Hidden Coolness

Ryan recently discovered and shared with me some functionality within iTunes and AAC audio files specifically that was previously unknown to us. The functionality itself (you'll have to read his blog to find out) is very cool, and something that has been needed.

However, the more interesting part to me is that cool stuff like this sometimes sneaks out under the radar. I have seen this occasionally before, where a company has built some really fantastic functionality into a product, but then does nothing to promote it. It slips out when a few people find it and spread its existence via word-of-mount.

My company has been notorious for that in the past. We would stock our products with tons of extremely useful features that then never got documented, or were just never promoted to the sales force or general public. You would then get people years later saying, "Man, I wish there was just someway to do this task...", and we would then tell them the exact functionality they needed had been there for years. It got extremely frustrating at times.

So, my point is, brag up your features companies, all of them. Anything Engineering sticks in there, add it to a list features somewhere.

Back to the point at hand, this new feature is extremely cool. Ryan has pointed me at a podcast to try, and also remixed his latest DJ mix into enhanced AAC format, rather than MP3. I will try them both out tonight on my 4G iPod to say if it works as well on there as it does on his 5G.

Experimenting on doing this with an M4P will have to be left to him, given that I can't run ChapterTool (no MAC in my house yet), and my complete lack of M4P files (thanks JHymn!). Given that it is just XML data, and a known AAC format, maybe I should look into writing a Windows app for this. If I then added .cue support, it would do everything Ryan needs as well.

Update: Works great with a 4G iPod as well. Very slightly different, but mostly the same. A website regarding all of my finding will follow shortly.

I Tuned In

1 Billion songs have now been downloaded from iTunes. Think about that, that is a freaking ton of music purchased in an entirely new way than in the past. No physical media accompanying the purchase, just ones and zeros. Go back 8 years ago when I first started playing with MP3's and tell me that would happen in 8 years, let alone less than 3, and I would have been amazed.

The reason I knew the contest was over, is that when I logged into the iTMS tonight, I saw the counter getting dangerously close to the 1 billion mark. I had a few songs I needed to buy, so after refreshing a bit, and trying to guess the rate at which they were being bought, I grabbed my songs. I of course bought each one individually to try and maximize my winning opportunities. I was slightly disappointed when after I thought for sure the counter would have rolled, I watched it actually back up -- thus proving what I initially knew, that the counter was mostly just for show. Anyway, I gave it my best shot. Others around me would have no doubt liked me winning those 10 iPods, as I would have given almost all of them away. The 20" iMac was mine all mine though, and I can't even imagine having the $10,000 iTunes card.

Good show Apple. Now just quit breaking hymn.

Software is evil and will be the death of me

This was going to simply be an update to the last post. However, I really wanted to drive the number of posts for today even higher. No, not really.

Actually, the title sums things up pretty well. I love writing software, probably way too much. I can't tell the number of times I have wanted to get a bunch done at night, or had other things to do, but instead spent hours writing a piece of software. It is equally amazing how diverse and/or useless that software might be. I can't help it, I'm a code junkie. The more obscure and kitsch, the more likely I am to want to work on it, it seems.

Tonight's bit of coding resulted in my first bit of greasemonkey code. Nothing spectacular to that, as Greasemonkey scripts are just Javascript, which I have actually written a fairly large amount. My work was not spectacular either, as I was simply modifying the script I mentioned in the previous post. However, I am still happy, because I learned a bit about the inner-workings of Greasemonkey, I got to brush up on my Javascript skills, and I ended up with a script that actually works, as opposed to the one I posted earlier.

Here is the updated script.

Any color you want as long as it's black

Some guy who is obsessed with three stripes or something recently wrote about the new photocasting support in iPhoto. It all sounded grand when handed down from upon high by Jobs, only to turn into an exercise in proprietary methods and mis-implementation of pseudo-standards.

There are many gripes about this around the net. Dave Winer, the credited creator of RSS, providing as usual some of the most vehement. Today I found a page with the most truly informative postings about it that I have seen yet. These guys are an order of magnitude above me in their understanding of XML and RSS. Not surprising, as they were in it from the beginning, which makes things much easier, and the fact that I just don't have time to keep up with the whole of all technologies.

I was glad to find someone on that page had created a Greasemonkey script (screenshot) that I could add to Firefox to make those photocasting pages as least usable in their current, standard-smashing form.

As usual, big company provides something bad, open source hackers find a slick way around it. Good job guys.

I Spy

Spyware, that inherently evil beast lurking out on the Internet, turns out to actually be very controllable with the appropriate software steps.

First, of course, is quit running that screen door on the front of your computer known as Internet Explorer. Switching to Firefox pretty much single-handedly stopped any spyware from appearing on my computers that I use.

Next, keep an anti-spyware program around, just in case. I have ran various versions of these over the years (all free of course, the pay spyware program are often spyware themselves, or simply don't offer any benefits over free). I initially used AdAware, and then later added in Spybot Search and Destroy to pick up some that AdAware missed. However, when Microsoft bought Giant and released their product as Microsoft Anti-Spyware beta, I switched to that and never looked back.

Microsoft (actually Giant)'s product had a much simpler user-interface, found 100% of the spyware, including some the others missed, and generally seemed to just work. Being a beta, there were some things I didn't like of course. Navigating in the UI was sometimes non-obvious. Mostly I didn't like that if you were running a scan and decided to change an option, it stopped the scan. Also, Microsoft obviously hadn't fully integrated the code, as it still showed up in process explorer as Giant Antispyware and the look and feel was theirs.

Yesterday though, Microsoft released beta 2 of the product, and it is now renamed to Microsoft Defender. A bit of an ambiguous name, but I like the product a lot. It now looks, feels, and behaves like a Windows product (a good thing in this case). The user-interface is now very simple and easy to use, and overall it is very nicely integrated and automated. It can just sit there and do its job like I want. I recommend installing it. It is one of the downloads that require verifying that you have a "Genuine Windows" installation, but that isn't a big deal. Microsoft now even provides a nice helper application to allow validation while running Firefox.

Finally, since this has turned into a bit of a Internet protection post, I would recommend running AVG as an anti-virus program. Yes, viruses are not the big of an issue, since I don't run untrusted programs. However, I get enough emails with viruses in them, that it is nice to have AVG take care of that for me. There are probably other good free virus scanners, but overall I prefer AVG.

Doc Johnson

Yes, I used that title just to see what kind of fun I could have with Google ads.

However, docks are very relevant to this post. I have never purchased an iPod dock to this point, and I also haven't connected my iPod to my home theater. Both seem very practical and usable, they just haven't been necessary for me, and I hadn't really found a product for either that I truly liked.

All of that may be changing. We are potentially getting a new house, and the new house may be used a bit differently. I foresee being down in the home theater area much more than before. There is also a good chance that CRAPT games will be held down there, and music will need to be provided. The iPod makes a great way to do that.

Enter this new product from DLO. A dock that can be used with computer or entertainment center, that can provide an on screen display and remote capability for the iPod. Sweet. It has a very nice design, and the price point isn't terrible. I like it.

Let Sanity Rain

Computer users sometimes have too much control and time, and not enough up-front thinking. Over the past few weeks, I have seen several tips (being the type of person who is always reading tip websites) for how to be more productive with iTunes. Many of these discussion centered around the idea of "tagging" your music.

I was amazed at the number of bad suggestions out there. People hijacking the rating field to use some bizarre translation between number of songs to genre or category. Hey, isn't there a genre meta field that might solve that problem? Then, there were the people who stored their star value in the comments field, because apparently they lose their iTunes library on a consistent basis. Do these people live under power lines, or perhaps on a nuclear disposal facility? Backup your library, or better yet, don't lose it. I haven't yet.

Well today, I finally saw a good tip. Lifehacker posted a great tip from someone pointing out the grouping field. I also had pretty much just ignored this field entirely. However, you can do really good tagging with this. Add a multitude of attributes to this field that classify it to your heart's content. Perhaps AC/DC thunderstruck for example, could contain the following in the grouping field: "driving pregame Australian great_guitar". This could be continued infinitely. I can still make smart playlists based on all of the standard fields such as artist, album, date, genre, etc. However, I can now add this song to multiple other smart playlists based on labels. Very slick.

It's Sweeps Week!!!!

Sometimes you come across something on the Internet that just makes you feel dumber, or sorry for all the dumb people in the world after seeing/watching it.

Tonight I was searching for some information on the upcoming Vonage IPO, that will be happening this fall. I ended up finding an article about it on Forbes.com. I expect fairly accurate and informative news out of Forbes (maybe unjustifiably). While there, I notice a little box to the side, and the top link is "Top Topless Beaches" (Here is the link in case the Forbes site changes). This seemed a bit out of place, but of course I had to click on it. For those following along at work don't worry, there is nothing at all here that is NSFW.

Be warned, the first obstacle is that this video is in Real format (as in Real Shitty). I have Firefox tricked out to use Real Alternative, so I was okay there. I then proceeded to watch the video. This is maybe the dumbest, most pointless, least informative thing I have ever watched. The person brought into the clip is more of an airhead than I ever thought possible. I feel dumber now just for watching. To even things out, I wanted to make sure everyone else watches it and sinks down to my new, dumber level.

Google Chat Redux

Well, I blogged really quick about the new chat feature in Gmail the other day. Now, one of my accounts has the full functionality. Here are my thoughts on it thus far.

First, here is the screenshot I received that let me know my account was finally ready (sorry it is so small, click on it for a more readable version):


I said "sweet", let me try it out. Unfortunately, I didn't see anything upon logging in to my account. This is because I had Google Talk already signed in with that account. Keep this in mind, as it will come into play later. I signed out of Talk, and boom, I am presented with AJAX chat goodness and quick contacts.

(At this point I wanted to include some screenshots, but Google is having some issues with chat. It has temporarily disappeared from my account. Waiting for it to reappear...). Okay, I got tired of waiting, UneasySilence has some screenshots you can view instead.

Overall, the interface is very slick. The pop-out or pop-in arrows down in the lower right corner of the chat window are very nice. You can choose to keep the slick chat hovering over your lower right-hand corner of Gmail, or pop the chat out into its own window. You can also minimize the chat to a small bar in your Gmail. At this time, you cannot move the window when it is "popped-in".

Quick contacts work fairly slick as well. You can specify for any given contact by hovering over them if they should appear in the quick contact list or not. The quick contact list looks very much like Google Talk. Your status is indicated in the same manner, and you can still specify your status/tagline.

Overall, my very short experience chatting with it was positive. It worked as I would expect. We ran a few tests to try out some more interesting scenarios. First, we wondered how notification would work. If you browser is open to Gmail, even with the chat window closed, it will pop back open as soon as someone send an IM. If the browser is minimized, or you are in another tab, the title bar or tab text will change, but the focus will not. This lack of notification seems like enough of a reason to need to keep Google Talk around for the time being.

One thing I wasn't completely sure I liked is a new hover feature. Now, anytime you hover over a message in Gmail, you are presented with some quick contact options for that sender. Google designed it well enough not to interfere with your action on that message, but it does clutter the UI a bit.

The second thing I didn't really like, was when I restarted Google Talk, I started receiving chats in both my browser and Talk. I didn't get a chance to fully test this though before Google experience the issues I mentioned above and I lost my quick chat capability. I'll retest when it returns. I would really hope that having Google Talk active, would remove the chat capability from that Gmail account, as I originally found when trying to initially use it. We shall see. It's highly possible that I am bringing some of these inconsistencies on myself too, since I use multiple Gmail accounts, and have the Firefox Gmail manager extension.

Overall, this seems as usual to be a well-designed and implemented feature from Google that simply improves my experience using their services.

Update: It appears it may be Gmail manager that is doing me in on the chat service. Whenever it is active and logged into both of my accounts, I lose the quick contacts feature. I don't think I can function without the Gmail manager anymore, so I guess I will have to either wait or do without the chat feature from within my browser. At least logging chats still works.

The Taxman

Taxes. The word alone seems to inspire fear in many, especially when you are talking about preparing the yearly income tax return. I fully believe and understand that the IRS is incompetent, and that our system is horribly designed, but I still don't fear preparing my return in the least.

Perhaps it is my accounting background from high school shining through, but I simply don't find it difficult at all. The laws and process are clearly defined, although it does take a bit of searching sometimes to find the right document. Before someone goes and says that I just don't have a complicated enough scenario though, let me demonstrate to the contrary.

I have a long list of itemized deductions that I take advantage of, both on the federal and state return. Everything from donations, to mortgages, to a 529 college plan for all 3 kids. I fill out at least 2 schedule C forms for my wife's businesses every year, and have filled one out for the LLC that I co-founded in the past as well. Add several income sources, multiple investment types, etc., and my taxes are about as complicated as an individual return needs to be. On top of this, since last year I have been preparing the return for my property owner's association as well.

Yes, I agree, that some corporations will have returns that dwarf this, and they absolutely should use a paid tax accountant. However, for everyone else, I just don't understand the confusion, concern, or the money paid to tax preparers. The price to do simple forms is outrageous. Especially the 1040EZ. There is a reason it has "EZ" in the name people, a freaking monkey could fill it out correctly. You have to think more and follow instructions more when you order fast food (granted, some people seem to fail that concept too. Meh).

Okay, to the real point of the post. Although taxes make sense, the sheer amount of filling out the paperwork would drive me mad. That's where my friend Mr. Turbotax comes into play. I have used Turbo Tax for the Web for the last 7 years, and I wouldn't want to do my taxes any other way. The software makes it so simple to do the return, I don't have to fill in any actual papers, all math is done automatically, and at the end everything is checked and then whisked away to be e filed. The addition of importing from previous returns and from online statements has only improved the program over the years.

Each year, a few of us play the game of trying to pay as little as possible for the opportunity to use TurboTax. THe first two years I used it for free due to it being new, and my low income as a college student. After that, I managed to find deals each of the following years to greatly reduce the price. Last year, after checking out taxfreedom.com, we found that going through Fidelity offered the greatest discount. That coupled with a coupon code I found floating out in the Ether led to me only paying $19.95 for both state and federal taxes to be e filed.

This year, Fidelity once again is giving $10 off federal taxes. That takes your cost to $9.95 + $24.95, for a total of roughly $35. I still have the box taunting me for a promotion code too, so I will wait for a code to show up and then send away my already completed taxes. As in years past, I can then be treated to my money showing up electronically in my savings account in just about a week. That is freaking cool.


Summary: Tax system bad. People Silly. Use TurboTax with many Discounts. Grab a beer from the magic fridge.

Back in Black

I've been in a time/ambition downtime for a while, and thus no posts for a bit. I have thought of several good things to post over that time, I just ran out of either time or the desire to post. I'm back now though. I would like to return to more of a regular posting schedule.

Here is tonight's dish:

As I logged into my Gmail account tonight, I found that they have now added a feature I have been wanting for several months. You can now log your Google Talk chat history to your gmail account. Very cool!

Also, they indicate if you visit the Chats page in your gmail account that they will soon be providing a google talk client via the Gmail webpage.

This coupled with my new favorite tip from Lifehacker, 30boxes.com, is making me really love web applications.

One additional thing that I didn't even see at first. Google even added a slick feature aptly title "off the record" that you can enable if you don't want someone else to be able to log your conversation (yes, I know copy and paste will still work, but at least they provided the obvious knob). Wonder how all of this will work with Partychat.