and I mean it
One of the most popular pages on this blog is about a storage device that has a lot of enemies and few defenders, the SC101. It’s Windows-only, uses a proprietary filesystem and when (not if) it starts crashing, just say bye-bye to your data. The product didn’t do much good for Netgear’s reputation. So when Netgear offered me the opportunity to test a real NAS solution, I agreed. So they sent me the ReadyNAS NV+.
I subscribe to less and less podcasts (not enough time to listen), but there is one I always install on every newly installed iTunes. It’s called the Basic Soul Radio Show, it’s presented by Simon Harrison. Every week Simon selects two hours of old and new funk, soul and electronic music, which makes for a 200MB MP3 every time (upgrade that hard disk!). I have discovered lots of little pearls thanks to it. Some examples from the top of my head:
Expect to encounter a lot of artists/groups that you’ve never heard of. Some of it you won’t like, some you will adore. Because I wanted a better tool to search the 5+ years of archive, I built a little search engine on
http://tools.forret.com/basicsoul/
that allows me to search for artists, titles and labels. Per found occurrence it allows me to view the full playlist (reformatted from the original page) and if the podcast MP3 is still online, to listen to it (with a SMIL playlist, a M3U playlist or a Flash based MP3 player). I enjoy using it, to see when a track was first played, what other tracks that artist made etc …
Check it out!
PS: Every podcast episode starts with: “Today is the shadow of tomorrow. Today is the present future of yesterday. Yesterday is the shadow of today. The darkness of the past is yesterday. And the light of the past is yesterday“, a piece of lyric from “Shadows of Tomorrow” – Madvillain & Quasimoto.
On my left side: Matt Mullenweg:
At my right hand: Dries Buytaert:
I especially like the ’spam detection’ detail. If this is the main concern of two of the leading CMS platforms, you can imagine spam is a real problem.
If we extrapolate on the previous similarities, we could expect:
In any case, I admire both guys and hope they continue to successfully lead some of the most promising web software platforms around.
Every now and then I get a request to use pictures of mine for a poster, a flyer, a book. People usually find the pictures they want in my Flickr sets, where they are available in a max resolution of 1200 pixels for the longest side (so e.g. 1200 x 800 for photos in 3:2 aspect ratio). When this is not enough, people ask me for higher resolution versions. And that question comes in two versions:
DPI (dots-per-inch) only make sense for me if I would know on what size you want to print them. If you’re making an A4 flyer, that’s 8½ × 11 inch, and you need 300 dpi, then that means you need 3300×2550 pixels. If you want to print only an A6 size, that’s 1650×1275 pixels. So don’t tell me what DPI you need, tell me what pixel dimensions you need. Yes, you can save the DPI parameter in a JPEG file, but it changes nothing to the data. My 1200×800 picture with a DPI value of 72 or 300dpi is still, pixel by pixel, the same picture. Your image viewer might decide to show it as a bigger picture on the screen, but the image data is identical.
Beginning to see the pattern? No matter what DPI you set (or, as it happens, what size in inches) so long as you don’t let Photoshop resample the image up or down, it’s STILL 504 by 144 pixels.
Let’s save this one as 12dpi.TIF before we forget, then have a look at the file sizes. You’d think that a 300dpi file would be higher resolution than a 12 dpi file, and because of that a lot bigger, right?
Sorry. All three files are exactly the same size.
(from pptfaq.com)
So, if you’re asking someone for a high-resolution version of a digital picture, ask for minimum pixel dimensions, not for DPI! Otherwise you just show that, while you might have experience in managing print, you have no clue how digital imagery works.
My iPod Nano has gone into the equivalent of a coma. No matter what you do with the “HOLD” switch, it remains in a locked state. So while you can see when you connect it to a PC that the music is still there and the battery still works, you cannot use it, since the play-button (as well as all the others) does not respond.
Switching frantically between HOLD ON/HOLD OFF does not work, pushing excessively towards “HOLD OFF” (to the left) does not work. Is there a way to disable the HOLD button, or is that a mechanical connection that is not managed by the firmware? Can you open an iPod Nano and ‘clean the contact’?
The only other option I see is to buy a docking-station-with-speakers that includes a remote control. But why spend another 100€ on a 4GB iPod that doesn’t work properly …
Any ideas?
Via Pietel I heard of a Twitter account that publishes the playlist of StuBru in real-time. Interesting, but I listen to FM Brussel. How hard would it be to make the same thing for FM Brussel? Not that hard, it appears. After some twiddling with curl, twitter API and other PHP, here is the Twitter account for the playlist of FM Brussel.
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