/caracho/whatever, where the metadata quality is all over the map. If you’ve got a portable mp3 player this can be a big hassle, since without accurate metadata the files won’t neccesarily play in the correct order or even let you know the artist and song title of the individual tracks. There are solutions to this, like itunes, mexp or the builtin media browsers in players like QCD and winamp, but each has its issues. My favorite tool up until now has been Tag & Rename, but it’s a little spendy for a one trick pony. Enter The Godfather. It’s donationware – give them what you think it’s worth – and it works great, integrating with the CDDB and Allmusic.com. The interface is equal to Tag & Rename’s, and it’s speedy. Check it out of your mp3 collection is starting to get unwieldy, it’s well worth the effort to clean now and then.

Longtime readers have been exposed to my rants about how the telecom and cable industries are trying to turn the internet into a broadcast medium by limiting the upstream bandwidth they provide their subscribers with, this despite the fact that they try and market services like digital telephony and videoconferencing that to one degree or another require upstream bandwidth. A few months ago Verizon announced it would be rolling out new higher-speed data services, and while I was in ‘extended away mode’ during my move to Saratoga Springs, some of the details were announced. $35 a month for 5Mbps down and 2 up is Verizon’s initial offering, with up to 30mpbs down/5 up to come (prices not announced). This is 8x faster upstream than my current time warner account permits, and since you’re reading this weblog, you know how and why I would use the increased upstream bandwidth (the streaming music server would return for example, as would the dedicated NWN server and possibly even and EQ emulator server). This is fantastic news. I’m not in their initial markets but this brings great hope for the future. Oh, and Time Warner? Wake the fuck up and bring me back my upstream, or lose my business, it’s that simple.

Why do such a thing? To broadcast MP3’s to your home stereo, for one. Or for the sheer geek joy of it 😉 Anyway, check out the Aurius, which is only $50, relatively inexpensive for this kind of device. Oh, PC only, no Mac drivers for now.

I’ve been researching the masters program I want to proceed with, and as part of that I’ve started documenting all kinds of resources I intend to bring to bear when I begin the program. This led me tonotebook, a cool wiki-like desktop app. In functionality it mimics some of the basics of a wiki, but since it runs on the desktop it’s extremely easy to get up and running. If you find yourself keeping notes on tons of sticky notes all over the place, you might find this a useful organizational tool. It runs on all OS’s, though for MacOSX you’ll need to have X11 installed.

My brother hooked me up with a gmail account , and after using it for a while, gmail has offered me the chance to pass on accounts to my friends. So. Who wants one? Respond in the comments and it’s yours, first come, first serve. Why would you want one? First for geek cachet, a gmail account is all the rage in certain dorky circles these days. Second, if you get in early, you can secure your real name, I got david.hamilton@gmail.com for example, which will come in very handy with my impending move. It’s easy to remember. Also Google is trying a new metaphor for managing mail – instead of folders where you store email by category, it tries to build ‘threads’ out of related mail that’s most akin to some usenet reader interfaces. Apple’s mail.app also is capable of doing something similar, though so far Google’s seems a little better at correctly deriving what ‘thread’ a piece of mail belongs in. The interface is also pretty good, it’s got Google’s trademark simplicity, and it has some features that are rare in webmail clients, like address autocomplete and keyboard shortcuts. All in all, after a week or so I really like it, much better than Yahoo and more refined than speedymail.

Anyway, drop a comment and the gmail address of your dreams may be yours.

Everyone is chattering about this the last couple of days – google is experimenting with adding RSS feeds for usenet newsgroups – actually ATOM feeds to be precise. But while everyone is chattering about it, few are explaning how to use it, including google themselves. Fortunately Nick Bradbury has posted simple to follow instructions on his blog.

This is really cool stuff. By and large the mainstream audience has missed out on usenet, in part because like IRC it’s somewhat difficult to become comfortable using it, and partly because the signal to noise ratio stinks, what with the constant spam and flame wars. Still as I tell anyone when given the opportunity, newsgroups are a fantastic resource. Perhaps google’s efforts to provide RSS feeds for them will expose them to a wider audience. Meanwhile it definitely makes it world’s easier for me to parse hundreds of groups using the ‘watches’ function of FeedDemon. This is well worth checking out if you have even a passing interest – fire up that RSS aggregator and experiment.

Engage your imagination before heading over to the Register and reading this short piece on recent progress in the nanotechnology field. Ponder research into artificial intelligence and especially neural networks, and using the newly discovered manufacturing technique to build one that is as dense as a human brain. Would we get a neural network capable of something approximating human intelligence?

I have no idea, but it’s fun to imagine the possibilities.

Most folks are probably aware that Google is chock full of features that aren’t always easy to figure out from their minimalist interface – things like a dictionary for example (type ‘define:word’ and google will provide a definition). Enter soople.com, which provides simple access to google’s extended features. If you have trouble memorizing all the different commands at google, give soople a try.

I was a little sorry to see that Trellix was shut down as of the 15th. Really you could tell for years that it wasn’t going to make it, but longtime readers of this blog might remember that the original publishing system for it was the first version of the Trellix web publisher, and even before it could publish to the web I really liked Trellix. It came out somewhere around 1994-1995 and was initially a novel text editor that combined some notions of nonlinear/hypertext editing with aspects of powerpoint style presentation stuff. I loved the original PC only version. When they made absolutely no dent in MS Word’s dominance of word processing the tool morphed into a desktop web publishing tool geared towards the novice user or someone who wanted ease of use over features. When that didn’t work out the sold that product to Globalscape, where it lives on as CuteSite Builder. Unfortunately they haven’t been updating it for years and it’s basically not worth much now. Meanwhile Trellix the company worked as a middleware vendor selling to web hosting companies, taking some of the ideas from the original Trellix and incorporating them in a browser-based web content editor. They seemed to be doing ok, selling their services to big hosting companies like Tripod and at one point bailing out Blogger, but I guess that business plan didn’t work out either and they were bought out by another hosting company, which let the last of the original Trellix staff go a couple of weeks ago.

It’s really a shame. Trellix had some interesting ideas about how to approach data management and publishing in the original Trellix app, and with Dan Bricklin behind it (he developed the first commercially successful spreadsheet – Visicalc – among other things) it seemed like they had they potential to build an interesting and useful new toolset.

If anyone knows how to acquire a copy of the original Trellix word processor I’d be interested. I watch ebay for it and while the website stuff shows up regularly, I’ve never caught the original Trellix for sale.

If you’re interested in the subject, Dan Bricklin himself keeps a weblog which he updates regularly and which has a lot of background material on the software he’s worked on and the companies he’s been involved with.