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…)
I was just chatting with Mike, from FastMac, about that iPod battery failure post I wrote up a while back, and the follow-up attempt to buy a new battery. Apparently, FastMac can ship to Canada for something like $10, express! Other guys charge more than the cost of the battery to ship it up here, but FastMac has a network of Canadian resellers or something, so it’s much cheaper. They haven’t updated the website with this info yet, so check back with them later to see what the official story is for shipping to Canada.
As part of the ADCE blogging project, we apparently get thrown some new stuff to try out (and likely to review). The first thing that came my way was Webstractor - a cool sounding app that is kind of a combination between Safari and DevonThink. It acts as an offline searchable cache of web pages you surf, and generates tables of contents for sets of these pages.
My first reaction was “Hey! That’s so cool! I’m going to use this all the time!” So, I tried to do just that. I added stuff to it, and the thumbnails it generates of pages are pretty impressive. Even long pages, like the home page of my blog, are thumbnailed properly. Impressive.
But, after a few hours of intermittent usage, I was feeling a bit uneasy. The stuff I was using it for was really no different than what my del.icio.us account already offered. I found myself wondering how hard it would be to hack content searching and thumbnails into del.icio.us…
Webstractor feels like a decent academic researching tool - letting you save snapshots of a page as part of a research effort - say, for a thesis or term paper or something - and even provides handy tools to edit and annotate the pages. But… If you’re able to edit the page, it’s no longer archival… Safari’s built-in print-as-pdf feature does a pretty decent job of archiving pages, as does the “Save as Web Archive…” feature.
I’m not meaning to slag on Webstractor - it’s really a pretty cool app - it just doesn’t fit in with how I use the web. Online resources are more of a flow or stream, through concentration tools like del.icio.us or digg.com rather than desktop caching. A desktop cache is tied to, well, my desktop. That’s less useful for me, since it’s hard to share that cache, or to access it from other machines. Both of those activities are essential to making a web researching tool useful for me.
SoftChaos - the company that makes Webstractor - also offer a free Dashboard widget called Yoink for creating snapshots of a single web page. That’s pretty cool, and free…
Some notes I’ve gathered while working on some Very Large Projects™ over the last couple of years. Some of the projects have done some of these things, and some have done few/none of these. Live and learn… I’m just documenting them here so I can refer to something quasi-concrete on the next big-ish project that comes along.
None of these tips are written in stone. They are also not necessary for a project to get done, but these should make things much easier on everyone. YMMV. IANAL. YHBH. Wait. Not the last one…
Janice just dared me to go a whole month without checking the computer while at home. Apparently I’m a little addicted to checking in (RSS feeds, email, writing blog posts, etc…).
So… I’m going to give it a shot. No non-work-related computer access from home for one month. I plan on leaving the Powerbook locked up on my desk at work.
An experienced survivor who has maneuvered around many obstacles, you are looked up to by those who rely on your good judgment.
I suppose I should be flattered. John Sheridan was pretty cool. A bit too straight-laced, though, but cool. At least I wasn’t that green dancing chick from Star Trek (or worse)…
I suppose it would have to be “Identity 2.0” driven, since people may have more than one online presence (a primary blog, a work blog, a personal blog, a Flickr account, a Del.icio.us account, etc…) and the value is showing relationships between people and not software.
On this day, in 1918, marked the end of The Great War. The War To End All Wars. Later, to be known simply as “World War 1”. My grandfather served in that war, and luckily survived both the war and the flu pandemic that it quickly spread with returning soldiers. I had family serve in WWII as well, and thankfully all returned home safely. Millions of others (on both sides) were not so lucky.
DOH! A while back, I switched to using Dave Winer’s OPML editor, and at about the same time (apparently - I hadn’t noticed - it was just pointed out to me on the EdTechTalk brainstorming conference call) the Educational directory on iPodder.org went dark.
I had assumed that the OPML editor would create a file that iPodder.org could parse, and that the hosting provided by the OPML software would work. I’m not sure which fell over, but I’ll revert to a manually edited, hand-published .opml file ASAP.
Apple released an update to WebObjects - WO 5.3.1 Developer - which includes these changes:
This update addresses the issues and adds support for the features listed below: (emphasis mine)
Adds a modified Developer tools license that allows WebObjects applications developed with Xcode 2.2 to be deployed on any compatible platform
Adds better SQL Generation in the EOModeler Plug-in design tool in Xcode
Improved FetchSpecification building in the EOModeler Plugin design tool in Xcode
Adds a “components and elements” window for improved workflow in WebObjects Builder
Addresses incompatibilities with Xcode 2.2 Developer tools on Mac OS X 10.4
Bug fixes
Way to go, Apple! You had us all a bit nervous after the switch in licensing scheme at WWDC2005, but it’s sooooo good to see the decision come down on the right side of the fence. This will go a long way toward helping retain/grow WebObjects usage.
