Wiki Wiki

Everyone who knows me well, know that I love some wiki action. Usually when I say that, I'm of course talking about the super fantastic wikipedia.

However, tonight I found myself in need of just a general purpose wiki. I wanted one I could setup, with a variety of potential topics, and get a group of people together for collaboration. I googled for about 30 seconds (I sometimes forget how lazy I have become over time courtesy of Google) and had about 4 potential sites. I checked out wikisites, wikispots, and probably something else named wiki. In the end though, Zoho's wiki solution proved to be exactly what I wanted.

No ads, nice clean design, and ability to create my own sites for collaboration. Very nice.

Must Know for Gmail Users

I've wanted to post about this little tip that I find incredibly useful for some time, but hesitated until I had a good reference link. Well, no better than Google themselves to talk about it, I suppose.

The Feature: Gmail has a way that you can "mute" a conversation. All additional replies to that thread will skip your inbox entirely. Fantastic for off-topic mailing list posts. The weird part is how hush-hush Google has made this. There is no mention anywhere that I could find, other than this help page, that even mentions this. It is a keyboard shortcut, "m", but it isn't documented with the other keystrokes.

Perhaps they are just trying to not clutter the UI with a feature many will not use. Perhaps it was created in the apartment of one of their employees again. Who knows?

Tired. Dog Tired.

Yes, I am. I have actually wanted to get some posts out here several times already this year. Just too tired to make it happen until now.

However, I'm not nearly as tired as a technology/idea that I realized today I want to see die off much quicker then is currently happening. Voice mail. When I say voice mail, I'm using it as a general term to refer to answering machines, and any kind of voice mail such as those at offices, or used by cell phone providers.

They are all flawed. Steve Jobs obviously (to anybody not hiding under their rock) pointed out in his keynote that navigating in a sequential fashion is horribly outdated. That is just the start though. How much time each day do you waste listening to the following:

"I can't come to the phone right now, please leave your name and number after the beep and I'll get back to you"

Were you really wondering what to do when that person didn't answer and this mystery device started talking to you? Multiply that times each person you can't reach per day and you are just burning away minutes of your life. Put the 2 previous examples together, and now both parties are wasting double the time just trying to achieve asynchronous communication.

Why? We have already defeated this problem. It is called email. While not perfect, it is hands down better than anything voicemail has done.

So, we need smarter phone systems. Do like Vonage and send messages as audio clips via email (or optionally do speech to text as well). Then you don't need Job's iPhone, you simply need a phone that can do IMAP/POP.

Next, the stupid greeting has to go. Let your phone display a status on the screen, just like IM. You can quickly find out that I'm away, busy, screening, running from the plague, etc.

Make it so.

The Unholy Trinity

One of these things is not like the other...

The unholy trinity I speak of in the title is a combination I stumbled upon tonight with much glee on my part. Apple iTunes COM SDK + JavaScript + Windows Scripting Host. I know, you're probably wondering what the hell kind of medicine I am on, playing with Windows scripting. I had never touched it before tonight either. JavaScript and I have a longterm love/hate relationship as well. I love to swear at it endlessly for its annoyances and lack of ease of debugging, while hating how often it ends up getting the job done for me.

That all said, this combination has just allowed me to do some kick-ass things with iTunes. I had the SDK downloaded for some time, and I wrote some sample C++ apps when I first got it. However, after seeing the Apple JavaScript examples I decided to experiment with them a bit. I'm thoroughly impressed now, similar to Unix shell scripts (although orders of magnitude less powerful), I find that I can just get a task done very quickly, as opposed to writing a full application. Quick and dirty is the key here.

I currently have some scripts to perform some actions I had been meaning to do. Remove any dead tracks from my library, and cleanup bogus comments on some of my tracks. If anyone is interested, I can give them the scripts.

Now, for the challenge. Come up with some task/feature that you would like to do with your iTunes library that you can't quite seem to make happen with playlists. I'll see what I can do about getting it done in a script.

Lists

I've always been a list type of guys (and piles). My method for remembering and organizing things falls into those categories. I create piles sorted by where things need to go, or what needs to be done. These usually are just short-lived, but have been known to stay around longer than they probably should.

When I need to actually keep track of things to do though, I make extensive use of lists. They lists have taken numerous forms over the years. Pieces of paper, written on the back of my hand, in a text file on a computer, on a web page on my computer, etc. Paper is where I almost always end up at again though, although usually accompanied by at least one list as well.

Recently, my number of things to do has increased exponentially, while my time to do any of them has decreased to almost nothing. This led me to having far too many lists. Being a lifehacker reader, I realized I needed to find a way to let technology help me solve this.

An online list program would solve many of my problems. I could have a single list, in one location, that I could reference and work on from anywhere. It could be dynamic by being computerized, and perhaps I could even find some cool software that helped me in other ways I had not yet foreseen. After a very brief bit of searching, I determined that remember the milk had all of the features I wanted, and had a very nice user-interface.

So far, I am incredibly impressed with the ease-of-use, and the ways that I am finding to group my data to make it simpler to digest. I knew for certain that I was in the right place though when I added my first todo item to my personal list. I had an item that needed to be done by tomorrow. So, when it asked for a due date, I typed "tomorrow". Lo and behold, the software actually translated it into tomorrow's date. Freaking fantastic.

So, how does everyone else out there keep track of all of this crap, and have you come up with any other interesting tips or tricks?

Q: The opposite of Microsoft Derivation?

For nerds at least, the answer would be Google Integration (okay, it's a stretch, and barely qualifies as funny, too bad, I liked it).

Google today rolled out yet another pretty slick feature by allowing pictures to be added to contacts in gmail. That alone sounds kind of cool (not on my account yet, can't say for sure). Something new they have added that I haven't seen done before is the ability to suggest a new photo for people in your contacts to use. Just imagine the great conversations that could spawn: "Hey, Suzie, you should use this upskirt shot I have of you from last night at the bar".

Anyway, all of this leads me to a topic I meant to discuss some time ago. These features and apps that Google are writing are often nice (yesterday's announcements: trends, co-op, and desktop4 do not fall into this category). However, most of their new releases are simple incremental things, or stuff I find less than useful.

Instead of looking for new things, I would really like to see them do nothing but focus on integrating and tying together their existing services. I should have a single Google account, with varied levels of services and privileges. Why the hell should Blogger have its own login, or a separate publishing space even for that matter? Same goes for AdSense. The idea of a gmail account needs to go away, replaced by a generic Google account. That way, when something sweet like Calendar comes out, I don't have to tell people they need a Gmail account and have them stare at me like something out of V. Instead, I tell them they need a Google account. They nod their head and go, "Yeah, I like that search engine. I think I will."

There are some really killer integrations that a few of us have thought up. Imagine if Talk and Calendar were fully connected. When you were in talk and someone had a status of busy, you could hover over and see exactly what they were doing from their calendar, or at the very least how long they would be doing it (ceiling cat, you know what I'm talkin' about). Things discussed in chats, such as events, could be turned into appointments and added to Calendar just like that.

How about this, integrate Blogger, make it look like Google instead of ass, and instead of making templates something no mere mortal should try to create, use that simplified new Google Pages template creator to make the site.

Here's my favorite that I just came up with. All replies to my blog posts should be dropped right into my gmail account as well, as an unread, labeled thread. Then, when I reply to them, my comments can go directly back to the blog. Drooool.

Basically, I think Google has compiled enough good apps for now, but they could really make them unbeatable and draw in many more if they just spent the time to create some synergy out of what they have (yes, I used a marketing buzzword just now, but I used it correctly, so meh).

Cool, self-contained solution

I like when people create easy, self-contained solutions to problems that I hear people ask about all the time. In this case, the problem is getting old record albums converted to digital.

The solution in this case, is a turntable with built-in USB recording capability, and some included software. Yeah, the quality probably isn't all that great, but neither are most people's 30 year old albums that have been sitting stacked, in a dark basement for 20 years.

$130 or so from Amazon, and the problem is solved.

30 Boxes, we hardly knew ye

RIP 30boxes. I was really digging using this, and I have gotten a lot of good use out of having an online calendar; however, things have changed.

No, I'm not ditching the online calendar, it has just been done much, much better. Google calendar is now officially in beta (which is the same as saying release for the rest of the world). I've been a bit down on Google lately, because I even though I can't live without gmail anymore, their more recent releases have not impressed me a bit. Calendar is every bit as good as gmail though.

Everything I liked about 30boxes is still there. The interface is as good as I think it could be, everything is easy to find and navigate. I love that you can select either the quick event add, or a more detailed one. Coolest of all, they implemented the feature that we said they absolutely needed. Gmail will now prompt you if a message appears to have an event in it, and you can add it to your calendar. Integration at its finest.

Calendar sharing and delegating is retained, and RSS feeds are available, something I found very useful with 30boxes. Popup reminders are included, which 30boxes did not offer.

The last thing to find out is what type of iCalendar support is included. Overall though, I see Google having the killer calendar/email integration for me.


Some quick updates:
It looks like for now iCal importing is limited to a standard browse and upload form. This could be done a little smoother. Not sure if there is anyway currently to use a website's iCalendar file without first saving it offline.

Not really a calendar issue, but there needs to be a Calendar link from Gmail. I smell a Greasemonkey script in the making...

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.