One device to rule them all…
The timeline reads from left to right (obviously), and spans about 10-12 years. I couldn’t find my original Palm Pilot Personal. It would have sat to the left of the Visor. I also don’t show any of my original Windows CE devices, like the Philips Velo. And I suppose I should note that I actually have two of several of these gadgets.
I’ve always been interested in connectivity for PDAs. I had the snap-on modem for the Palm Pilot and the OmniSky wireless modem for the Visor. I paired my Zodiac with the Sony phone via Bluetooth and was surfing the net pretty reliably, though slowly, with that setup. I had a WiFi SD card that worked with the Zodiac, and even set up a Bluetooth Access Point in my house.
It’s interesting to see the incremental evolutionary steps between all of these devices. But it’s amazing to comprehend the generation leap the iPhone makes over everything before it.
Now that I have this photo, it’s off to the recycler for most of these things.
When I got my new Breedlove guitar last year, I ordered my usual set of Thomastik-Infeld strings from JustStrings.com (my favorite place to buy strings). Unfortunately, the brand that works so well on my electrics and older acoustics didn’t sound right at all on the Breedlove. The normally soft and sweet Plectrum series just sounded lifeless and dead, and the standard Spectrum series sounded humongous but squeaky and not musical.
I went through several other brands and strings types, including D’Addario, Martin, and even the fabled DR Rares, but nothing sounded quite right.
I soon discovered that Thomastik-Infeld had commissioned a fascinating character named John Pearse to design some strings for them, and when I realized that he has been making his own brand of strings for decades (among many other music products), I ordered them immediately. I’m glad I did. His standard set of Phosphor Bronze strings are fantastic. They are perfectly balanced, with sweet clear highs, full bass, well-defined tone, and ultimately very musical. These strings brought the Breedlove to life, and will be my standard set from now on. Note that they are not coated in any way, so they’ll need changing on a regular basis. Fine with me.
Alas, John Pearse himself passed away just a couple of months ago, but his incredible strings should live on through his company, Breezy Ridge. I myself am now a life long customer. And I think I’ll order his video and book about Cooking with Wine…
Finally! Microsoft just released a beta update for Entourage 2008 (the Mac Office email client). Entourage already works fairly well with Exchange Server, but the update adds some critically missing features. Here’s a list from Microsoft:
Tasks, Notes, and Categories now sync with the Exchange Server Resolving names against the Global Address List now works via EWS/HTTP. This means you no longer need to be connected to your corporate network via VPN to resolve names when addressing an e-mail or meeting invitation Improved Autodiscover. In Entourage for Exchange Web Services Beta, the Autodiscover service keeps user account settings up-to-date after the account setup.
• It runs in the background every time that you start Entourage.
• It also runs at a server-defined interval, typically every hour, to make sure that the Exchange Server settings are always kept up-to-date
For me, category support is the big win, as I use categories to sync Exchange calendars with Google Calendar. I just need to make sure our corporate Exchange Server has the right rollup patches, and I’ll give the beta a spin.
Mac Mojo: The Office for Mac Team Blog
I posted an update to the (amazing!) Suck-O-Meter [suckometer, suckometeriphone] app for the iPhone. Just head to http://www.suckometer.com using Safari, or visit Apple’s Web Apps site. It will auto-detect your iPhone or iPod Touch, and you’ll soon have a greater awareness of the number of sucky things around you.
The Suck-O-Meter can now run as a stand-alone app if your iPhone is running OS version 2.1 or later. Just click the “+” button and choose “Add to Home Screen”. This lets the app load a lot faster, and you won’t see any of the usual browser stuff.
I also removed the Amazon.com ad, and replaced it with an ad banner from AdMob. Previously, there was a 1-in-5 chance you would see the Amazon ad after each “Does it SUCK?” test. After six months and tens of thousands of page views, I’ve made a whopping $1.43 in ad revenue. I’m not really trying to make money from this thing, but I do want to know what kind of conversion rates exist for various iPhone ad models. The AdMob banner appears on the bottom of the screen all the time, and at the moment, seems to think that Suck-O-Meter users are highly interested in a vacation. Makes sense to me!
Finally, I moved the hot-spot for the about box from the previously dedicated “About…” link on the bottom. Now you can just click the “Suck-O-Meter” title to see the about box and contact support. You know… if you need support.
For a gamer…
To solve some of the compatibility issues with the Atom newsfeed, I’ve decided to route the feed through FeedBurner. Google acquired FeedBurner last year, and there has apparently been some discontent with the service, but it seems fine to me. The new feed URL is: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/mikeyp. This is the default feed when you subscribe in the browser, or click on the Subscribe button. The original Atom and RSS feeds will continue to work fine.
Originally, I wanted every element of the blog to be served directly from MikeyP.com, mainly to optimize page loads, preserve XHTML validation, and guarantee decent rendering fallback to mobile devices. But I’m using a lot of “outsourced” services on the site now, including:
These services essentially transfer the bandwidth burden from my site to the client browser and/or service host, while requiring JavaScript support on the client. However, not all of them validate with correct XHTML. Generally, widgets often don’t “encode” ampersands because they inject HTML instead of XHTML, which will cause XHTML validation to fail.
I finally deprecated the old RSS 0.91 feed for this blog and replaced it with a proper Atom 1.0 feed. The RSS feed still works and always will, but you may want to re-subscribe with the Atom feed at some point. The feed URL is: http://www.mikeyp.com/weblog/index.atom. You can also click on the subscribe link on the side of the page, or click the little Feed icon 
in your browser.
UPDATE: See entry about feedburner.
I'm also trying out the AddToAny service which automatically shares posts to numerous community web sites. There is a now a little "Share" link at the bottom of each post. Click it to send the post to news sites, bookmark sites, Facebook, or whatever. I was tempted to use another service called AddThis, but they embed a little flash file in every link. Except for embedded items in posts, like videos, I'm trying to keep the site flash-free.
I have a DIY video security system at the house. It uses a Linux box with two video capture cards connected to two security cameras. The Linux box runs an app called motion [motion, motionrpm] that will capture images and videos when motion is detected in a video frame. It works extremely well, except that I need to leave the Linux box running 24/7. It uses between 60-70 watts according to the Kill-A-Watt, so it's a prime candidate for lowering the power bill.
The motion wiki pointed me to a box called the Aviosys IP Video 9100A ![[B000HBVTCA]](http://www.mikeyp.com/css/external.gif)
. It takes up to four composite video inputs, and serves up either snapshots or a real-time video stream over the network. Basically, it's a little Linux box that runs in under 5W. Sold!
Here's the before and after shot, with both boxes plugged into a WiFi bridge.
The motion software supports IP cameras natively, so I set up the software on my main Linux server, pointed it at the 9100A, and just like that, no more extra 65W Linux box running 24/7.
Even better, the guys at Yoics have developed an alternate firmware that allows direct access to JPGs for each video device. It also provides a very nice iPhone-optimized view of the cameras. Their firmware is highly recommended.
When I added the Google Reader Widget to this site, I chose the style "none", which inherits the site's style and layout. However, it did some odd things with margins, so I wanted to style it manually. Google doesn't provide any styling documentation, but a quick inspection using Opera's "Show Structural Elements" option in the Author Mode button revealed class names. Here they are:
/* google reader widget */
div.reader-publisher-module {} /* container for list */
div.reader-publisher-module ul li {} /* list items */
div.f {} /* "Read More" link */Also note that links in the Google Reader Widget don't have escaped ampersands, which produces invalid XHTML 1.0.
As much as I enjoyed creating the Rock/Paper/Scissors captcha [morerpscaptcha, rpscaptchasandwich, rpscaptcha] scheme for comments on this blog, the commenting system has otherwise been fairly primitive. I've been exploring ideas for enhancing the system and including some kind of global authentication like Google Connect, Facebook Connect, or Gravatars.
But it looks like a the guys at Disqus have most of this covered, so I'm going to give their system a shot. They support their own registration system as well as Facebook Connect, so if you have a Facebook account (with 150 million users, who doesn't these days?), you can post with your existing account.
I'm using the Javascript version of Disqus for now. If it works out, I'll convert to the backend API, which might make the pages load a bit faster. I also need to take a crack at restyling their default comment thread, which I'll do when I overhaul the rest of the site.
Comments that were posted with the previous system are still visible on the blog in the "Legacy Comments" section. However, only Disqus comments are counted in the "(#) comments" link on the main page.
The 7 year old boot drive in my Linux box crapped out, so I decided to remove it and boot from the secondary (better) drive. If you're clever, you can reassign mounts in /etc/fstab, update /etc/lilo.conf, run lilo -r /dev/sdxxx, and boot without problems from the new drive.
I'm not that clever, so I have a Linux boot CD handy to patch things up. And of course, I had a problem getting lilo to work while the old drive was still in the machine, but it was easy to resolve after removing the dead drive, booting the CD, mounting the new drive, and doing the lilo routine again.
After booting the machine with the newly lilo'd drive, the OS loaded up as expected, and I was up and running as if nothing changed.
Except that the network no longer worked. Wha? I removed a hard drive. Why would the network stop working?
I have two network cards in the machine, a 1Gb card as eth1 that requires special drivers, and 100Mb backup card as eth0 that has drivers in the kernel. It turned out that udev detected a general hardware change when I removed the drive, and added a line in /etc/udev/rules.d/60-interface.rules that set eth0 to be eth1. And that caused the wrong drivers to load for the wrong card.
I love Linux.
As usual, today's MacWorld keynote was scheduled to occur during my morning commute. As a card-carrying geek, I like to follow the keynote live via liveblogs or Twitter. I have a dashboard mount in my car for my iPhone, so I fired up the Twitterfon app and attempted to catch the keynote Twitter updates during my drive. However, after one minute, the iPhone would blank and lock the screen as it usually does, preventing me from seeing Twitterfon updates.
Normally, I use the iPod app on the iPhone to listen to music and podcasts during the drive. When audio is playing on the iPod, the iPhone does not auto-lock. In fact, you can leave the audio running in the background while using other apps. Perfect!
I opened the iPod app, started an album, switched back to Twitterfon, and enjoyed the MacWorld keynote updates throughout my commute. Cool.
I replaced the generic search function on this blog with a custom Google Search. It provides much faster search results, and lightens the load on the server. I'll add highlights to the search results at some point.
I also replaced the Link Blog section with the list of blog items I'm sharing on Google Reader. I switched my feed reader from Bloglines to Google Reader several months ago, and haven't looked back. The formatting of the Link Blog list is a little weird right now, so I plan to spruce it up when I overhaul the stylesheet for the site.
Sorry about all of the test posts that may have appeared in your feed reader. I've decided to give this blog software (good old blosxom) a bit of a reboot, and try to bring it up to some more modern standards.
This weekend I added support for MetaWeblogAPI and MoveableTypeAPI, which will let me post from external sources. In particular, I can now use Windows Live Writer to create posts. If you're on a Windows machine, and you haven't tried Live Writer, you must give it a shot. This is great software.
The Meta support comes from the BXR project, along with patches from mattn-san and a couple of tweaks of my own.
More to come!
