All watched over by machines of loving grace 2007

A lovely vision of technology in this poem here by Richard Brautigan.

I do like the way the Long Now folks respond to the world and what resonates with them. (Ah! and that word - resonates - rings and reminds me to go put the album by Brian Eno of the chimes for the Clock of the Long Now on my wishlist).

Creative ways to destroy old backup tapes 2007

The user group for the products of the company I work for had an amusing thread a while back about good methods for destroying old backup tapes from servers.

Among my favorite suggestions:
- Put them on the magnetic security desensitizer and bang them several times
- Microwave DVDs/CDs "Smells bad, but a good light show"
- Give them to your medical professional spouse to run them through an MRI scanner

But the hands down winner?
"The tape itself is great for tying plants to supports stakes in the garden.  The old 1/2" stuff was best, 2400' would handle a lot of tomatoes, but 1/4" should still do."

Tramp The Dirt Down 2006

Fantastic news over at kottke.org: "Microsoft to retire pile-of-crap web design program FrontPage."

Let's have a poll in the comments - what's the best drink to hoist to celebrate this brightening of the future of web development?

Paradigm shift 2005

I was just looking at FasterFox and thinking about their pre-caching and about AJAXy things and realized that we really can't trust our old stats anymore to tell us the kind of things they used to tell us.

User attention is no longer equated with page requests.

Bad Upgrade 2005

Springstreet Networks, the folks behind Salon and Nerve personals appear to be conducting an exercise in how not to change your service. The new look is cluttered and unsophisticated. Some email messages are lost. Some users have just vanished. (Too bad for you if that email courtship was progressing nicely!) If you had more than one account, they've been merged. If you had pictures that weren't on display, they're displayed.

Oh and how did they announce this? I thought not at all, but now a friend tells me he saw a popup window that said something about it. Too bad most of us have popup blockers these days. And this from a company that has your email address?

Tacky and poorly managed, Springstreet; you really could have handled this so much better.

Disk space for multimedia files 2005

As I prepare for my trip to Africa and for capturing audio & video on my journey, I'm realizing I need a lot more storage space for the media files I'll create. Questions are coming up:

1. Should I upgrade the drive in my 12" PowerBook G4 to a larger size than its current 60GB?

I've already had advice from my friend Tantek to definitely have a pro do this if I go this route since its a fragile operation. (Of course, I could get an immediate 28GB upgrade by moving my iTunes folder off, but since this is my primary stereo, that'd only be a temporary solution and is unattractive).

2. Should I buy some small physical size, high storage USB drives to store things on? What are the largest ones available?

I saw Seagate has a 5GB. Anyone know of others or have experience with them good or bad? Seems like I'd want to carry at least two so I could back files up to both in case of disk failure.

3. Where can I learn more about video capture and editing so I can work with the largest file size I need and no larger?

Friend of a friend Elli recommended I get Quicktime Pro which will let me edit my movies and export them to other formats. Any other recommendations? Good books or online tutorials?

4. Anyone got any experience with or know any resources to help me with safely and securely uploading posts and/or media from random internet connections? Advice on extending battery life and recharging while traveling (especially in regions with flaky power supplies) would also be most welcome. (I don't suppose there's a good solar charger yet...)

More multimedia experimentation. 2005

Maybe audioblog's tools will be easier & better for me and my viewers.

Floundering toward multimedia 2005

Well, I'm trying to beef up my skills before I go to Africa and so I broke out the iSight and with a certain amount of futzing about with Quicktime Broadcaster - made a little video post.

Then I signed up for audioblogs.com (which also does video, don't ya know) and tried uploading it. 

Turns out they only support avi format, so I flailed around a bit more before figuring out how to convert it in iMovie - and man is it an awkward process, would an Export option in the menu right under the Import option have been so hard, Apple?

I'm uploading and it's taking forever so I look and see that the Quicktime movie is 1.6MB while the avi file is over 29MB. What the hell, man?

There has got to be a better way. Advice anyone?

Mac OS X Tiger and Treo syncing problems 2005

Can't sync your Palm device after upgrading to Tiger? The helpful instructions you need to get the Palm Desktop Installer to quit failing with an "Access Denied" error are right here at PalmOne where I searched but didn't find them. Thank you, Google for indexing sites better than their owners.