February 7th, 2006
No time, just links
As there’s no time for writing about life in general, here are a bunch of links as usual. Heavy on tech, they’re also, I might add, hopefully helping you out รก la Lifehack, as I love to litter your life with links that help, rather than just take your time away.
So, what’s new in the Google Empire? Well, they’re incorporating a chat client into GMail. As this is comforting to you, remember: they’re already indexing every single e-mail you receive and send, opting to store this info and use it any way they please. They please, mind you. Just imagine what fun their marketing people will have with your chat-data. If you’re keen to try out the GMail Chat-functionality over a web-page already, try out the AJAX-y Gtalkr, which is not affiliated with Google. By the way, this is a very interesting article that you should read, before taking in GMail completely.
Morrissey is taking off again with his new album and a coming tour; the tickets for Sweden are released on Monday morning, and if you want to, listen to one of the songs off his coming album through a streaming web-page, you can do that, right here.
Speaking of music, the coming double-CD-compilation from Prince (off Rhino), coinciding with the release of his coming CD, is interesting, but do check out The Dresden Dolls. Heavily piano-laden, tight-singing, simplistic-yet-complex band has got me by the gonads. One of the very few American indie-bands I actually enjoy; their own tag, “Brechtian Punk Cabaret”, is a description very on-target, albeit they’re better than that. I love their reverb-y, heavy sound, and the lyrics are good; a line like “is it man or Memorex” says a bit.
You need software to know what the MP3’s you have really are encoded as? Check out Audio Identifier, which is very nice.
If you’ve got an old iPod, why not run it with Linux and get it playing several new codecs and film?
I’m very much into sparking a wiki at work, preferably one with a built-in ticket-handling-system, i.e. Trac, but if you’re on the look-out for a wiki, try the Wiki Matrix, where you can easily compare functions between loads of wikis. It seems a lot of big corporations love TWiki, e.g. Yahoo! that carries a +60GB TWiki. And don’t worry if you merely want a very simple wiki, as there are some available that run straight out of one single HTML-file; I prefer TiddlyWiki.
Speaking of wikis, I’m trying to get into using a calendar online. That’s not a problem per se, as there are plenty of services that allow you to use online calendars, but synchronising them is a major bother. A lot of people seem to like CalendarHub, but as it still doesn’t allow synching with other iCal-compatible calendars that require a login, it’s not really interesting. 30 Boxes is also enticing, but doesn’t either allow synchronising. If you are, like me, using Outlook 2003 (because I have to synch my Pocket PC with it) you can actually export your calendar to the iCal-format, using this freeware for Windows. Blast! I’m looking forward to controlling my calendars like wasps control cockroaches.
Interesting software, Flickr Backup is. I’m Yoda, and it runs in Java. From the supplier: “Flickr Backup is a utility that allows you to download the pictures you have uploaded to Flickr back down to your computer for personal backup or restore.” Very nice indeed! Download it here.
Speaking of software, don’t miss out on DEMO 06, where a load of systems and apps are making their way into the limelight of the Internet (…) soon enough. Yeah, right – like GMail will ever come out of its beta-crypt; anyway, check out this little collection of news from the conference.
March 13th, 2006 at 21:30
[...] 30 Boxes, a very up-and-coming AJAX-driven online calendar that I’ve written about previously, has now released an “import tool” for importing data from some common calendar-applications into 30 Boxes. Before you try it, though, mind the bit named “Notes”, at the end of the import-post; I’ll try it carefully. [...]
March 15th, 2006 at 23:08
[...] The last time I delved into 30 Boxes, there was no import-function and I hence dissed it. Now, I have exported everything from my Outlook-calendar and am really liking 30 Boxes. The downfall of this is, of course, that I have to write everything that I type in 30 Boxes into my PDA as well, which is very frustrating. However, as my PDA is disintegrating I might just move to a web-calendar wholly. We will have to see. Web 2.0? Changing, people! Back to why I like 30 Boxes: [...]