Blog Posts

It's like a brand new iPod, but older.

Product Image: TruePower iPod Battery for 3G iPod

TruePower iPod Battery for 3G iPod

My rating: 5 out of 5

I got a new TruePower battery for my 2.5 year old 3G iPod last week. It took a grand total of 20 minutes to install, and after charging the battery, my iPod is performing better than it did the day I bought it.

I’ve gone entire work-days (including commute to/from the office) with about a third of the battery life left. It never went that long when the iPod was new. I no longer have to worry about my battery recharge cycle (don’t forget to charge it when you get into the office, or it will be dead when you go home. don’t forget to leave it in the dock all night at home, or it will be dead in the morning. etc… very liberating).

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Updated Colophon

I get occasional emails asking me about what plugins I use to run this blog. I don’t mind answering them coughAlecahem but having an up-to-date colophon might be helpful, too.

I just copied the table from the WordPress plugin manager, trimmed out the “Action” column, and pasted it into the colophon for this blog. I’ve noticed that some plugins provide incorrect or incomplete URLs to the plugin description/download page. I’ll find/fix the links when I get a chance. And no, I’m not turning the colophon into a wiki ;-)

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Intro to Wiki Presentation

I gave a presentation/workshop this morning introducing 20 folks to wiki. “Collaborative Publishing with Wiki”. The session went really well, I think, and there have already been edits by some attendees on the U of C wiki (and perhaps on Wikipedia as well).

Here’s an interactive Quicktime version of the presentation. I didn’t record audio - I really need to record the full session. If you view it, imagine me talking about stuff, and making things really interesting and clear. It’s another modified-Lessigian-style presentation, so no bullet points, and some of the slides may not make too much sense without me talking. If a slide looks odd, imagine something interesting or pithy, and click the mouse to go to the next one…

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GoDaddy increased account limits!

Patrick just came by to ask me about my experience with GoDaddy, so I was telling him about the great deal - 25 GB of bandwidth per month and 500MB of disk space. Patrick looked at me quizzically and said “No, that’s not right… It’s 250GB and 5GB.”

Wha? So, I check my GoDaddy account, and they’ve increased the hosting account limits! It is now 250GB of bandwidth per month, and 5GB of disk space. For $5CDN/month.

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Google Analytics - nice, but delayed

Product Image: Google Analytics

Google Analytics

My rating: 3 out of 5

I’ve been playing with Google Analytics since I saw Tim Bray mention it last week. It looks like Google bought the Urchin webserver stats cruncher, rolled into their Adsense service, and are offering it for free. Although it seems rather tilted towards optimizing Adsense revenue, it’s also quite useful for non-Adsense usage.

I’ve been letting it chew for a week to see what kind of data it came up with, and am really impressed with the reports it provides. My only real beefs are that the data is delayed (-1/2 star) - by sometimes a day or more - and that it borks in Safari (-1/2 star). And, the interface seems really complicated (-1 star) - I keep forgetting where the various reports live. Are they visible under “Executive” mode? “Webmaster”? “Marketer”? And, some of the terminology used to describe the reports is a bit non-intuitive. Maybe not if you’re an Adsense geek, but for a regular web-head, I keep thinking “uh, what does this report tell me - they do provide nice paragraphs under each report to give the gist of it, though.

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Market vs. Community Based Economy

Stephen Downes posted a link to a Salon article on Community-based economy.

It strikes me that moving away from a market-driven economy (in whatever form that may take) would solve or at least alleviate many of the things that bug me about Modern Life. The omnipresent advertising. The insane bubble-and-burst stock market. TV being so dumbed down as to make the vast majority of it useless, or IQ-decreasing, or worse. The need to “monetize” everything. The resistance to making difficult yet necessary decisions (like, say, avoiding the Peak Oil crisis, for example).

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Homeless in the Learning Commons

Our office space is being renovated/downsized to make room for a new bioinformatics lab. All of the construction/cleanup/setup on our side of the floor was supposed to be done over the weekend, but it wasn’t. And they’ve already started demolition of the area I was in last week. So… Until they finally get around to correctly setting up my area, I’m homeless at work. I’m poaching an ethernet line from a nearby cube today, with the iPod cranked waaay up to drown out the noise of movers and furniture-setter-uppers. If I didn’t have stuff that I promised would be done today, I’d just write off the day as “downtime” and head home. No chance of working from home with Evan home (and awake).

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iPod battery replacement

Well, that was easier than I thought it would be. I’ve got a whole lot more respect for the Apple hardware designers. The metal back of the case isn’t epoxied or glued in place, even though it feels completely solid. There are some locking mechanisms between the edge of the metal and the plastic front of the case, and it just pops off with the special tool (and pops back on with some gentle pressure). Very cool design.

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Update on the unplugging-at-home experiment.

It’s hard. Much harder than I would have guessed. I was upstairs the other night, gathering Evan’s laundry to throw in the wash. The laundry was in the hamper in the home office. The computer was just sitting there, begging me, pleading with me. Just check your email. See if someone’s commented on your blog. Check a couple of blogs. What harm could it do? Who’s gonna know? Come on…. You know you want to….

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iPod Battery is Here

My new FastMac battery for my 3G iPod (a TruePower battery) arrived here today. It was on campus yesterday afternoon, but just missed the on-campus delivery truck. That’s amazingly fast delivery from California to Calgary, even adding some time for the package to be opened/searched by Customs at the border.

I’ll try upgrading my iPod’s battery tonight, and will take pics of the process to show what it looks like when a total hardware upgrade amateur tackles it (I’ve upgraded RAM and hard drives in Powerbooks, but that’s about it…)

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