Jan 30th, 04
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Darn it, I like the monitor, but thing has mysteriously died. I get heart rate and speed, but I don’t get cadence or power anymore. Sent a note to the folks at Polar and they think:
_If the Power sensor shows green light, then cadence should work. Have you chosen the cadence ON (also power) in your wrist unit (options – bike set)? Other possibility is that the chain speed sensor or its’ wire is broken (yellow led is not blinking). On that case you can contact your local distributor for further assistance, you can find the contact information at “Polar”:http://www.polar.fi/polar/channels/eng/polar/contact.html_
So it has to go back to the shop. Too bad I actually like the thing and was just getting used to training by watts.
Jan 29th, 04
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“Diet K”:http://www.dietk.com/. Now that Kazaa lite has been hammered by Kazaa, Diet K seems like the new replacement. Like Kazaa lite, it removes the spyware. Get it now before it disappears.
I’ve also tried E-mule. Smarter protocol, but doesn’t have nearly as much content it seems.
Jan 29th, 04
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“Tom’s Hardware”:http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20040127/index.html. Given that doing the label and then affixing it to a CD and DVD is a pain, maybe the better way is to print directly to the CD. The Epson R800 and a couple of other models do this. Could be the tipping point for me in buying one of these. Here’s what Tom’s hardware found:
* The key to this is that the Epson 900, 960, R300, R800 have a straight paper path that allows thick things to go through.
* What CDR you use matters here. They like the Memorex produced the crispest brightest looking end product. Imation was next. The media is more expensive though, but it is just one step.
* You should wait 24 hours after you burn a CD before you print the label, that’s one difference.
Jan 28th, 04
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“Captcha”:http://www.captcha.net/. Bill Gate mentioned this in his Davos talk, but the idea is that if you don’t want spam send something back which computational hard for a machine, but easy for a person. Here is the CMU version of this.
Ticketmaster uses this as does quite a few bulletin boards and some other places. He’s right I think that its the answer long term to spam. The other piece you need is unforgeable email so that you actually know if it says, I’m from somewhere I really am.
Jan 28th, 04
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Interesting to see how two trends could make the PC quite different from what we know it. Beside Google, “Citeseer”:http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs is an incredibly useful way to find related academic documents. Give it a try.
# “Knoppix”:http://www.knoppix.org/ . Now that modern BIOS let you boot from just about anything. Not just a floppy, but really anything, folks at Knoppix have created bootable CDs that have all the executables on the CD and just boot. That means only the data is left on the machine. What a great way to have a zero install. Of course, you can now go larger with a bootable DVD, but it is amazing what you can include in 700MB. Also interesting to see how it is configurable. You get BTW, Linux, the KDE graphical desktop, MP3/Ogg/MPEG4 media player, Open Office.
# “USB Key fobs”:http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_attrib.php?page_id=152&sortby=popular-&vendors%5B%5D=0&popup1%5B%5D=55%3A105&popup1_attr_id%5B%5D=105&popup2%5B%5D=0&lo_p=0&hi_p=0&form_keyword=&sortby=&ut=1813100444775761. These are truly amazing devices. The only thing that Connie has ever asked for that I don’t have. They are amazingly convenient personal storage. It is totally passive and 256MB is $50, 512MB is $130 and 1GB is $250. “Samsung”:http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,112684,00.asp is the leader in this and the technology developments are pretty amazing. A 512MB flash is a single chip for goodness sakes.
# “Migo”:http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1366612,00.asp are already doing clever things by caching personalization information like favorites, etc. Then there is “ibutton’:http://www.ibutton.com/pki.html which throws a Public key certificate on the fob. Given that USB 2.0 is everywhere and fast, I know understand what a smart card is. It ain’t a mag striped thing. Its a keyfob with identity on it plus a cache.
# “Peer Tech”:http://peertech.org/UsbKeysAndHardwareCrypto has also done this so that with just a CD that has a read-only Linux file system plus the fob for keys then it is easy to have secure access anywhere and worry about viruses, etc.
# “OceanStore”:http://oceanstore.cs.berkeley.edu/info/overview.html. Related to this is abstracting storage. At Berkeley, they are working on a Peer-to-peer system that persists files forever. A very impressive set of research has been done on this. “IEEE Internet Computing”:http://oceanstore.cs.berkeley.edu/publications/papers/pdf/ieeeic.pdf has a great overview of the architecture.
# “RDF”:http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/01/24/rdf.html. I’ve actually had an RDF description on this blog forever, but haven’t understood exactly what it is for a long time. This reminds me that it is a general purpose description language that is easy to query. Used quite a bit for newsfeeds, but its more general than that. It’s a W3C thing with a formal “specification”:http://www.w3.org/RDF/ and I actually found their formal “primer”:http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/ quite helpful.
# “JXTA”:http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jxta2/. As part of this peer-to-peer research, quite a few folks have developed basic frameworks for writing P2P applications. JXTA is one that Sun has done that provides a high scale way for peers to communicate (rendezvous) with each othere.
Jan 25th, 04
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OK, based on a couple of reviews at popphoto.com and also photo-i.co.uk, here’s a list of printers to consider at the top end:
* Epson 2200. $600 street. The grand daddy anmd most folks still love it.
* Epson Stylus “R800″:http://www.photo-i.co.uk/Reviews/interactive/Epson%20R800/. $400 street. Brand new, has 8 inks. Can also print directly to DVDs/CDs. Some complain about duller image though. See previews at “Red River”;http://www.redrivercatalog.com/infocenter/epsonr800.htm, but most folks seem to like it quite a bit. Widespread availability in February. Announced at CES. Also see “FLAAR”:http://www.fineartgicleeprinters.org/5760×1440_dpi_Epson_Stylus_Photo_R800_printer/UltraChromepigmented-archivalinks.htm which BTW is a really great web site for high-end printers.
* Canon “i960″:http://www.photo-i.co.uk/Reviews/interactive/Canon%20i950/. $170 street. He basically loves this printer. It is a 2 picoliter ink head, so it is incredibly fine and the quality is amazing. So is the price!
* HP Photosmart “7960″:http://www.photo-i.co.uk/Reviews/interactive/HP%207960/. $260 street. Main drawback is that you get six inks with three cartridges, so not quite as efficient as one ink per cartridge. Like our current HP, the print head is in the cartridge, which is why they are expensive, but also why they don’t clog. Compared with the Canon i960, it has less punch, but seems more accurate than the i960.
Jan 25th, 04
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We have an old HP Deskjet 970Cse. Printer cartridges are amazingly expensive at $25 for large black (45A) and $50 for large color (78).
“Omnipro”: http://store.omni-biz.com/. Trying a place that sells remanfactured cartridges for $10 and $15 respectively a pop. A little bit of a risk, but interested to see what the quality is like. Got good reviews at Yahoo and Pricegrabber.
Jan 25th, 04
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Been using this browser called Opera. Pretty nice. Very fast. Also allows multiple subpages in the same browser and it restarts from where you left off. Very convenient for us shoppers who close the browser and then want to get back to where we came from.
Also has a nice mail browser. Best thing about it is that is is small and keystroke fast. Not true with Outlook which takes so long to start. Not a great spam filter though.
Jan 23rd, 04
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Chaosmint :: QTFairUse, MyTunes, and Protected AAC Explained. I’ve been using itunes for a litle bit on the Mac. Because it does such a good end-user job, its hard to see what’s really going on underneath. Great notes from Chaosmint about what is really happening:
* File Formats. There are unencrypted formats MP3 and M4A (AAC, but not protected). Apple created a new format M4P which is AAC encrypted with an iTunes ID. If you want to listen to an M4P song, you have to have the iTunes ID and only three machines can have that ID at any one time.
* MyTunes. iTunes allows streaming of MP3, M4A or M4Ps out over your LAN, but you can’t save the files being streamed. Mytunes lets you save those files to disk. Now, M4Ps are still encrypted, so you still need keys.
* QTFairUse. What this does is that it takes an M4P file and if you have the right iTunes ID and password, you can decrypt into an M4A file effectily removing the DRM form the song.
* Audio Hijack. These are tools that takes the M4P file and when it decrypts into uncompressed format (e.g., a WAV file in Windows speak, an AIFF file in Mac speak), then you grab that and recompress it anyway you want.So, it doesn’t crack the scheme, but grabs
* Ripping a bunred CD. it just as you can make a Audio CD with iTunes and then rip it to get unprotected content. This is exactly the same idea as audio hijack.
The basic problem is that with PCs, you can always find a stage where the music is open and then you can grab it.
Jan 23rd, 04
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I’ve been using Mac OS X for a while now. Finally getting used to it. Main issue is that Entourage seems very slow and also seems to crash.
* “Entourage Unexpected Quits”:http://www.macfixitforums.com/php/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=OfficeX&Number=370362&page=19&view=collapsed&sb=1&o=&fpart=1. Another in a series of great errors messages. Have this with both Entourage and Ecto (a offline blog editor). Seems like the equivalent of app hang, but there don’t seem to be any user accessible diagnostics. Happens whenever I try to browse contacts or calendar entries. There is a magic entry with Entourage, hold the option key down when you start it and you get the rebuild database options (why isn’t this a menu somewhere, maybe a Mac convention).
* Ecto unexpectely quits. Still need to research this one. I’m sorry it was unexpected ;-}
