The Republic of Geektronica

A (Belated) Mothers Day Video

Covers everything my wife and I say in a given day and more. That’s only because my kids aren’t that old yet.

May 12th, 2008 | Tags: mothers day | Author: phoneboy | No Comments

The Empire Strikes Barack

Whether you’re voting for one of these clowns or that geriatric guy, you have to admit, it’s funny.

May 7th, 2008 | Tags: barack obama, hillary clinton, the empire strikes back | Author: phoneboy | No Comments

Twitterfone: Giving Your Voice To Twitter

A little over an hour ago, Pat Phelan announced to the world that Twitterfone was live. Within 40 minutes or so, he had 1500 signups. Since the service is invite only at the moment, it might be a bit before you get your invite to the service!

What is it? Twitterfone takes your voice, transcribes it to text, and tweets it on your Twitter feed, complete with a link to the original audio. This is bog simple and free.

Local numbers are available in 10 countries, including the US, UK, and Ireland. Another 30 countries are coming in the next 6 weeks.

May 6th, 2008 | Author: phoneboy | No Comments

An Open Letter to Airset: More Vs. Better Features

Dear Airset,
I’ve been a longtime Airset user. I beta-tested the mobile application on my Motorola V551 back in the day, and I still use the calendar feature.

Periodically, I explore the other features of the site, but I only actively use the calendar since I can access it from anywhere and subscribe to its iCal feeds and receive SMS notifications. It’s a great solution.

Unfortunately for Airset, it’s also one that is duplicated by Google Calendar. I’ve continued to use Airset because I find its interface attractive and find its service more reliable (anecdotally, I think Google Calendar is less consistent than Airset in sending timely SMS notifications). I’m sure Google Calendar has a much larger user base simply because they tap into Google’s existing user base from Gmail and other Google web applications, but Airset’s calendar remains a good product.

The problem is that it remains the same product it was when I began using it in 2006. Since then, the pace of development in the web application space has increased exponentially. The core features, e.g. the calendar, have not seen any major improvements.

Interestingly, Airset has continued to grow its feature set, but in ways that absolutely baffle me. Music playlists? File management? Photo albums? Website publishing? Yes, these features are useful to group administrators who don’t have the time or inclination to use other services, but they are mediocre at best compared to what’s available elsewhere. One-stop-shopping might keep users on board, but it will not make your service catch on virally the way a must-have tool like Remember the Milk did.

My advice, then, is to stop adding new applications that will be useful to relatively few of your users. Focus on your core offering, and rather than making your service bigger, make it better. Add features, not new products. Increase usability, and stop adding mediocre features that no one will use. Offer an API and connect to other platforms such as Ning, Facebook, and Netvibes. Stop the widget junk in the dashboard before it gets worse.

I like Airset and want to see it thrive. The SMS and group management offerings are some of the best out there, and position Airset will to lead innovation in the web groupware space (but for the love of geek, stop calling it “webtop computing”).

Warm regards,
Geektronica

April 25th, 2008 | Tags: airset, calendar | Author: Justin | 6 Comments

Permalinks Borked For Now - Help Wanted, $50

We’ve moved this site to our WordPress Multiuser installation for consistency with our other blogs, and we’ll have a new banner up shortly.

However, one unanticipated problem was that our old permalink structure is not compatible with WP-MU. The old structure was
/%year%-%monthnum%-%day%-%postname%
but the new structure is
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

To complicate matters, the two plugins created to solve permalink change problems don’t work with WP-MU (just regular WordPress), and the core WP files are shared by the other sites, so I can’t edit .htaccess or put in /year folders with custom .htaccess files.

Any ideas? $50 for a solution, paid via PayPal.

April 21st, 2008 | Tags: permalinks, WordPress, wordpress multiuser | Author: Justin | No Comments

Using Netvibes As Your Web2.0 Dashboard

I’ve been using Netvibes for several months as my start page both at home and at work. Similar to iGoogle but much shinier and more robust, Netvibes lets you combine widgets, HTML fragments, and even whole web pages into one dashboard-style start page. Your page can have several tabs, and each tab can have as many modules as you want.

Right now, I use the following modules on my Netvibes page:

• Twitter (2 different accounts)
• Seattle Times news (via RSS widget)
• Remember the Milk (3 different widgets for different smart lists)
• Weather forecasts
• Pandora web radio

Most cutting-edge web2.0 services - such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Gmail, Flickr, and so forth - have custom Netvibes modules. Even if they don’t, you can paste widget HTML or a URL into a blank module of the appropriate type, and it’ll be added to your page. You can easily resize and drag/drop the widget right where you want it.

For the past year, I’ve been checking a certain job search results page. It’s a pain to remember to check it manually, so I set the results page (with search query in the URL) as a Netvibes module. If a new job opens up, I’ll see it on my Netvibes start page. I’ recently removed this module since it was no longer relevant, but am finding new uses for similar widgets every day. There’s also an iPhone version.

The latest release of Netvibes, going by the name Ginger, also has some Ning-like social networking features that I’m not taking advantage of. If you’re feeling social networked out, try the Netvibes modules for your various sites, and see if you can get it all working in one easy dashboard. It’s also possible to customize your Ginger theme. New features are announced regularly on the Netvibes blog.

Netvibes is the brainchild of Tariq Krim and Florent Frémont, and was founded waaaay back in 2005, when, even in the early days of web2.0, the Ajaxed start-page-o-sphere was pretty crowded. Netvibes has continued to innovate, though, and remains, in my book, the best of the available web2.0 start pages. Check it out.

April 20th, 2008 | Tags: netvibes, widgets | Author: Justin | No Comments

Should Your GTD System Bug You?

I’m trying out the Mac-only GTD application OmniFocus at the recommendation of a few friends, and am liking it so far. While I tend to use Remember the Milk for most of my task management needs, it has not proved robust enough for complex project planning.

You can do just about anything you want in RTM, but certain types of planning and organizing are a bit awkward, and go beyond its intended usage as a to-do list (though, I must add, it remains one of the best web applications in existence). For example, it’s often helpful to see a project as a series of ordered steps, but RTM does not support task ordering or nesting.

I’ll put up a full review with recommendations once I feel more comfortable with my implementation of GTD with OmniFocus, but for now I’m still hunting for usage and optimization tips. While looking for a way to get SMS notifications (which I did not find), I came across this discussion on the OmniGroup forums, which raised a question I’ve never thought of before: How much should your GTD system interrupt you with reminders?

Since I use Outlook and Remember the Milk, I have several ways to ensure that I get reminders of important tasks and appointments. David Allen recommends only putting the “hard landscape” on your calendar - that is, only real appointments that you will actually keep should go on the calendar; tasks you can do more or less any time soon - as soon as possible - should be kept elsewhere so they don’t clutter the calendar.

I tend to date my Remember the Milk tasks with the time I should start them by, building in enough time so I can complete them by the date they’re actually due. Ideally I’d specify a start date and a completion date, but RTM only has one date field.

Of course, when certain tasks aren’t actually urgent, a problem quickly develops with this system: a large backlog of overdue tasks, few of which are really overdue. The ones that really are due get buried among the others, and the system loses its effectiveness. I get SMS reminders at the exact time I specify for each task, but this is useless if I can’t actually complete the task when I get the reminder.

This leads me to recall perhaps my best GTD insight yet: An organizational system is not a motivational system. Knowing what you should be doing is not the same as wanting to do it, much less actually getting it done. This occurred to me almost a year ago, but not until today did I see how my own GTD methodology fails to take its truth into consideration.

I’ve tried to compensate for this in RTM and Outlook by using invasive reminders - SMS messages sent to my phone, or popup reminders on my desktop PC. But it doesn’t really work for things I don’t want to do in the first place. For appointments that I have no choice but to keep, it works great - the “hard landscape of the day” is what reminders were meant for. They are intended only to remind, not to motivate.

In the aforementioned discussion thread on the OmniGroup forums, the creator of the thread suggests that OmniFocus build in more nagging reminders - completely configurable, of course - in order to remind him what he needs to be working on. The other forum members quickly denounce this suggestion, saying, in effect,

Instead, they say, you should review your system regularly and make a decision about what you should be working on. You don’t need nagging reminders - in fact, using such reminders (except for hard-landscape appointments) is a clear sign that your GTD system is not working.

This was a tough realization for me. Perhaps I should give up looking for ways to bug myself, and work on developing the habit of reviewing my tasks and projects more regularly.

OmniFocus is designed to give you complete control of what you’re looking at, with filters, a “focus” button that hides everything except the project you’re working on, saved views (called Perspectives), and more. It goes far beyond RTM’s Smart Lists feature, so if you want to see 10-minute tasks due yesterday in project X that you can do while on the phone (@phone), you can, and you can save this view - and create a keyboard shortcut for it - very easily.

The discussion thread contains a bit of argument about whether software should a) work the way users really work, or b) require the user to learn new, more effective behaviors. Most of the comments fall in the latter camp, arguing that software developers shouldn’t facilitate bad habits by adding unhelpful (if tempting) features such as nag-me reminders.

What do you think?

April 19th, 2008 | Tags: gtd, omnifocus, remember the milk | Author: Justin | 8 Comments

Apple ][gs-Turned Laptop

This has to be one of the most awesome mods I’ve ever seen:

This buy Ben Heck took an original Apple ][gs and modified it to look like a laptop. Look at those slats on the front that remind you of the Apple //c. There’s a floppy drive on the side. There’s also a CompactFlash that serves as a hard drive!

Of course, it’s not a real laptop as there’s no battery. But it sure looks cool!

April 15th, 2008 | Author: phoneboy | No Comments

Google App Engine Announced: Like Amazon S3; Python-Only for Now

Google announced their much-anticipated web services product - now known to be called Google App Engine - at a press conference/party earlier today. TechCrunch, as always, has the first details out the gate. The product will be formally announced at 9:30 PM PST.

Web development geeks (and I’m not one) will have a greater appreciation for the finer points, but the short story is that Google App Engine is very similar to Amazon’s S3 offering - disk space, database services, and bandwidth, available on an as-you-need it, highly scalable basis.

Amazon’s S3 has become popular with certain types of developers, and probably won’t lose any business to Google’s product at this point. However, Google App Engine is free during the beta period, which has a few limitations, as reported by TC:

• Only the first 10,000 signups will be activated
• 500MB storage
• 10GB bandwidth
• 200,000,000 megacycles/day of CPU time
• The only supported language, for now, is Python

The Python thing is weird, but it’s what Google uses, and they’ll add support for more languages over time. If a developer is looking to deploy and app they’ve already written, I assume Amazon Web Services will be the way to go for a while, but Google App Engine may be good for developers writing new Python-based apps - especially, as this TC commenter points out, they want to get bought out by Google.

April 7th, 2008 | Author: Justin | 1 Comment

You Have To Burn The Rope

I’ve seen some pretty hard flash games in my time, but this takes the cake:

If you think you can beat it… go give it a try.

April 6th, 2008 | Author: phoneboy | No Comments