I Fear No Gear

I saw a really cool product posted on Engadget, and it is at WalMart of all places.

For under $200, you can have an in-dash CD/MP3 receiver that is XM-ready, has a 2" TFT-LCD, and also includes an SD slot for reading jpegs and mp3's. This thing finally does nearly everything I need in a car stereo. Now, I just need it to work with my car's steering wheel controls, and have an auxiliary input for when I still feel like using the ipod instead of a SD card for moving my music.

I Walk the Line

I took the plunge tonight and installed Firefox 1.5 RC3 on my laptop. The sad/interesting part is that it is even a big deal for me. I used to be Mr. Bleeding Edge, always running the latest version or unreleased beta of a product, just because.

Anymore though, I want my stuff to just work (JFW to those who know). I don't often have the time to dink around with things that aren't working as expected, or to simply play with the latest and greatest thing.

However, Firefox is my friend, and I knew that at RC3 stage, this thing should be solid. It is. I am very happy with it thus far.

Of course, one of the tricks is getting all of my favorite extensions to work. I still despise somewhat how Mozilla has handled extension installation in Firefox. Most I use have been updated (I will update my extensions page shortly), but there are those stubborn ones that have not. One of the most prevalent of these is AutoFill. I love this extension, and can't navigate around the web for long without missing it. I searched a bit and nobody seemed to have updated it. So, I did it. I will post this to some forums and hopefully get it more noticed, but until then, I'm decreeing it here.

The fixed version of AutoFill for Firefox 1.5 can be had here.


To finish (since I need to go to bed), I will add a movie plug once again. Go see "I Walk the Line" if you haven't yet. Fantastic movie that should pull in many awards. Yes, I am biased being a huge Johnny Cash fan, but I know many people who enjoyed this movie who would not have expected to do so. Oh, and Shannon's favorite artist, Shooter Jennings, makes an appearance as well :-)

Are you stealing?

I started this with a juicy title, because this is much more substantial than the previous blurbs for the day. This is a conversation that Ryan and I were having the other day, and I found this site that brought it back to mind.

The underlying issue is, are you essentially stealing by blocking advertising? This has become very relevant more recently with various technological innovations that block/remove commercials. One example from a few years ago was the commercial skip feature on ReplayTV's. This actually ended up being removed in later firmware (like mine) because of pressure from media groups. The web browsing world has something similar with the AdBlock extension for Firefox. Since this is perpetually one of the top five downloaded extensions, I would say people are using this in large numbers as well.

The site I linked to in the title and above has noticed the effect this has on their advertising revenue. They have created some code to check for this extension and display a message telling the user that it is bad.

Which brings up the question, is it bad? Do I have the right to block annoying advertising? I think the answer is absolutely, yes. Now, I'm smart enough to realize that nothing is free. The content that I am getting for free is likely subsidized by advertising. If everybody quits viewing the ads, the site doesn't make as much money, and I lose good content.

However, I maintain that blocking ads is fine. As long as people are blocking them conditionally, as I do, not simply grabbing a list and blocking every ad in site. I say this because I purposely do not block google ads. They are unobtrusive, targeted, and generally do not annoy me. Thus, I think with selective ad blocking I am essentially telling advertisers to create better ads or I will ignore them. The problem is that rather than doing that, most would rather simply find more ways to circumvent blocking techniques. So, it becomes an arms race. There will always be new ways to block the new ways to circumvent the old techniques of producing annoying advertising. How's that for a tongue/mind twister?

What this really points at is a complete shift in advertising in my mind. Move toward pay for content, rather than blast "free" content subsidized with advertising.

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company

In this day and age of Microsoft haters yelling to the skies about Monopolies (whether they are warranted in thinking that or even using the correct term is a different matter), who would have guessed that one of the largest monopoly breakups ever has essentially been undone.

Back in the eighties, the US decided that AT&T had far too much clout for a single company and issued the massive breakup. Now, somewhat under the radar, although not to anybody following the telecom industry, Ma Bell has essentially returned.

Here is the logo of our new telecom overlords:
This is basically a combination of the AT&T, Cingular, and SBC logos all rolled into one. The recognizable AT&T globe along with the AT&T name have been kept due to their continued strong worldwide presence. All of the work SBC had done to promote and switch to the Cingular name seems to have been for naught.

Here is a good link detailing this final step in the reanimation of a monster.

Here is a link showing some of the amazing and ridiculous steps that have occurred in the time line between the old AT&T and this new one.

What is and what should never be

So, I got to quote a badass Led Zeppelin song, and have the title be completely applicable to the topic. Who is the last company on Earth you would want to buy a portable music player (or DAP as Engadget likes to call them)? Anyone? If you said Packard Bell, we are in complete agreement. Why haven't they died yet?

See it here in all its patheticness.

Return of the Blurbs

Okay, so a while ago I promised a day of blurbs. I got busy and it didn't happen. Today I'm going to make up for it.

First item of the day (chosen completely at random): one of the best posts the onion has ever done. This applies to so much more than television, use this as reference or for fodder anytime some zealot is pushing their cause too much. It was primarily because of this that I stopped touting the fact that I did not have a cell phone (whoops, I guess I just broke that rule). I didn't want to fall into this category.

Here is the post.

Survey says....Sony Sucks.

Hey, most of us have known that for years.

Back to the more relevent point, here is a list of XCP protected CD's that you should send back to Sony or sacrifice in homage to stupidity. Here is an article on their plans for retribution.

Even more new blogger features

Well, as I was posting the last worthless post a few minutes ago, I noticed Blogger has a new feature. You can now moderate comments.

I don't know what I think about this. I guess it is good to add it as a feature, but I'm glad they default it to off, and I don't plan to use it.

I do already receive an email anytime somebody comments on my blog. However, I wouldn't want comments to be delayed because I am too lazy or busy to go read my email.

Ignore me - just testing some more Amazon goodness

Amazon has this associates program which is kind of cool. Nothing really innovative, but it pays you a percentage when somebody buys something thanks to a link of yours. They keep enhancing this in good ways though, making the links more and more useful. Today I am trying out their new hover feature that gives a better preview of the item.

Why am I doing this all here, instead of on one of my other pages? I'm lazy, and just in case you are interested. If not, I don't care, and I'm still lazy.



Unfortunately, blogger won't let me include javascript. Here was the javascript that would have added the new preview to this link:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/s/link-enhancer?tag=musingsonalmo-20">
</script>

Gorillaz on my Mind

Okay, so I actually stole the title from a Blade II Soundtrack collaboration by Redman and The Gorillaz.

However, this is very sweet. Thanks to the BBC, you can watch an entire live set of The Gorillaz performing the Demon Days album. Found once again by my favorite blog, Uneasy Silence.

Latest Microsoft Build Tools for Free (for one year)

Okay, some will say I have sold my soul, because I am promoting development tools from Microsoft, intended to pull even more people to their side. Those people can stop reading now, I really don't care.

For everyone else, Microsoft has done something pretty cool today by releasing for free the express versions of all of their new 2005 development tools. These are the equivalents of the old favorites like Visual C++ 6 and others. I always have these at my disposal via MSDN at work, but this is cool because now I can have these tools for my own personal use at home. Very nice.

Here is a nice blog post describing how and a bit of why they are doing this.

Making Firefox Even More SupaCool

Okay, the screenshot below may turn out a little small, so use your imagination, or figure out how to make it bigger. This may be one of the best enhancements I have seen to Firefox yet. Someone has figured out how to view pages in IE, as a tab within Firefox. This is exactly what Netscape tried to do, but failed miserably in their new browser.



I found this through my new favorite blog, UNEASYsilence. It is an extension based upon the "View in IE" extension that I have used and loved for a very long time. Just like "View in IE" you can specify a whitelist of sites that will automatically be opened using IE, or you can simply right click and tell the site to open in IE, only now, it will open it in a new tab rather than a different browser. Sweet!

Here is why this is better than Netscape. First, it only opens sites that I have specified with IE. When they are opened in that fashion, a little icon down in the status bar changes from the Firefox icon to the IE icon. Now, here is the even better bart. The second you navigate to a different site it switches back to Firefox. That smacks Netscape on its candy ass. Netscape happily continues using the wretched security abyss that is IE.

All in all I am extremely happy with this. I think it is a very clever way to handle this specific type of task. Here is where you can obtain the extension. Note: if you are still running a 1.0x version (which I am), rather than 1.5 beta, there are two extensions you will need to install, rather than just one.