Goodbye Derek.

We will miss you. Thank you for the theme song, words and humor.

Christel and I had the pleasure of interviewing Derek K. Miller back in January of 2006 for the DiabeticFeed podcast. He was affable, interesting and touched upon being a Type I, his life and his music. This was well before he was diagnosed with cancer. He really added to the zeitgeist of my online life and I will sorely miss his ongoing contributions.

Listen to the show here.

It's a girl!!!

I am going to be a dad in 60 days!!!

Just had to say it.

Google To Shut Down Gizmo5 On April 3

It was fun while it lasted...

Google To Shut Down Gizmo5 On April 3

But there is hope...

Make Your Own Free Phone Service by Combining Google Voice with Other VOIP Services.

Unfortunately, as of this posting, though, Sipgate does not have any free phone numbers right now.

The Mac App Store

It would be so easy to sit here and write snarky remarks about how "Finally, Macintosh users finally have a way to put software on there computers" or "It was so hard dragging a single icon into the applications folder - so much work." But, that would be under-cutting the brilliance of what the Mac App Store brings to the whole Macintosh experience.

Being an Ubuntu Linux user, an iPhone user, food shopper and purchaser of fine thrift shop merchandise, I understand the value of discovery. "Oh," one thinks, "I have never thought of working this [thing, food, or application]  into my life. And..." one continues, "if I were not [standing, looking or smelling here] I would not have found [the aforementioned stuff]." And there it is - the brilliance of consumer discovery.

Ubuntu's software library attempts to categorize packages for ease of use, but I have never found myself installing software on Ubuntu that I absolutely did not need for a specific purpose. Ubuntu, for me, is all about precognition. But, I am constantly fiddling with new apps on my iPhone, and now Macbook, just to dip my toe in the water and see what is out there. It is fun. It is entertainment. It may prove to be useful (though, often is not).

So, go ahead, do a software update on your Mac and take the Mac App Store for a spin - you will not be able to miss the new blue circle with the "A" icon in your toolbar and you have nothing to lose but time. And money.

One cheapskate's stupid guide to making a DVD (Windows)

You have video. Maybe you got this off the web, off a video camera or off your Tivo. And you have have total and complete ownership of this video because you would not want to break any copyright laws. You want to make a DVD, but you don't want to spend the money on DVD burning software and all the brain damage that comes along with learning this expensive software. Can this be done and remain cheap and easy? Yes.

• Download DVDFlick

DVDFlick is a genius bit of open source software that works, works well and does all of the heavy lifting for you. You to not have to know the dimensions of the video, the type of codecs you need or even the first thing about the annoying minutia of DVDs. The program knows, so you don't have to. And is free and open source.



Take video and drop it on Program.
Set the preferences.
Hit "burn disk."

See? Easy. Now you can give grandma DVDs of all those AVI files you have of the kids.

Friends for Jennifer

This is a new blog from a former co-worker of mine who was recently diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease. Please subscribe to the RSS. http://friendsforjennifer.com/

Pano of Buckhead, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Made from 10 separate images taken with the iPhone.

The ViewSonic WAPBR-100 - Revisited.

This post is a response to a post I put up a year and some months ago about the The ViewSonic WAPBR-100 along with the discussion that has occurred over time in the post's comments. I think it is interesting as to the Google juice and the conversation this little lark has created. And if it were not for the conversation, I would not have instantly had a solution to... oh, first a story.

I have a server. Not the most powerful, but it has real RAID and a 64 bit Linux and heaps of memory and half a terabyte of storage. My baby is strong and has good bones. My baby is also loud and hot - so much for 24/7 operation. Then it hit me, I could plug my baby monster into a wi-fi access point and run it in the basement where it is cool and dry and I would not have to worry about the noise. So I did. And in doing so I brought my ViewSonic WAPBR-100 out of mothballs to hook the server into the network remotely.

But WPA2 encryption did not work in bridge mode with the replacement Linksys firmware. This was an odd little quirk because it had WPA2 available in other modes. Time to pull the trigger on the discussion about DD-WRT that was happening on my old post.

My friends, lets not quibble here anymore - just load DD-WRT. It works. It works well. It is beautiful. And adds yet more functionality to the once annoying paper weight that Viewsonic brought to the world.

Get it here (I'm using the "dd-wrt.v24_micro_generic.bin") - http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv3/dd-wrt/downloads.html

Good Day, Sir. Harrumph.

Are we done being called "idiots" and "dummies" yet?

North Miami Autostitch Panoramic

One cheapskate's stupid guide to getting programs off your Tivo (Macintosh)

Too often the world just passes me by while my head is somewhere in the sand. I did not know until recently that there exists two programs for the Macintosh that stuffs all the brilliance of $26 Tivo-To-Go program into two programs that, to my mind, are more stable and MORE feature rich than Tivo's own product.

You have held you breath long enough, iTivo and Pytovox Pytiovox are just two of the most beautiful free apps I have seen - simple, kind of pretty, and self explanatory. Both programs were wonderfly cobbled together by Yoav Yerushalmi and, frankly, I love this guy!

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iTivo is THE app for getting programs off your Tivo Series 2, Series 3 or Tivo HD and re-encoding them for another device or backup. Amazingly, the list of the types of re-encoding it will do is long and comprehensive. And, as a bonus, this program has some commercial skip smarts that will remove the ads during the re-encode.

The only bits of information you need for this is the ip address of your Tivo and your MAK number - both of which I tell you how to get to easily.

The only weirdness I found with this program is on OS X, version 10.4.11, the program complained that it needed Growl but besides that - runs like a champ.

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PyTivoX is ultimately a simple way to serve up video files to your Tivo. And it just plain works. Though it did not work on OS X 10.4.11 for me, it is still quite a brilliant little program for the latest OS X version. All you do is pick your video directories to share and hit apply. Then, on your Tivo, go to the 'Now playing' menu and pull in the video. There is also a 'StreamBaby' streaming function that works well for 4:3 content on Series 3 or HD Tivos, just browse 'Music, Photos, Showcases.'

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One cheapskate's stupid guide to getting programs off your Tivo (Windows)

One cheapskate's stupid guide to getting programs off your Tivo (Macintosh)

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