Monthly Archives: April 2010

Great iTunes Hack

Posted by on April 26, 2010 No comments

There’s so many things to learn, it’s hard to keep track of them all.  I found this one on Lifehacker.

I think like most people, I just don’t have the time to go through all my stuff.  I often wonder who does have the time to tag every picture with faces, or to correctly label all your music.  I’m sure it’s a wonderful thing if you do it, but my music collection has been a mess for… oh… 10 years?  When did I go digital?  Heck I don’t even remember.  I do remember seeing my first iPod way back in 99.  So it had to be shortly after that.

So I got a decade of crud built up in my collection and no amount of purging, murging or (what rhymes with *ging?) crying?  pounding?  well you get the idea.  Nothing has really made it better.  So we live in an uneasy truce.  My iTunes library holds yet another project I will never get to.

But today I found a very clever hack with smart playlists that lets me enjoy my music without cleaning it up.  Here’s the gist of it.  A lot like using SQL queries to get lists of information that you then run new queries against (called sub-queries or views) you can create a smart playlist, then use ANOTHER smart play list to filter it.  Essentially, you create 3 playlists, each that filters your music by quality and how recently it was played.  Then you create a master list that combines those three.  Songs you like a lot get mixed in more often.  Using shuffle, it’s every bit as good as Pandora.

For mine, I had to weed out Spoken Word, Children’s, and about a dozen other non-music related genres.  Then I created a list called “Banned” and anything that gets dumped in there gets excluded from my smart play list.  Over time I can go back and decide if I want to keep any of that junk.

Give it a whirl.  The only thing that confused me is that iTunes will change what options you have available depending upon what you are filtering against.  For example, select “Author” and you get one set of options.  Select Last Played and you get a different set of options.  Just play around to see which song attributes have which options.  Ultimately by combining different lists (rather than creating one UBER list) you can make some very powerful song combinations.  I’ve been listening to mine all afternoon and nearly all the things it’s playing are awesome, including some music I haven’t heard for a long time.

So give it a whirl.  It’s cool.

LastPass – and Password Card

Posted by on April 26, 2010 No comments

For quite a while I’ve used 1Password on my Mac to keep the 10,000 passwords I have to manage across all my accounts. This week I came across two tools that I’m very impressed with. The one problem with 1Password is that it doesn’t support google chrome (yet). And there’s no PC or Linux equivalent.

Well, Last Password (http://lastpass.com) is an amazing application that supports EVERY SINGLE browser I use. It stores all the information with one master password and early on I’ve been very impressed with it’s integration and utility.

The other nifty little tool I found via lifehacker.com. It’s a site called Password Card. (http://passwordcard.org). A Password card is quite clever. It’s basically a simple index card you carry in your wallet that allows you to create strong passwords and not have to remember them. How does that work?

Simple, you remember an index into the card, like square blue, or diamond green. Right now I’m playing with a triplet to recall like square white h9 or solidcircle purple v8. What does all that mean? You go to the solid circle symbol, then scan down to the purple row, and start reading off 8 characters vertically.

The reason for the 3rd option is that not all sites agree what makes a “strong” password. Some love the 8 random characters, symboles and digits, others need to see 9 before they thing a password is strong.

The genious of this system is that all you have to remember are simple things like a symbol name and a color, but the password itself is really difficult. You print the card, laminate it, and stick it in your wallet. Even if someone gets your wallet they won’t know what indexes to use to get your passwords. I’ve been using it for a few days, and so far I’ve been slowly upgrading all my passwords to “strong” passwords. It seems to work pretty well, especially with a tool like lastpass to help.

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Update:  It’s harder than I thought it would be to remember things like color, symbol, direction count for each website.  And as good as last pass is, it can’t cover every situation.  Like desktop apps that need to login.  For example evernote, or iCal, or Mail.  Keeping track of the symbol / colors is trickier than I thought.

The Tie King

Posted by on April 8, 2010 No comments

The last two nights of little league baseball have been crazy. I watched both my sons teams build huge leads, and take certain victory into the last inning only to give it all up. We didn’t lose, but we didn’t win. That makes 3 ties for me this season. Coupled with my 3 at the end of last season I have 6 total ties. I think that has to be a record.



The last two nights were the wackiest as both teams took commanding leads into the last inning. Tuesday night, I brought in a developing pitcher and figured what could go wrong? 3 runs later and loading up the bases I watched the tying run come to the plate and I thought, man we need to end this. So I brought in an ace. Bang. Grand slam. THEN we get the out to end the game. Score 9-9. We have up 7 runs.

The culprit was everyone waiting for someone else to make a play. Any one of 3 or 4 kids could have won the game at any time if they caught the ball, threw the ball, or held onto it. But the real culprit was me who left the developing pitcher in too long. I think now I realize it’s better to pull a kid while he’s on top then to let him struggle.

This is probably why you see Major league managers pull a hot pitcher. Because they grab theme before they get into trouble. So everyone is thinking why are you pulling that guy? He’s on fire! Yup, but he’s about to go very, very cold.




Last nights game was crazy. My son was pitching the best game I’ve ever seen him pitch. Then at the top of the 6th inning he drilled one into his foot batting. Now he’s hobbling around, no way can his pitch. It’s his plant foot. So we go to a decent backup. He gives up a run but gets two quick outs. Then we start walking guys. I’m not going to see a repeat of the previous night so we pull him right away. Only to have the next kid do the same. We walked the bases loaded with the bottom of the other teams lineup. The easy outs got a free pass so we could get to their best hitters.

I mean, if you’re going to give up the lead that’s the way to do it right? Then follows the gong show of dropped pop ups, ground balls going by two fielders to the fence, kids out of position, and beautiful strike out pitches getting past the catcher so they’re called balls. Kids not catching the ball when it’s thrown to them, or not hanging on to it for that final out. It didn’t help that the umpire completely blew a call at home plate early in the game which cost us a run. We had 5 or 6 chances to end that game and win it. 4 or 5 kids could have saved that game. No one did.

We took a 7-1 lead into the sixth inning and gave up 5 runs with 2 outs. Final score, 7-7.

I keep telling my kids that we’re tough to beat, but the reality is also that we need to finish. All of my latest ties we have allowed the other team to come from behind. I saw this play called Honus and me. In it Honus Wagner said, “Baseball is organized humiliation.” I also saw in the epic Ken Burns documentary about baseball that, “Baseball is made to break your heart.” Earl Weaver said baseball is the greatest game because, “you must give the other man his turn.” You can’t run out the clock, or play keep away, you must give the other guy his turn.

All that makes baseball probably the hardest of all to close, but we need to learn to close it. the lesson for my guys? Everyone can make a difference. Everyone. The key, is that when the opportunity comes to you in the form of a little white ball, make a play. Don’t wait for someone else. You be that guy. Be the guy to pick it up. Be the guy to catch it. Be the guy to throw it. Be the guy. Make a play.

If we can do that, I know we’ll win.

iPad Day 2

Posted by on April 5, 2010 No comments

Well, after spending most of the Easter Holiday focused on my iPad I learned a few things.

  1. It’s a little buggy. I have a few apps that crash out to the home screen (Evernote, and the ABC Viewer)
  2. It’s really challenging to update a blog with. Can’t wait for the iPad versions of Facebook and WordPress.

My favorite apps so far?

  • Epicurious is georgious
  • NPR – it’s awesome to be able to scan the articles, read them, or listen to the content
  • GamePlan – Jason Giambi showing how to do drills in a collection of videos almost makes me not hate the money leach that is downloadable content (DLCML)
  • Weather
  • Google Maps with a window large enough to actually see a map instead of a single street or intersection
  • USA Today – I’m now done with news papers. Officially, once and for all. If every paper doesn’t go to this…

None of the games have clicked for me yet, that’ll take some time but I know it’ll be a great gaming platform.

Kindle / iBooks

After a full day of use, my iPad ran down to about 18% of charge, so I threw it on the charger and grabbed my kindle. I started reading Bullpen Gospels by Dirk Hayhurst (funny but kind of depressing). I bought it through Amazon and started reading it on my iPad. When the batter got low I switched to my real kindle (v2) – but after an hour, I just couldn’t find a decent reading light – I went back, saw my iPad had charged to 40% and I snagged it and resumed reading on it. I may never use my kindle again.

However, there is one stupid thing about both the Kindle and iBooks readers – it’s the margins. Books have margins because (among other reasons) you need somewhere to hold the book without covering the text, or to take notes. But ebook readers a) don’t need margins for notes and b) I have the edge of the iPad or the kindle to hold. Why do I need another INCH of useless screen space? Can’t I just zoom to the width fo the content? This is the most stupid oversite in all these readers forcing me to use 1″ of screen for absolutely no reason. Get over it and let me zoom to the content width – just like mobile Safari.

The guys that nailed this are Marvel with their comic reader. I may actually start buying comics again. I think that was the first time I enjoyed reading a comic in 30 years. It’s better than the print editions.

So all in all, love the iPad. Will be interesting to see how much I really use it going forward, but it is now my default reader, of all kinds of media.

Every New Thing Now…

Posted by on April 4, 2010 No comments

OR Me and My iPad

My iPad

My iPad


Okay, I’m the kind of guy who has to have every new gadget. Well almost. The reality is that a few years ago I become an Apple Fan Boy. I wrote about my switch from PC to Apple back in 2006, but with the iPhone and iTouch I pretty much joined the ranks of the apple fanatics and left it at that.

So of course I pre-ordered my iPad and my less than 6 month old Kindle started to shoot me dirty looks. But you know, it’s another Jobsian hyped product and well… I had to have it. I’d read all the stuff I was supposed to read. Scanned all the blogs. Updated my iTunes at midnight. And here I sit on Easter Sunday playing with my new toy. (And my wife and children are standing over me wondering why I’m playing with this instead of them on Easter Sunday)

The Good

Okay, everyone has pretty much reviewed all the same things so I’m not going to cover any of that. What I’m going to hit are the stuff that wasn’t obvious to me from reading to the reviews good and bad.

  1. Media Consumption:

    Wow, this is unlike any other device I’ve ever played with. You just can’t get the experience of skimming through content with an iPad like you can on a touch or a phone. The big colorful screen making skimming USA Today, or NPR like nothing I’ve ever done. And in a world of been there done that, new experiences are to be relished.

    I have a net book, a laptop, and desktop, and a kindle, and this thing blows them all away. I never really enjoyed reading on a pc, sitting in my chair like a kid at school, and cuddling up with a netbook… well just sucks, even if you try to rotate the screen. As for my kindle? It is AWESOME at reading paperback books, you know novels, but anything else? Come on. Just navigating to a chapter or verse is a nightmare. But the iPad? It really feels new and different. This I give an A+

  2. The Bad:

    It’s not really the bad. It is really more like the missing. I told my brother, the iPad is the exact opposite of a netbook. A net book is everything you want except the screen. Everyone knows the screen on ALL net books blow. Why? Probably because if they fixed that no one would pay for the much more expensive laptops. But an iPad is nothing but screen. And nothing else of a computer – no usb, no hard drive, no upgradable memory. No physical keyboard. Zilch. The bluetooth keyboard support for the iPad is nice, but an expensive add-on.

    No where the iPad has a lot of room to improve is when it comes to creation. For example, that nifty photo in this article? I had to take that with my iphone and post it with my iphone then copy it over. There’s no camera or way to capture pictures with this thing. Also, a lot of apps are missing basic functionality you expect from a computer but don’t miss on a phone. For example, log into gmail with safari, then try to forward someone an email… wha? You can’t. Or how about in mobile mail, you want to make some text bold, or italics, or underlined… forget it. Really? You’re kidding me.

    Also basic features you just get used to on a PC, I want to send an email to my baseball team and include a link to the game schedule and… iPad doesn’t multi-task. Instead of quick switching to a window in the browser with the information I need, I’m opening and closing apps. Man that feels clunky.

Summary

So we have to go, but here’s the bottom line after playing with it for a day. iPad has a long long way to go to be a competent content creation platform, even for bloggers. The lack of a camera is a big big omission. What’s more, the work pattern is so different, you just don’t realize what you’re missing until you reach for it and realize the platform doesn’t support it (like no scroll bar on the side of this text entry box in the word press blog page). And while Apple keeps hyping that flash is about video – Flash realistically is also about charts, and graphs, and useful tools (speakeasy.com), or livestrong.com weight management tools (yes, I’m trying to become a lesser person.) Video is perhaps the largest and… (wait for it) flashiest part of the web, but by no means is it the only useful application of Adobe’s signature web technology. Man I hope Apple and Adobe work this out.
But nothing, beats an iPad for enjoying wonderful media created by other people.

update: Turns out going back to edit this blog with iPad safari is practically impossible. The text edit box has no scrollbar and the software keyboard has no arrow keys. So how do you scroll to the end of the article? I can’t wait until they start updating the wordpress and other apps for the iPad.