« April 2005 | Main | June 2005 »

May 31, 2005

PDXPOP Now! 2005 Compilaiton Tracklist Announced!

PDXPOP Now! 2005 Compilation cover

After much waiting, ear bleeding, hair pulling, and paperworking, the 2005 PDXPOP Now! compilation has finally gone off to the duplicator and printer. As with any process like this, there was a lot of great music that didn't make it and not every track on there is for everyone, but I think the overall level of quality and divsersity of stlye is pretty amazing.

Also I'm totally in love with the album art (the image here is the cover) by Portland's own Tyler Stout

So check out the list, keep an eye on the PDXPOP Now! website for upcoming announcements, including a release date for the CD (we're gonna have a party!) and the bill for the festival. Enjoy!

An asterisk denotes a previously unreleased track.

Disc One

  • "Rollercoaster" - Sleater-Kinney
  • "I'm So Low" - The Minders*
  • "While We Have The Sun (4-track home)" - Mirah*
  • "Pile of Gold" - The Blow*
  • "Uh-Oh" - Nice Nice
  • "To Destruction" - Dolorean
  • "Radio Radio" - Swords
  • "Clawz" - Please Step Out of the Vehicle*
  • "Second Sickness" - Desert City Soundtrack
  • "Evil Falls" - Holy Sons*
  • "Windows & Walls" - Modern State
  • "Daydreams With Daffodils (Stepperz Remix)" - YACHT*
  • "Lovin' Machine" - Glass Candy
  • "No Sound" - 31 Knots
  • "Just Expect" - Copy*
  • "Why'd You Have to Die?" - Toothfairy*
  • "Descender" - Point Line Plane
  • "These Trees Are For Resting" - Alan Singley
  • "Mountaintops in Caves" - Talkdemonic
  • "Chemical Reaction" - Spooky Dance Band

Disc Two

  • "Alive With Pleasure" - Viva Voce
  • "It's Over" - The Gossip*
  • "God and Country (live)" - The Thermals*
  • "A Plague Upon the White House" - Blues Goblins*
  • "Sista Social Theme Song" - Menomena*
  • "Gore Appeal" - Die Monitr Batss
  • "To An Angel on No Condition" - Lkn
  • "The Untold Story" - Myg feat. Mikah 9, Sleep*
  • "Hi-Fi" - M. Ward
  • "Emma" - Sexton Blake
  • "Smallest Man" - Sunset Valley*
  • "Move your Body" - The Snuggle Ups*
  • "Freilechs Von Der Chuppe" - Shicky Gnarowitz and the Transparent Wings of Joy*
  • "Laughing Gasping" - Wet Confetti*
  • "What We'll Admit" - Jessica Jones
  • "I Am the Only Master of the Ten-Key" - Binary Dolls
  • "Cardboard Box" - Point Juncture, WA
  • "A Gilded Age" - Norfolk & Western
  • "Homebody" - Cajun Gems
  • "All of These Things" - The Helio Sequence*
  • "From My Own True Love (Lost at Sea) (Demo)" - The Decemberists*

Tagged: , , , , ,

Posted by Greg at 4:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 28, 2005

The Films of PES

There are two particularly powerful aspects of the best miniature-based animation: a kind of revelatory hyper-real perspective that comes from the relative size of the lens to the objects being represented (using a normal camera on miniature skyscrapers can give a level of detail and a texture of perspective equivalent to shooting a real skyscraper with a camera that is four stories tall); and the thrill that comes from recoginzing one material as the image of another (the moment when you see the puppet as both wooden and flesh, when you see the strings and simultaneously believe in its internal life).

The films of the PES animation collective profoundly excel in this second aspect. They make short witty stop motion films that tightly intertwine their materials with their subject matter, often in breatakingly surprising ways.

kaboom skylinekaboom from above

For example, in Kaboom, they give us a skyline made of oil cans, salt and pepper shakers, trophies, drill bits, tea balls, and old fashioned razors. The surrounding city grid is perfectly implied by loaded circuit boards. When the (peanut shell) bomb lands, shiny spherical Chrismas ornaments make for an especially cheery explosion. Rendering skyscrapers and bomb blasts with such transient and informal objects is a perfect match for the movie's apocalyptic narrative since it both underlines the fragility of even large scale human endeavors and simultaneously adds an irony of underemphasis to the destruction of the city, transforming it into a child's trashing of his model town.

This obsession with toys and brightly-colored baubles, is especially evident in another film, Fireworks.

fireworks blasting offfireworks in the sky

This film follows the progression of a fuse setting off fireworks-launching coin wrappers whose amunition explodes into concentric bursts of children's candy and shiny change. At the start, two back-to-back yellow and orange candy corns make for a highly believable lighter's flame. The materials make physical the childlike wonder we feel at fireworks while playing with their sentimental and nostalgic resonances.

A third film, Wild Horses Redux (originally made as an ad for Nike), uses this material intelligence to explore classic themes of the Uncanny.

football team rushing forwardfootball team entering the meat cave

The film shows a team of toy football players stampeding across a furry landscape before passing through an opening into a cave with walls of meat (tunnels constantly recur in PES's films) before exiting back into the landscape and disappearing into the distance as the slogan "made to move" fades up along with the Nike "swoosh." All of the material choices, from the people represented by dolls (Hans Bellmer) to the furry ground with its exposed fleshy interior (Meret Oppenheim), use classic surrealist strategies for creating an Uncanny confusion between human and animal, living and inanimate. The frozen plastic football team rumbles like a herd of animals while the meat inside the cave implies that the whole landscape is itself a (formerly) living thing. All of these factors combine to create a confusion between a football game and a primal animalistic charge, which exactly fits Nike's larger branding aesthetic.

PES's films tend to last exactly long enough for you to notice what everything in them is made of and no longer (with the exception of Pee-nut, which rambles on trying to wring something more out of what is essentially a bawdy one-liner). Although this short format perfectly suits their reliance on these rich uses of materials, it would be exciting to see PES try to sustain a more complex story over a longer film, using multiple environments and sets of materials. With the right subject matter, PES could make a film that would find a place alongside The Triplets of Belleville in the growing niche in mainstream moviegoing for quirky and independent animation.

(via MeFi)

Tagged: , , , , ,

Posted by Greg at 5:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 27, 2005

A Little 43 Folders Love

Nothing gooses me out of a laziness-inspired blog hiatus like a good linking. Today, Merlin Mann of 43 Folders, a better and better read blog dedicated to "a bunch of tricks, hacks, and other cool stuff" related to productivity and organization, wrote an entry about my Guest Check PDA idea. Before I saw the post, I was kind of wondering why 400 people seemed to have looked at a couple of the pictures in my GCPDA Flickr photoset today and now I know why.

If you are coming here for the first time looking for info about the Guest Check PDA, check out the original post. Welcome.

Tagged: , , ,

Posted by Greg at 7:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Guest Check PDA

A while back, Merlin Mann at 43 Folders came out with an idea that's since caught fire: the Hipster PDA. The idea was that, instead of using a complicated digital handheld that made you learn a secret scrawl and a special stylus to write things down, you could just use a piece of paper. And if you clipped a bunch of small pieces together (say in the form of index cards) then they'd be easy to organize or give away or do with what you will.

Recently, I've noticed friends of mine who work as servers (for example Chris and Amy) have been ending up with Guest Check pads at home, and they're using them. Sometimes they end up at home by accident, by ending up forgotten in a back pocket. Sometimes they get brought home on purpose because they seem useful or have useful notes in them.

What we've been finding is that they're great as PDAs.

(Here you can see some notes I took in my Guest Check PDA while working on the MFDZ player.)

You're used to carrying it in your pocket, so it feels comfortable there. The pages are perforated to rip out easily so if you need to give someone a note or organize some individual notes into a group by stapling them it's nice and neat. I haven't really done this yet, but you could use those boxes and categories at the top as organizational categories or space for metadata.

What got me started using the Guest Check pads as a PDA was using my pad at work for non-work-related things: giving out the name of the currently-playing band to customers who asked (especially when it happened to be a Music For Dozens artist) writing down ideas that occur to me, or taking note of some memorable thing that someone said or that happened. I started finding that at the end of my shifts I'd have pockets full of little notes that needed processing (that's another satisfing thing about the Guest Check format -- easy-of-rip-out-and-crumple makes for a very satisfying way to cross something off a to do list) and I just got used to building my whole system around it. I still use my Moleskine a lot of the time. It just feels more dignified, part of the luxury of wearing non-stainproof clothes and sandals on days when I don't have a shift. But when I need something that's totally utilitarian, that I'm not afraid to destroy or cross things out in the Guest Check PDA is like the comfortable pair of New Balances that I wear to work: they're a little worn and not as white as they once were, but they make it easier to get the job done.

You can see some more pictures of my Guest Check PDA in action in my relevant Flickr photoset. I'll be adding more pictures next time I get some time to shoot some of the pages I've got sitting around or when I generate more.

Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Greg at 7:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 18, 2005

Star Wars Arcade World Record Tragedy!

This past Monday morning, Brandon Erickson, a friend of Ethan and Cary's from college and a teacher in the Portland Public Schools, began an atttempt to break the all-time record on the 1984 Star Wars arcade game. I just read the following heart-breaking announcement on Ground Kontrol's site (the retro-arcade at which the attempt was made):

After over 54 hours of continuous gameplay, Brandon was overcome by a combination of fatigue and especially difficult gameplay and was forced to end his game just 18 million points shy of the 300 million point record and settle for second place...an amazing accomplishment in itself. Congratulations, Brandon!
Cary and I went and visited Brandon last night at about 10pm and he seemed to be going strong, using a back brace to stay upright at his stool and dependably beating the game every two or three minutes.

The most tragic part of Brandon's noble and quixotic quest was the fact that he has already seemingly been cheated out of a quite similar record. In February, he set the record for "Tournament" mode on the same game with 20,891,403 points. Then, one David Palmer "remembered" that he had, the previous year, scored 31,660,614 points. He could provide no other source of verification besides "witness" whereas all of Brandon's attempts have been verified on video and all the other top scorers seem to have been checked by referees. Check out Twin Galaxies for the unbelievable proof.

To now get so close to the unapproacable 300,007,894 record (suspiciously held by the same David Palmer) and not get there is just too much for one person to have to take (especially when the third-placers are so far back). Until that Palmer character can produce a video of either of his records, I'm going to consider Brandon the official IDFDZ Star Wars World Record Holder (for whatever that's worth).

If you want to find out more, you can get a DVD of Brandon's Tournament Mode record game and read an article about Brandon's record setting attempts in the Willamette Week and see Brandon's original announcement of his attempt on classic-games.com.

Also, Brandon (sort of) did the whole thing as a fundraiser for Portland Public Schools (I kicked my ten bucks in to his $746.25 total) and the contributions are still open. Email him at starwardspledge@gmail.com to contribute.

Tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Greg at 5:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Best Of IT Conversations

I've mentioned IT Conversations here a few times before in the context of other subjects, but I recently recommended a bunch of my favorite episodes to a friend for a trip he was leaving on and he suggested I reproduce the list here. Some of these talks played a big part in getting me excited about some of things I've written about here, so I thought that made some sense. Here goes (it's in approximate order of "favorite-ness"):

George Dyson
the son of Freeman Dyson, on John Von Neumann and the origin of "hacker" culture.
Philip Greenspun
a web publishing pioneer and creator of Photo.net, one of the first online communities.
Neil Gershenfeld
chief of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms on the future of desktop fabrication: the coming ability of anyone to design, make, and build anything. Mind blowing.
Paul Graham
founder of Viaweb and excellent tech-essayist, about genius generally, and great hackers, in particular.
Bruce Schneier
a web and computer security expert. Sounds dry, but is actually filled with some rare rational insight on the post 9/11 security world.
Larry Lessig
creator of the Creative Commons. The material may be familiar but it's interesting to hear how much of a firebrand Lessig is, and how convincing.
Steve Wozniak
brilliant, nutty inventor of the Mac on his whole life story and interests.
Malcolm Gladwell
New Yorker reporter and author who investigates the surprising ways we think and make decisions
Cory Doctorow
sci-fi author, BoingBoing-creator, and EFF advocate on the problems of controlling complex systems and the threat to IT from Hollywood.
Clay Shirky
insightful stuff on new uses of cell phones. Short.
Doc Searls
One of the original bloggers talking about DIY IT.

This is only just a sample, click around on the site and you'll find a bunch more interesting things on any of a number of tech topics. Lots of good stuff to fill your iPod with.

Tagged: , , ,

Posted by Greg at 1:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 17, 2005

Tutorial: Blosxom

I've been thinking lately about my experience learning to do things on the web (both in the past and the more complex things I'm trying to learn how to do now) and it seems that I'm in kind of a good place to write some really useful tutorials. There's some things that I know how to do that a lot of other people don't, but I only learned how to do them pretty recently and so none of the skills involved seem natural (and therefore not requiring explanation) to me. Also, I still remember really wishing that there had been clear explanations of these things around when I was trying to do them. Where "geeks" relish figuring out fiendishly hard technical problems without any help from anyone, I think there are a lot of people like me who just want to get things done with some web technology without having to re-invent the wheel themselves on every project. There may be a market larger than just me for tutorials aimed at "beginners" that don't talk down, that don't just walk you through doing things without explaining what's happening, and that do let you accomplish some useful things on the web while learning as much more as you can take about the larger contexts.

Recently, a non-technical friend with a growing interest in the web, asked me to tell him about the system I use to publish this blog. I thought I'd try to turn my response into my first tutorial aimed at meeting the criteria I just set out. So, without further ado, a tutorial on the blog hosting system, called Blosxom.

I run Ideas For Dozens via a blog hosting system called Blosxom (pronounced "blossom", but spelled with OSX in the middle). It was designed by Rael Dornfest, one of the guys who runs O'Reilly (a technical publishing, conference, and education empire).

The way Blosxom works is through plain text files and something called a CGI script (stand for Common Gateway Interface). Basically the CGI is a little program that processes the posts I write as individual text files into the blog that ends up getting displayed when you come to Ideas For Dozens. What that means in practice is that there's a file called blosxom.cgi that lives on my webspace (which is provided to me by Speakeasy, my service provider, and which I access through an SFTP program called Fugu [SFTP stands for Secure File Transfer Protocol -- i.e. a thing for moving files around which keeps your secrets]). Bloxom.cgi is just a text file has two parts, a human readable part at the top where you enter in information to set certain options and to provide details about your situation, and a bunch of code underneath that actually does the work and that I don't ever worry or think about (mostly because I don't understand it).

So, here were the steps for me to get my blog up and running:

  1. I downloaded the blosxom.cgi script from their website
  2. I copied it onto my Speakeasy hosting space using Fugu
  3. I created a folder on my Speakeasy space called "blosxom"
  4. I created files inside that folder called head.html, date.html, footer.html, and story.html (as instructed by the tutorial on the blosxom website)
  5. I edited blosxom.cgi to enter in the name of my blog, the location of the folder that I'd created, and a few other things that it asked for (the Jefferson quote at the top, etc.)

Then, in order to post, all I have to do is to put a text file in the blosxom folder on my Speakeasy space. The blosxom.cgi script turns any text file in that folder into a post. It takes the top line of the file as the title and the rest of the post as the body. If I create folders or sub-folders in the blosxom folder and put posts in them, the script treats those as "categories" (that's why posts will say "/useful/web" at the bottom of them).

Now, having done all this will not result in a blog styled like mine. It will result in a plain text blog with the title at the top and the posts stretching the whole length of the window, and the sidebar stuff who knows where (although there is something appealing about plain html layout in its cleanliness). The last big step, which is where the styling and layout come in, is to edit the three template files you created in the setup: head.html, date.html, footer.html, and story.html.

Accomplishing this section of the setup is going to require writing some HTML and CSS, two flavorsx of "markup," the system for creating written instructions that determine the design and layout on the web. It is obviously somewhat beyond the scope of this tutorial on Blosxom to include a full tutorial on either HTML or CSS. Many excellent tutorials are available (W3Schools is a good place to start). That said, I'm going to give you a tiny taste of CSS just to explain some of the context of how it works within Blosxom (hopefully if you're not familiar with HTML or CSS it will be enough to almost give you a sense of how Blosxom works and if you are already fluent in them it will be more than enough to really annoy you).

The way blosxom displays your blog is as follows: it starts with head.html, then it displays all the appropriate posts (based on the options you selected in the cgi) using story.html as a template. Then it puts in date.html every time a day changes (i.e. between posts that were written on different days). And it finishes up by putting in footer.html at the bottom. The entire style of my blog comes from some CSS that I wrote that goes at the top of head.html. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is a relatively new (3 years?) system for doing layout on the web. The way it works (in super-oversimplified-summary mode) is that you define individual styles, by dictating their design characteristics, at the top of your document and then apply them wherever you want on your page. Here's an example from my blog. At the top of head.html (because that's the file that the script is going to look at first) I wrote:

#sidebar {
            width: 20%;
            float: left;
            padding-left:.5em;
            padding-right:.5em;
            font-family: sans-serif;}

What's happening is that I'm creating a style called "sidebar" (which is, obviously, intended for my sidebar) with certain attributes. It should take up twenty percent of the width of the page; it should "float left," which means that other content should flow around it to the right; it should have internal padding (the distance of the internal content from its bounding rectangle) of one-half of a tab on the left and right sides; and it should use a sans-serif font.

CSS is not a very complicated subject but it is a very large and detailed one, so all I'm going to say about it here is to explain way you apply these styles in the rest of your page. All you have to do is put <div="sidebar"> before the content you want to be displayed in this style and then </div> when you want to stop displaying stuff in it. In practice, it looks like this:

<div id="sidebar">
    <h6 style="margin:0px; padding:0px;">ABOUT</h6>
    <hr>
    <img src="http://www.speakeasy.org/~gborenstein/profile.jpg">
    <p style="font-size: 10px;">
    I like things that work.
    <br>

. . .

    <hr>
    <a href="http://www.haloscan.com/"><img width="88" height="31" src="http://www.haloscan.com/halolink.gif" border="0" alt="Weblog Commenting and Trackback by HaloScan.com" /></a>
</div>

If you look at the code inside the <div> tags, you can see the beginning and end of my sidebar (I've skipped most of it since it's really long): the first line displays the word ABOUT and sets its size, margin, and padding; the third line (that starts <img src=. . .) displays that picture of me, etc. At the bottom of the sidebar, right before the </div> tag, you can see that I'm displaying the Haloscan logo as a link to their site (the <img> tag is surrounded by <a href> and </a> tags).

I find that the best way to proceed with CSS is trial and error. It's often hard to predict just what a change in a certain attribute is going to do, so you end up going ahead and making the change, checking to see if the result is what you want, and altering it if it's wrong. The advantage of CSS over old-fashioned table-based ways of doing HTML layout (for example, the At Dusk website) is that it is more "liquid", things move around more fluidly based on how big the things around them are. The disadvantage of this is that everything's position is dependent on everything else's.

The other word of advice I'd give for someone trying to style a Blosxom blog, is just imagine that the whole thing was one big text file with story.html appended onto the bottom of head.html and footer.html appended onto the bottom of story.html, and so on. That will often explain why strange things are happening to your layout.

Now there are a couple of other things that I do on my blog that I won't go into detail on here. The "ARCHIVES" section is run by a Blosxom plug-in that is pretty easy to figure out if you read the details on their site (I think I may also use a time plug-in to display the time stamp on each post, but I can't remember). Also, I display RSS Digest that parses RSS feeds and lets you style and display them. They explain how to use their service pretty well. And my Flickr images. come from a Flickr "badge" they provide, which is also not hard to figure out. There are a lot of things like that designed to help you display certain kinds of info on your blog.

So, I guess it makes sense to conclude with some of the pros and cons of blosxom. The good things about it are that the posts are just plain text, so you can create them offline in any text editor of your choice and you're not dependent on some bloated web interface or a program that you have to pay for. Also, you have as total control over the display as you would over any other webpage you might make. You don't have to fight a premade template or design via a limited set of options in a web form. It is also totally free (not counting hosting) and native to OSX. The disadvantages are that post management is basically non-existent. For example, recently I accidentally opened and re-saved an old post (Quicktime. . .emitkciuQ), and since the date/time was reset, it jumped to the top of the blog. There's no way to move it back now or manage post order in anyway as far as I know, which also means you can't do timed publication or any other sophisticated thing some other systems let you do (you could accomplish some of these things using more advanced operating system technologies [chron jobs] but if you're at that level of sophisticaiton, you probably didn't need this tutorial). Also, since there is basically no interface (bloated or otherwise) it doesn't offer any of the features that a lot of the more hand-holding systems offer: like automatic pinging of Technorati and other blog tracking services, category management, easily implemented search, etc. All said, Blosxom does provide a good combination of low price (being free), simplicity of use, degree of control, and relatively full set of features. It is not as strong in any single one of these areas as some other solutions (a full comparison of most options is available here), for me I found that it held the best combination.

Tagged: , , , ,

Posted by Greg at 5:24 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

May 15, 2005

Braman Song Blog Online

Jon Braman, whose website I designed and whose music I recorded, has started an audioblog on my suggestion. Jon makes great ukele-rap and has a habit of calling and leaving songs as answering machine messages for his friends, so I thought Audioblogger would be perfect for him. I'm going to do a little jiggering to see if I can't get his audio posts to appear on his website as well. They're definitely worth listening to. Especially, the first one which is a capella. (You can subscribe to Jon's songs here)

Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Posted by Greg at 5:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 12, 2005

This is a test of SSI includes

Posted by Greg at 4:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 10, 2005

I'm holding my commas: Update

The Great Comma Crisis of 2005 has ended. Plus, I now know all about the mechanical working of Powerbook keys. They've got two crossed loop-shaped bits of plastic which interlace at a jointed-intersection. The one closer to the top of the keyboard slots two small pegs into two small holes and the one close to the bottom of the keyboard has a bar that hooks under a protruding metal catch. Then, the key itself clicks onto the top of the whole thing and sits right on top of the weird jelly-like substances that actually triggers the keystrokes, and that I've probably now permanently polluted with my finger oils (though their already was a surprising amount of hair in there). . .

Tagged: , , ,

Posted by Greg at 10:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

I'm holding my commas

The comma/open-bracket key fell off my Powerbook's keboard. Now, whenever I want to type a comma, I have to press this strange jelly-like thing. Weird. It wouldn't be so bad if it was at the same level as all the other keys.

Tagged: , , ,

Posted by Greg at 9:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Quicktime. . .emitkciuQ

Just noticed something odd watching a Quicktime movie in Safari. If, at any time while running the movie or after it's stopped, you hit cmd+BackArrow, instead of going back to the previous page as usual, the clip plays in reverse. In order to go back you've actually got to mouse over and hit the back button, which then works normally.

Although this seems like a bug, I've been having just the most fun with it playing things backwards. Check this out to get started. Let it load all the way through without watching it. Put the cursor at the end, hit cmd+BackArrow, and enjoy.

Tagged: , , ,

Posted by Greg at 9:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

RSS Recomendations

If RSS is really "TiVo for the internet", when does it start making recommendations? TiVo is basically an aggregator, just like NetNewsWire. It keeps track of the shows you "subscribe" to, checks to see when new "items" are available, and downloads them for you to look at when you're ready.

One thing TiVo does that NetNewsWire doesn't is recommend shows you might like that are not currently amongst your subscriptions. No aggregaror does this, as far as I know. Although these recommendations don't always work perfectly and you may get stuck with TiVo thinking that you're gay (registration required), they seem like a pretty good idea.

Our aggregators know a lot about what we like. Mine knows that I read a lot of posts about music distribution, intellectual property, arts administration, and animation, and a lot of other posts that have podcasts from public radio shows attached to them. If NetNewsWire maintained a database of RSS feed providers (or collaborated with someone who did) it could tell me when someone started a new podcast about the administration of animation non-profits, say, or even if a single post appeared on some obscure blog about a new Creative Commons-licensed mp3-sharing site. If NNW, or one of the other news readers, didn't want to do it, it wouldn't be hard to create an online "RSS Registry" where people could submit their feeds with keyword descriptions and their individual posts with Technorati Tags via ping. Then a user could go to the site, enter the list of feeds they subscribe to and receive in return a new RSS feed that notifies them of new posts and new blogs that the Registry's recommendation engine thinks they might like. The big disadvantage of this system (that you would have to constantly return to the site to keep it updated on the feeds your subscribed to, weakening the feedback mechanism which would make it truly powerful) might be mitigated by the use of aggregator plugins that would keep your Registry account up to date. The plugin could also do things to refine your recommendations like keep track of the posts that had links you clicked. A big advantage of implementing the recommendations through a website rather than a service provided by an aggregator might be that the site could take advantage of the social network of its users to give better recommendations (i.e., "people who subscribed to this feed also read. . .") in addition to taxonomized (or, maybe, folksonomized) labels.

Some people might be concerned by the idea of their RSS reader starting to talk back, sending information about their interests off to some sketchy outside entity, just at a moment when so much brainpower is going into trying to figure out how to make money from syndication. But I think that there's something really powerful to be gained in the tradeoff: closing the feedback loop, getting more and more useful information with less work. And privacy concerns are just more of a reason to implement something like this yourself, so that it will be free, fair, and open rather than owned by one of the aggregators or someone even less trustworthy. Because with all the work, thought, and investment from people a lot smarter and more knowledgable than me going on in this space, someone else is going to think of this before too long and who knows where they'll take it.

Tagged: , , , , ,

Posted by Greg at 2:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 9, 2005

Quicksilver and Text Wielder: All of the Services

My mind is still a little boggled by this, but I'll try to explain it the best I can. Last night, I opened up the Quicksilver preferences to see if there were any new plug-ins available (in the new Tiger version, you get plug-ins from an internal menu rather than from their website). Specifically, I was looking for one that would allow me to ftp a particular file to a particular location (check out my last post to find out why).

Some new plug-ins had appeared (including the del.icio.us one, which I'd been waiting for), but nothing for ftp. One of the new plug-ins was called "Services menu module". Immediately, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

You see, a while back, I downloaded a little app called Text Wielder. What it does is make avilable more than 120 actions from the Services menu of every application. Most of them act on text: get a URL, search in any number of search engines, look up a map from a given zipcode or a zipcode from a given address (I think that one was why I got it in the first place), etc. You can also write your own actions.

So now that I can use any applicable service from within Quicksilver, I have all of these actions at my fingertips at all times. So, beyond having solved my instant-ftp problem (Transmit.app offered "upload file" as a service), I now have a very deep pool of things I can do with text (the number of options on text went from in the teens to 89). Plus I have the ability to create any new actions that I want, so the pool is actually theoretically bottomless. Just when you think Quicksilver's run out of new ways of blowing your mind, it finds those last few shards of attached skull and sends them skittering.

Tagged: , , , , , ,

Posted by Greg at 2:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Upcoming

I've added a new section to the bar of contextual info at the left there, under the title of "upcoming". For a while now, I've kept a list of ideas for posts in a text file. Using the Quicksilver append trick, it's super easy to record a quick description of an idea in the moment I'm having it. Then, when I've got some time to write a post, all I've got to do is view that list (usually using Quicksilver's right arrow functionality) to see the post-seeds I've got sitting around to get me started.

For some reason, I thought it might be a good idea to display this very list on the site itself. At times my internal shorthand may be inpenetrable or the content may overlap with the summary of my del.icio.us posts that appear right below it (and often hint at my future plans for posts), but when thrown into the mix, the list will make the sidebar a pretty good snapshot of what I'm thinking about right now. Hence you can point me to links or send me your thoughts ahead of time in order to contribute to posts, not just in comments, but before they're even written. Just another step towards making this blog into more of a conversation instead of a monologue that reverberates into empty space.

Right now, I've got a couple of technical glitches getting in the way of having this working as smoothly as I'd like: Speakeasy doesn't seem to actually support html includes even though they say they do, or, more likely, I'm doing something wrong (even though I'm using the syntax everyone seems to recommend: <!--#include file="file.html" -->), or, even more likely, some setup remains for me to do to get SSIs working in general on my Speakesy space. Either way, it's not working right now. Ideally, I'd like the workflow to go as follows: edit my "toblog.html" file with Quicksilver; then ftp the file up to its proper location with either a widget or, even more preferably, with QS itself. Soon, soon, soon.

Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Greg at 5:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 4, 2005

Give-a-Disc, Take-a-Disc

I had another, lower-fi, idea yesterday in the car on the way to the airport that could supplement the idea of distributing music through local wifi networks. I call it "Give-a-Disc, Take-a-Disc":

Since I first discovered podcasting back in December or January, I've started to accumulate a pile of CDs that I've listened to once and never plan to again. What happens is that, since I haven't yet iPod-ed my car, I end up burning CDs of podcasts that I want to listen to in the car (or at work, or any other non-headphone-safe zone). Then they just sit around filling up my room and occasionally tempting my housemates into bending them until they explode into clouds of dangerous shards.

The library (or some other public place, like a cafe) should set up a system where people with content-filled discs that they no longer want can drop them off to be found by people who are looking for something to listen to. The things have gotten so cheap that it would be like the Give-a-penny, Take-a-Penny system at convenience stores, a kind of physical analog to online peer-to-peer networks. To bastardize a phrase from Nicholas Negroponte, we would be 'trading atoms in order to trade bits'.

In the midst of all the work to get cultural products to flow freely through the web, it's easy to forget that most people still find their music, books, and movies on little bits of plastic and trees floating around out there in the world.

Tagged: , , , , ,

Posted by Greg at 4:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Very Local Music

After I told him about my idea for bloggable public space, my housemate/bandmate, Cary, thought of an interesting extension to it. In addition to creating a community bulletin board-style blog, the venues could use their wifi hotspots to distribute music. Just as the Austin Wireless City Project did during the recent SXSW interactive media conference, these businesses could set up Rendezvous networks and use them to allow customers on their wifi networks to listen to a particular set of songs they made available.

So, you'd sit down in Pix, open your laptop, fire up iTunes, and you'd see a shared-playlist with songs from Laserhawk, Strength, Amy Subach, and, of course, At Dusk (all bands with members who work at Pix). There might also be some promotional songs of the upcoming PDXPOP Now compilaiton.

At SXSW, they took things a step further. AWCP actually set up a central server that each of the businesses could access which would then in turn make the songs available to their customers. Ever since BMI started threatening to sue Pix over our practice of playing music in the shop, we've (mostly) converted over to playing only local music for which we have explicit permission from the artists. Sarah, my boss, has talked about setting up a network of local restaurants and cafes that have received similar threats from BMI that would share a common library of permissioned-music. Using this Rendezvous system, we could make that metaphorical network into a literal, or at least digital, one.

Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Greg at 2:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 2, 2005

Personal Telco Project

This isn't my normal kind of post. There's not really an idea here, more of just a standard-practice blogish act of pointing to something cool on the web. But, it does relate to a previous post on bloggable public space and it's for a good cause, so here goes: the Personal Telco Project

In the last couple of years, I've heard over and over from various sources that Portland is "the most wireless" city in America -- that is, the city with the greatest wifi penetration per capita -- and that it had become such largely because of a grassroots effort. But I'd never known anything about the particulars of PTP until reading their website just now. They work with businesses and individuals interesed in setting up publicly available wifi nodes and have so far created more than 100 nodes around the city. They provide technical know-how, education, and maintenance and channel volunteers and enthusiasts of whatever technical level into useful activities. They also hold weekly and monthly meetings as well as "play days" (educational/technical/bullshit sessions).

From their site, at least, they seem to be a relatively well-strucutred and highly functional non-profit, which, as a person currently working to turn an organically organized local cultural organization into a real and lasting 501(c)(3), I both admire and envy.

It would be cool, if UrHo takes me up on implementing my bloggable public space idea, to partner with PTP to accomplish it. Also, we should have a wifi node at work, but I guess we'd need to get the wired internet there first.

Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Posted by Greg at 3:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack