Pardon the Digression but...

Posting here has slowed for the time being but for good reason (to me anyway). I'm finally shucking my blogspot diapers and have purchased proper hosting and a domain name or two.

So right now I've put a few things on hold while I de-rustify my html and css skills and build a proper site. In a week or so I hope to be moving this weblog to a proper Wordpress install just like my heroes Earl  Moore and OmegaMom. I'd like to have a proper static site to hang it off of as well, hence the html and css remedial work.

Thanks to heathenx as always for guidance in edumacating me on hosting plans and domain whatchamawhoosits.

And to the good friends mentioned above - you should expect a few newbie questions! :)

Let's see if we can step it up a notch around here! :)

Blogged with Flock

The Catherine Zeta Jones of Online Word Processors

If you've ever tried Google Docs, you'll know it's an online word processor in the traditional Google style - functional but not necessarily the prettiest girl in the room.

But after trying the Adobe-acquired Buzzword today I have to say I've just met the Catherine Zeta-Jones of online word processors.

Very slick indeed! In fact, I was almost tempted to keep adding tables just to play with the interface. There are some really nice ideas going on here. Between the creative ideas and the high polish of the app, it's obvious they've spent a great deal of design time (graphic and otherwise) on this.

It's a free sign up when you get there.

I love seeing the bar get raised. ;)

Blogged with Flock

Make My Logo Bigger Cream.. and more!

Stuck with a crappy graphic designer? Say goodbye to all your worries with easy to apply "Make My Logo Bigger Cream". Big improvements with only one application. And there are lots of other deals to be had too, like "Whitespace Eliminator Spray" and more.

This company could put many hard working designers out of business. :)

ps. The look on the designer's face when confronted with "Flouresencizer" is priceless.

Check out all of these wonderful products right here.

:)

[via boagworld]

Blogged with Flock

The True Future of Online Office Productivity

Screw Google Docs or Writely or whatever. Forget about ZohoWriter and MS-Office Online...

If you're looking for a truly awe-inspiring online word processor, look no further than WordPerhect.

You be pleasantly surprised by the advanced interface and a truckload of innovative features such as:

- the ability to write on a variety of media from the back of silver cigarette foil to a torn off strip of cardboard
- the ability to customize your writing instrument size
- the choice of colour (as long as it's black)
- the ability to save your documents, and even print your documents
- in the spirit of less is more, the delete key scratches out the previous character, there is no delete per se.


Make sure that you use your browser full screen since the highly advanced rendering engine will scale accordingly and enhance readability.

ps. The pop up dialog system will undoubtedly be the model for OS's in the future.

;)

Blogged with Flock

The Dirty Car Art Gallery

Wow. Have you ever seen the Dirty Car Art Gallery. Absolutely amazing. I'm used to seeing what we call the old 'Charlie Weiber'.. which amounts to a simplified version of a portion of the male anatomy usually seen on the back windows of dirty white construction vans. This is a few million notches above that! :)

Blogged with Flock

Back on the StumbleUpon Wagon

About two and a half years ago I posted about StumbleUpon. After being a little bored with my feeds this weekend, I decided to get back on the SU wagon and give it another shot.

On the face of it, it doesn't appear to have changed much. I am however, finding it quite addictive. It seems to bring me to a ton of interesting and new sites. You might have noticed a short flurry of brief posts about some interesting stuff over the past couple of days. Those came from my Stumble'ing. In fact, I had to restrain myself from overposting. There were a ton of interesting sites, but I didn't want this blog to become a steady stream of regurgitated links. Still, I find many of the sites fascinating and I'll definitely share the odd one or five in between what will hopefully be more substantial and more consistent posts.

If you're keen on finding new and interesting sites in your own fields of interest, then StumbleUpon might be a great tool for you.

Blogged with Flock

Missing the Point

As a non-professional blogger (ha! couldn't ya tell..) and sometimes screencaster, maybe I'm completely unqualified to judge, but I think a new Top 100 (or an old Top 100 for that matter) completely misses the point of blogs, podcasts and the web...

The power of the internet is niche information. Build me a better search and recommendation engine and I am invincible!

Blogged with Flock

A very cool low-tech site - and it's Post 500!!

Bill Westerman's utilware site is cool. There is no RSS feed. The layout is simple, clean and interesting. The site is different than a lot of others because while it's modern and unique, he hasn't used any flash (I think). It's navigation is kind of book-like in that you can flip through page by page if you like, or refer to his table of contents - and it's in a horizontal layout. There is nothing 'below the fold', since there is no 'fold'.

He's got some interesting writing there on a variety of tech-bent topics. He's developed a GSD (Getting Shit Done) methodology which is 'brutally simple' and 'doesn't require a lot of forethought or planning'. Right up my alley. Lately he's into pen and paper, something I can definitely relate to.

Anyway, it would be nice to have him in my RSS reader, but then again, I'd miss the wonderful-ness of his site if he had a feed. It's definitely worth a visit.

On another, unrelated note, this is my 500th post here on Renaissance Man. I was thinking of doing up a full-on well thought out meaty post on some heady topic, and then realized this would break with tradition! :) - and likely jarr my few regular readers.

In any case, if you are one of my few regular readers, a truly heartfelt thanks for your patronage and be happy in the fact that there's simply nowhere for this blog to go but up! :)

Cheers.

Pre-Hammered Sinatra

I finally got around to watching Steve Gillmor's Bad Sinatra 1. Since I don't own an iPhone (and have no desire to), I decided I'd use the nifty program DeVeDe to burn it to a DVD and experience the full glory of Gillmor on my living room TV. With a slice of cold pizza in hand, I hit the play button and watched.

After it was over, I was pleasantly surprised that I didn't feel as though it was '38 minutes I'd never get back'. Clearly it's not polished. Hopefully it never will be. Steve still has his magic. His ability to annoy, cajole and make me chuckle has remained untainted over his months of relative silence. I'm glad.

High points? Dan Farber, definitely. Devoid of the scene-stealing, attention hungry bravado of Calacanis, Farber continues to forcefully right the apple cart that Steve is constantly trying to upset. I admire his attempts at pinning Steve down on some of the issues. Never quite successful mind you, but it's sure fun watching him try.

Other things I liked - Doc Searls of course. Pre-hammered shit and the state of VRM. Now there's a white paper for you. He made me laugh - more than a couple of times.

I wasn't impressed with a lot of the other stuff, not because it wasn't important (to someone), but it wasn't to me. If it was up to me, it would be the Steve, Dan and Doc Show all over again - there is long standing magic there I think - you can hear.. er.. see it. And just to ice the cake, put Jon Udell on speakerphone in every episode and pan away to a lovely scenic shot just as he's about to make his big point on the crackly speaker. That was classic too.

Annoyances? Damn Robert.. straighten the hat and adjust the camera if you need to. I know it's cool to be a nerd these days, but c'mon, that just couldn't be comfortable.

I'm interested to see where it goes. If it's anything like the Gang of old, I'm sure Steve has no idea where that is. ;)

Oh yeah... Note to Steve. The USB input on my new Kia's stereo, combined with my 100km daily commute says to me that audio podcasting is anything but 'dead'. I must have listened to 35 Diggnation episodes and have only ever watched two and they even have hot babes on there sometimes ;) - The power of video podcasting is not as strong as you'd like to think.

I guess the true test will be if I create an audio version of your video show and feel I'm not missing anything. Wanna pull a Diggnation and save me the work by providing an mp3 only feed too?

Didn't think so. ;)

Screencasters Update

There has been significant discussion over on this thread at inkscapeforum.com about our screencasters.heathenx.org site. We received several good suggestions and as a result we've updated the site slightly. Kudos to heathenx for his successful journey through video encoding hell, and his patience with my absolute skill at butchering his CSS work. ;)

Here's the low-down on the changes:

- tweaks to the css to make it suck less in IE browsers

- we're now streaming the swf files and offering up avi files for direct download (the avi's are encoded with xvid and mp3 codecs for those interested).

- we now show the size of the avi file so that you know what you're about to download

- we added anchor links for each episode so if great people like Ryan Lerch and Nico Buculei and other Inkscapers want to blog about specific screencasts they can link directly to the specific episode

That's pretty much it. If you've got more suggestions, keep 'em coming. Although now maybe heathenx and I can concentrate more on coming up with some new screencasts.

A New Site is Born...

Well we've gone and done it. Fellow Inkscape screencaster heathenx and I have spent the last month or so putting together a home for higher quality versions of our screencasts. You can see the fruits of our labour at http://screencasters.heathenx.org.

About 6 months ago I uploaded my first Inkscape screencast to YouTube and soon after heathenx started doing them too [he does nothing but copy me ;)]. We've had plenty of views on YouTube, but two things always bugged us. The quality/size of the video, and the 10 minute/100MB limitation on uploads.

So while we won't be abandoning the YouTube posts, we're going to be putting our screencasts over on the new site and likely posting versions to YouTube in tandem with that.

We've got all of our 23 episodes up on the site right now. We decided to encode them in flash format (.swf files) for two reasons really: ubiquity of the flash format and easier streaming capability. You can download the swf files to your local machine and view them in your browser or any flash capable media player, or watch them right on the site in your browser. The site also has an RSS feed which will serve mainly as a outlet for announcements - ie. not as a video blog per se, at least for the time being.

Call me a masochist, but I have to say that the hurdles and challenges we had to overcome to get the site the way we wanted was the most fun I've had in a while. Both heathenx and myself are engineers and because of that, I think that we're pretty much in our element when stuck with a problem and left to our own devices. The fact that we share the same dry and sometimes childish sense of humour didn't hurt the fun factor either. A quick check of the About page will illustrate that fact quite clearly. :)

And that's really the whole motive behind it. Fun. Sure, we could easily use the site to make millions (after all, we developed a completely custom-built content management system for it - in 80 lines of python [cough cough]), but we're far too modest for that. ;)

So if you've enjoyed any of our past screencasts, or want to check them out, head on over to the site at: http://screencasters.heathenx.org

We'd appreciate your feedback to help improve the site, so if you've got any comments or questions, you can comment on this post, or email us at: screencasters AT heathenx.org

And of course, if you like the site (or hell, even if you don't) spread the word to your screencast and/or Inkscape loving friends.

It's All Text

Via Chromatic's post at the O'Reilly OnLamp blog, I tried out the It's All Text Firefox extension and I have to say I love it!

This extension lets you quickly bring up your favourite text editor any time you need to enter text on a web page. I find my own Blogger comment entry box for instance woefully small and inept. With this add-on installed, I can either right-click in the text box and choose "It's All Text" from the popup menu, or click the semi-transparent edit button that the extension puts at the bottom right of text boxes. If you haven't set an editor preference yet, it'll ask you to do so the first time.

From then on, once you do it, your editor of choice (gVim in my case) will pop up and when you save the document, the text gets pasted into the text box. Nice and simple.

I don't think it works in Gmail's rich text mode when composing an email, but a quick switch to plain text mode reveals the edit button once again. You shouldn't really be in Rich Text mode anyway should you... ;) Of course you can always compose the bulk of the text in plain text mode and then once it's been pasted in, switch to rich mode to add links and such.

All in all, a very useful tool. If you do a lot typing on the web and miss using your favourite offline editing tool, check it out.

Speed test anyone?

It's probably been at least a year, if not two, since I last checked into the speed of my DSL connection. I remember back then that I was supposed to get 1500 down and 500 up and that various speed tests were showing me at about 80-90% of that.

It seems my service has improved since then. (Click the graphic to visit the site and test your own connection).



Nice to see things improving.

Conversation with a Facebook Refugee

A friend of mine recently told me he was 'done with Facebook'. Naturally, I asked him why. He said that old "acquaintances" were coming out of the woodwork, and while it was great that his wife was (and still is) a Facebook member, he was uncomfortable seeing scrawlings on his wall from partners from days gone by. Clearly, he didn't want to deal with the potential problem of the 'crazy ex-girlfriend'.

He also lamented the fact that it became a way for friends and acquaintances to shoot cheeky responses around at each other. Now if you combine this with his demographic (mid to late 20's - very recently married - but very much a guys night out type of guy) you can safely assume the banter back and forth was not always G-rated (but probably quite fun.)

We soon got around to discussing the things people do and write on the web. And that while it might be fun to post outrageous things on someone's "Wall", you can't really count on being able to take them back. And further, you can't count on something you write (anywhere on the net) being really deleted or somehow disappearing into the ether after a year or two.

Now this guy is not that tech-saavy - doesn't blog, frequents YouTube but not Digg - you get the picture. So I thought it'd be fun to show him the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine. Needless to say he was amazed that so much of what has (and is) going on on the net is being archived and captured.

I have a feeling that most people in the mainstream who are now just starting to generate and publish (however inadvertently) things on the net, don't really get the potential permanence of it.

As I've said several times before, be proud of what you write (or at least not embarrassed) and you'll do fine. If you don't, you'll never know when it might come back and bite you.

ps - While I have never found Facebook very compelling, my interest in it is declining even further day by day. But then again, so is my interest in Twitter. But that's another story, for another post.

Why Facebook and not blogs?

Kent Newsome asks the question:

"What is so much better about Facebook (and MySpace and other similar platforms) than an ordinary blog on a popular platform- say WordPress?"

I joined Facebook a little over a month ago - and while it does have it's uses, it in no way would serve as a replacement for this blog (or blogging in general). To me it's a completely different animal.

Facebook has put me in contact with two or three old friends (an old friend with whom I'd lost touch, one French teacher from high school and a former university house-mate of mine). The rest are people I already know and interact with. But that's really the extent of it for me. It's not a place I visit to learn anything new other than whether or not Joe OldFriend has kids or not or some other personal info people are willing to share.

But that's just it. It's all personal. It's all relatively closed. It's only as open as people are willing to make it. I don't login often. Maybe because I'm not a social butterfly by nature. Maybe because it's just been a series of 'hey long time no see, what ya up to' type private messages.

Sure, there are people who cross connect, join groups and share pictures and interests. If that's what you're looking for then it serves that purpose too.

Blogging on the other hand is much more expansive. And a lot more work too. But you're opening yourself up to discovering many more new things and people (and being discovered by a much wider range of people too). It's a completely different thing. If your into learning about new things, expanding your horizons and really participating in a global conversation then Facebook is not the place to do it. Granted it's not meant to be, and frankly I get the impression that the vast majority of people there are not that lofty in their ambitions anyway - which is perfectly fine too.

Of course there are the more subjective aspects. Facebook is very constrained design-wise and not at all pretty. It's a big step up from MySpace, but my home page seems like a sea of user names, widget headings and a big fat annoying ad on the left side, all drowning in a sea of too-tiny text. I imagine you can play with it, but every Facebook page I've seen is the same. It's just too constrained for my tastes.

It's also a closed system. So there is absolutely nothing that advances the cause of the most underappreciated internet technology - RSS. I don't think Google can crawl Facebook and for some people that might be a good thing - if they even care. Maybe it's only people who understand the value of a feed aggregator that will care about that anyway.

It still reminds me of Classmates.com. It hasn't added any value to my life other than reconnecting me with a few long lost friends. But a quick google search of my name could have done it a lot quicker. But alas, not everyone has a web presence and this might be the way in for the 'great unwashed'. If only it wasn't so closed. Maybe a buyout might go some way to solving this.

What is telling for me is that for each person I reconnected with, I always ended up telling them it was better to check out my family blog or this blog if they really wanted to see what I was up to. I've been really using it as a way to climb in there and say - 'come out here and see what you're really missing'.

Make no mistake, not everyone is cut out for blogging. Not everyone wants to write more than a few misspelled lines in a comment on someone's 'wall'. Not everyone cares about well designed pages, trackbacks or RSS. Maybe Twitter/Jaiku/Tumblr addresses all that.

To me, blogging is so open-ended and has so much potential in so many ways and Facebook has none.

I think the winds of change are always blowing too. There's been Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and now maybe Virb or something else. Maybe it's good you don't put a lot of hard fought effort into your content on Facebook. You likely won't be able to move it when you transition to the 'next big thing'.

There's some food for thought Kent. :)