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The folks over at incompetech.com have created a cool free service for all of your graphing needs. You can configure various kinds of graph paper and generate PDF files once you’re done. Here is a sample view of the configuration screen for a basic square grid:
This is great resource for gamers who often need graph paper to map out scenarios. Check out all of the generators here:
http://www.incompetech.com/beta/plainGraphPaper/
Wow, that’s quite a lineup of shows. South Park!
Apple releases new stuff to the public at a dizzying pace. Google too. This has to be a huge part of the success of both companies. Consumers like to see new stuff on a regular basis. Or, at least this consumer does ;-)
Over in Microsoft-land, this year has been affectionately named The Year of Release by Microsoftees since almost all teams will be releasing the fruits of the last 5 years labor in and around 2006. Windows Vista, .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 (in Nov ‘05), MS Sql Server, Team Foundation family of products, to name just a few.
Still, should we wait 5 years for an OS update? Consider the release schedule of the Mac OS: 10.0 ("Cheetah", March 24, 2001), 10.1 ("Puma", September 29, 2001), 10.2 ("Jaguar", August 13, 2002), 10.3 ("Panther", October 24, 2003), and 10.4 (“Tiger”, April 29, 2005) (from KernelThread).
Now that’s a release schedule.
Nobody makes me want to let them into my allowed sites like a site that has a sense of humor:
“Grr! A popup blocker may be preventing Gmail from opening the page. If you have a popup blocker, try disabling it to open the window.”
Update: Here’s another:
A few Bloglines quips.
First, as most Bloglines users can probably attest, they haven’t substantially changed their service in a long, long time. This is no news to anyone. In their defense, the one feature I noticed that they added a little while back was their excellent well-designed mobile version.
Second, since they marke a feed as fully read when you click on it, I find myself letting feeds that have accumulated a lot of post age even more since I’m afraid I won’t have the time to fully go through each post. I know I can mark the entire feed as “unread” or pick and choose posts that I’d like to keep. However, I wish I could configure bloglines to present a single “page” of posts and I can nibble away at a backlog at my own pace without a lot of “Keep as New” clicking.
If you read my last post on Hamachi, you may be wondering how this experiment has been going. Well, today I went to the site to see that there were a few new things I’d like to talk about.
The UI has had some minor cosmetic changes. The internal options panel got a lot more options (read below).
Also, premium accounts get that little yellow swirly star thing in the lower-right corner of the hamachi window. Clients logged in as premium show with a star instead of a little red circle.
First, there is a new client. The new client is a 1.0 beta and it sports these new features:
Second, there is a new my hamachi section of the web site. It looks like this and you can get details on all your networks and machines:
Finally, you can purchase time-limited premium accounts for $4.95 a month (per client install) which goes down to something like $3.25 a month if you buy a 360–day license.
The premium account allows you to run hamachi as a service.
I tried out the premium service on four machines for 30 days. Two at work and two at home. This allowed me to finally run hamachi properly as a Windows service. Thus, remote desktop (mstsc) finally started working! Yes, it’s very fast! I wish I had some benchmarks against my work VPN but I just don’t have any.
In any case, I can still enjoy secure file sharing, iTunes music sharing, and remote desktop as I mentioned in my original post.
I highly recommend you check this out. I’ll be going to San Francisco at the end of the month and I can’t wait to play my entire music collection and access my home computer from the hotel Internet connection. We’ll see how that goes.
Via boing boing, what a crazy insane commercial for Honda. All sound effects are done by a chorus of, well, humans. Official link here.
The 7:48am train actually came at 7:48 today and I missed it. For months, months, it has been stopped about a 1/4 mile east of the station, easily within view, sipping it’s morning brew of electricity from the third rail. We all watched it sit there until it decided to come to life around 7:55am and crawl to the platform where we all happily jumped on.
Today it just marched up at it’s regularly scheduled time and I was caught unawares as I approached from the remote parking lot below.
If this continues, it will result in a major disruption of my morning schedule. I depended on the lateness since it allowed me to put my kids on the school bus at 7:40am.
I wonder if the sudden timeliness of the train is the result of a resolution to some longstanding scheduling problem. I hope not, or I’ll have to come in earlier and miss my kids in the morning.
Grumble.
Bear with me…
Tim Bray inspired this post with his PHP Calendar Fun post…
Mozilla Sunbird can subscribe to iCal files on the web. In fact, you can subscribe to multiple iCal files and Sunbird will merge them. If I’m not mistaken, the Apple iCalendar application uses this format and I imagine invented it. Yep.
Say I want to share my calendar with my wife. I do this now with WebDAV on my personal web server (primordia.com). I’d rather use a Web 2.0 “calendar service”, call it cal.endar.us. cal.endar.us which lets me host my calendar which I can share and grant write access to permissioned people. Subscribers would see a complete iCal file on the web but it would be dynamically generated with each request based on the latest event information on the site.
One step further… cal.endar.us could support a Web UI to enter events. Subscribers to the iCal files will automatically get updates as they refresh their calendars. This way I or others can add events to my calendar while traveling or otherwise away from a client with something like Sunbird installed. Though, check out Portable Sunbird.
One step further… calendar events and entries get taggified. These tags can be used to create virtual iCal subscriptions. I want to subscribe to an iCal composed of “concert” and “
One step further… RSS feeds of bands or other social groups can have their normal blog feeds parsed for dates. The cal.endar.us can subscribe to these feeds and compose tagged entries. Some junk will likely get in until a standard for calendar/event extension to RSS or Atom is developed. Maybe the capability is already there.
So let’s talk about syndicated calendar events. RSScal? AtomCal? CalAtom? Pop syndicated event functionality into Sunbird or iCalendar and events can stream in. Multiple streams can be subscribed to just like multiple iCal files can be subscribed.
A little digging brought me to Technorati hCalendar events (beta). This seems exactly like what I’m describing here, better even. hCalendar seems pretty cool:
This specification introduces the hCalendar format, which is a 1:1 representation of the aforementioned iCalendar standard, in semantic XHTML. Bloggers can both embed hCalendar events directly in their web pages, and style them with CSS to make them appear as desired. In addition, hCalendar enables applications to retrieve information about such events directly from web pages without having to reference a separate file.
I’m finding myself using the wickr widget for the Yahoo Widget Engine more and more. In fact, it’s a staple on my desktop these days.
I found the widget via the most excellent Windows RSS Feed (there’s a Mac feed as well).
The widget works by presenting you with the most recent public images on flickr.
You can give the widget permission to access your photostream by loggin in. Once you do that, you can view your photostream and favorites by clicking on your image.
You can type in one or more search tags and wickr will present the first page of thumbnails. You can view subsequent pages using the little funky scrollbar control you see above the search box.
Search results can be organized by most recent or most interesting. I believe flickr classifies most interesting as those photos with either the most comments or the most people who mark a photo a favorite.
In any case, you can click on any of the thumbnails to view a larger preview window.
This preview window has a bunch of tools that you can play with. From left to right:
wickr comes highly recommended.
A sunday story…
The wind howled last night like I’ve never heard it hown before. The snowstorm that accompanied that wind let down about 2 inches of wet stickiness before 4–5 inches of fluffy whiteness covered the streets and houses in my suburban neighborhood.
There was enough snow for a good day at the local park where we have some good hills to ride down. My wife is away this weekend so I had quite a task ahead of me.
It took about 20 minutes to get the kids dressed in the snow gear. Giovanni did it all himself, but Antonio was in a sour mood and took forever to get himself in order. Marco is only 2 so I had to bundle him up myself. I started the car and let them play as I cleaned it off and began my shoveling work.
45 minutes later, the kids were exhausted and wanted to go in. Fine, I thought. “Just take off your boots,” I said.
When I finished shoveling I walked in the house and saw this:
BOOM!
After thinking a moment, I decided today probably wasn’t the day to go sleigh riding. I mean, I literally couldn’t bear the thought of suiting them up again. We’re going to a birthday party later today so at least we have one more opportunity to get out of the house.
Well, that’s all there is to my story.
I am posting this as an experiment. Google sure is doing a lot with video. They allow you to easily send a video link out, export the HTML code so you can embed videos like this on your site, format videos for easy upload to your PSP or iPod and they’re now selling video to boot. More here.
In any case, check out this amazing soccer ball dribble.
As promised, here are the first two cloud photos from my set of nine taken on Sunday with my Sony DSC-R1.
The images have been lightly processed using the Sony Raw converter to adjust the tones, Neat Image for noise reduction and Photoshop for sharpening.
I have saved each file in the following formats: 1920x1200, 1600x1200, 1280x1024, and 1024x768. If you need another format, let me know and I’ll cook it up. The original file is also present at a whopping 3888x2592.
All of the photos are on flickr since it seemed to be the best way to upload the files. You can see the files via the Cloud Wallpaper Photoset. Folow these steps:
From there, you ca set the file as y our wallpaper depending on your OS.
I’ll add the rest of the photos to the photoset as soon as I can. Enjoy!
I’m behind on my updates. I hope to provide updates on these topics in the coming week:
Blah, blah, blah. I’m finally getting back into the groove.
Here's wishing everyone a very happy New Year!