Utility

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Forward Looking Statements: More on Haystack

Haystack powers allyoucanupload and will soon power all of Webshots (Webshots is a photo sharing community with 19,000,000 members who have uploaded over 375,000,000 photos).  Allyoucanupload is an image hosting service that we built to run alongside Webshots.

by way of Scripting News

I went to look at both allyoucanupload and Webshots.

So how far does my picture actually travel?

Free Image Hosting at allyoucanupload.com

Click here to actually see some detail ;-)

When would I decide to “throw” my picture into the cloud?
The only reference that I have is the URL I get back.
I already “lost” a couple of GIF files into the object store.

Interesting.

Central Desktop:

Central Desktop:

What is it?

Central Desktop: Easy to use  collaboration software.  It can be used it to create custom "extranet" workspaces. It includes tools to manage software deployments, assign tasks, track progress against milestones, document versioning, and more. It just does a whole bunch of stuff pretty darn well.

Reviewed by Doug Mitchell

Looks interesting, wonder if this will help Face??

(Via WorkHappy.net: killer resources for entrepreneurs.)

(Via Sam’s random musings.)

Yes, Sam. This might be exactly what would make a good start. Lots of questions about “getting the data back out”, and about the utility for the novice.

At $99/month it might be easily justified as a “funding a project” cost and run a 6 month experiment.

MarsEdit: Easy weblog editing.

BBEdit Gems | All BBEdit, all the time.
If you write webpages, you probably use CSS. (if you don’t use CSS yet, it’s the best thing to happen since HTML itself: it simplifies the whole webpage-styling issue enormously: see The CSS Garden.)


Have you looked at iTunes?

by François Joseph de Kermadec — iTunes is turning into a slow, ineffective mess of an application. Surprisingly, nobody seems to notice these discrepancies, focusing instead on the brilliant iPod and the Music Store. Let’s not forget iTunes is the center of the puzzle.

Some of us “abuse” our tools.

I just recently created a single frame movie (using iMovie) that has an image in it.

I have copied this movie into iTunes any number of times.

What I do is add metadata that helps me track and find my home-brewed DVD recordings. Each copy of the movie gets the metadata for the movie(s) contained on my DVD.

I have Smart Playlists (in a playlist folder) that allow me to track and catalog my movies.

Yes, my simple list that might be 2K bytes of information has grown (4KB per movie) but what the heck, that’s only 1MB for tracking 250 movies. A small price to pay for the convenience.

If I was really insistent about it I could track down an image for the film (IMDb?) and use that as the single frame.

Import image into iPhoto, create a “slideshow” movie, put the movie into iTunes. That takes about 400K, so it isn’t really an option.

Now if iMovie had some Automator controls…or was AppleScriptable ;-)

Paul Thurrott’s Internet Nexus:

Needless to say, the Apple Web isn’t going to put up with that kind of abuse. One of the more friendly responses was from Les Posen, who actually took the time to answer each of Winer’s somewhat rhetorical questions about iTunes. The fact that Posen’s post is so long should alarm people. I think it proves that Winer has a point.

Some would suggest that the terseness of my response to Dave’s questions is a bad thing (see The iPod is too fancy for its own good post on my blog). Length of a response shouldn’t alarm people, except that they might actually have to read something. Here’s a terse answer.

  • You can tell if a “tune” is on the iPod by looking in the iTunes. The iPod is listed in the Source panel. Highlight the iPod and the list of tunes shows up on the right. You can tell if a tune is on your computer by looking in the “Library”.
  • If you have copied a tune to the iPod you have 2 copies. One on the computer, one on the iPod.
  • If you do a “Get Info” on a tune in the Library you are shown where the corresponding file is. You can also use the menu command “Show Song File” to open a Finder window at the location of the file. When tunes are on the iPod the “Show Song File” is disabled, and a “Get Info” does not show the location of the file.
  • To delete – highlight the tune and use the delete key, or the menu option “Clear”.

Turns out that the iTunes help covers most of the issues raised. Typing in simple questions in the help system’s “Ask a question” box locates answers quickly, within 1 or 2 entries by rank.

MarsEdit: Easy weblog editing.

Scripting News: 12/23/2005:

Let’s say I bought an audiobook, it comes on eight CDs, I rip it into eight folders, write a script to name the files 001.mp3, 002.mp3, 003.mp3, etc. From there, if I copy the files to the Archos, it does the right thing when I start playing the first file, it goes to the second, then to the third.
But the iPod can’t be made to care what the filename is, so it plays them in the order of the ID3 info, which is almost completely random because the ripper has no idea that the eight CDs are actually one big document.
So the Archos wins, I can use it to listen to this book because it’s a Really Simple MP3 player. The iPod which adds a layer on top of the filesystem, manages to remove just enough functionality as to make it completely useless for this task.

Read the rest of this entry »

Howtoons!

Howtoons!

Howtoons are cartoons showing kids of all ages “How To” build things. Each illustrated episode is a stand-alone fun adventure accessible to all. Our Howtoons are designed to encourage children to be active participants in discovering the world through Play-that-Matters — fun, creative, and inventive — and to rely a lot less on mass-consumable entertainment.

This pointer is for Christine

Andrew Weil: Tech Nation:

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Dr. Weil, the author of “Healthy Aging: A Lifelong Guide to Your Physical and Spiritual Well-Being.” You know him best from his numerous bestsellers on healthy living and his public television specials. They talk about the science of Healthy Aging. [TechNation audio from IT Conversations]

(Via IT Conversations.)

MarsEdit: Easy weblog editing.

Stanford iTunes

Most interesting. Most interesting.

Making Light: Folksongs Are Your Friends

Don%u2019t ignore warnings. If someone tells you to beware of Long Lankin, friggin%u2019 beware of him. If someone tells you not to go by Carterhaugh, stay away. Same goes for your mother asking you not to go out hunting on a particular day. Portents about weather, particularly when delivered by an old sailor who is not currently chatting up a country maid, are always worth heeding.

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