Found on the Intarwebs

I am Legend

~ randyaa ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday we saw the trailer for a movie coming out in December called “I am Legend.” It looks awesome and I have no idea how we missed it until now. Check out the trailer below.

[metacafe]http://www.metacafe.com/watch/637560/i_am_legend/[/metacafe]

Your Music Your Way

~ randyaa ~ 3 Comments

Anywhere.FM LogoI read about Anywhere.FM a while back and even added it to my Daily Notes. I never took the time to look into it until today. Holy crap I wish I had! It’s an awesome service. It lets you upload your entire music collection and listen to it anywhere you want. At the moment there is no storage limitation but the site is still in beta so they say that might change. I was originally hesitant when I heard about it because I thought it was going to be a service you had to run on your computer at home to share your library over the web. Since I have recently gotten rid of my home server I wasn’t looking forward to running another service.

There is also a client side application which allows you to sync your entire iTunes library. They claim to be working on a winamp and Windows Media Player syncing as well.

Don’t worry you’re not stuck listening to your own music either. What would a website be today without a built in social network? Anywhere.FM is no different. They allow you to add friends and listen to their music and playlists. They also have a very large repository music available for free. Plenty of raw music for you to discover. You can even browse other people’s music and play that as well. I’m not sure whether you get access to all of everyone’s music or if it has to be shared somehow but at this point I’m very excited.

Apparently this is all legal thanks to paying royalties to the artist through ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, the three performing rights organizations. I’m sure the artists are happy about this because they get paid for songs which have already been paid for assuming you actually do own the rights to the music you’re playing. It’s just paying income tax and sales tax.

This leads me into another topic… I’ve gone legit. That’s right I’ve started weeding out my questionable music and getting legit copies of music I really enjoy. That being said I currently have a lot of whole albums. That has stopped. I’m now only getting the songs I really want. I think the desire to obtain a whole album is a hold over from the days of purchasing CD’s. Its time to move into the 21st century and only pay for what I want. It will increase my overall quality of music as well. To that end I’ve also begun a weeding out process on my Ipod. This weekend I went from somewhere around 4-5k songs down to only 300.

Ironically the very thing that caused me to get into this legit kick is something not so legit. About 2 weeks ago Nick let me in on a loophole for free iTune songs from facebook. It took some time but I managed to build up 250 free songs before they closed the hole. Yay for me :).

Gravatar

~ randyaa ~ Leave a comment

Gravatar LogoI generally like the idea of consolidation. I’m tired of all the logins I have all across the web. I try to use a very small list of identical names and e-mail addresses but with the shear number of sites out there and the different security requirements it’s very difficult to keep them all up to date. I’m a fan of openID although I don’t think they quite get it yet. I love the concept I’m just not sure about the execution. Using a website address as your one unique login is awkward.

In general there’s just too much clutter on the web. Too many things that accomplish the same task. Too much information being generated by every individual. I wrote before about consolidating the feeds I generate into 3 main categories.

Today I consolidated my avatars. An avatar is what people see of you. It’s often the first image they’ll get of you, or perhaps even their first impression. It’s a drag to update these avatars on every site you use. I myself hardly used to use them simply because I don’t like searching for a photo to use and trimming it down to size etc.

Gravatar makes it very easy. Essentially you attach an image with an e-mail address and thats it. Any website which is Gravatar-enabled will display your Gravatar wherever it detects your E-mail address. Your Gravatars also have ratings so that certain sites can say they only want to allow ‘G’ or ‘PG’ Gravatars for example. The only Gravatar I have is this:

I have now enabled Gravatars on RandyAldrich.net and RandyandRachel.com. I’ll probably do so on any website I administer in the future as I think its a great way to build community.

If you hate seeing the Gravatar logo, Create yours today!

If you’d like to enable Gravatars on your wordpress blog simply download and install this plugin and then add the following line of code in comments.php wherever you’d like them displayed:

<?php if (function_exists(‘gravatar’)) { ?><img src=”<?php gravatar(“X”, 80, “”); ?>” class=”gravatar” alt=”Gravatar Icon” /><?php } ?>

As a sidenote… I may create an updated version of the plugin myself (or send the needed changes to the original author) which inserts the above for you when I get a chance.

Clearwire

~ randyaa ~ Leave a comment

Cleawire LogoWhile in BestBuy returning a game today, I noticed a new Kiosk for Clearwire. It claimed to offer cheap wireless Broadband access. I was intrigued so I grabbed a pamphlet. After further review their broadband access isn’t that great.

  • ClearValue (standard tier)
    • 768Kbps down
    • 256Kbps up
    • $29.99/month
  • ClearPremium (premium tier)
    • 1.5Mbps down
    • 256Kbps up
    • $36.99/month

While their speeds arn’t that great they’re still a big step up from dial up. The idea is interesting and I knew that companies were begining to offer it in other cities but I wasn’t aware Rochester was on the map yet.

Don’t fret, Rochester is on the map!

Clearwire Rochester Coverage

One concern I have however is that it appears to be using a proprietary wireless protocol rather than the existing 802.11b/g protocols. What this means is people are forced into utilizing their provided modems rather than being free to roam the coverage area with their mobile devices. Too bad, If the speed was a little faster, I’d completely be willing to switch if I could connect using my existing wireless devices.

Ron Paul

~ randyaa ~ Leave a comment

I haven’t been paying much attention to the Republicans until recently. This is mostly the media’s fault and I’ll admit I’ve been suckered in. I used to be a Joe Biden advocate because I thought he was the only worthwhile Candidate. About a week ago, however; I started paying attention to Ron Paul and I’ve since changed my stance. Take a look at the clip from Comedy Central’s New Daily Show website below.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/sitewide/video_player/view/default/swf.jhtml

It makes me sick that this election will most likely be decided during the primaries and we’ll end up with either Obama or Hillary. I blame the Media. Give some attention to the other (worthwhile) candidates.

The best election we could hope for, I think, would be a Joe Biden vs Ron Paul election. If that were the case and both were given the opportunity to present their stances the results wouldn’t be obvious to me. I’d have to seriously weigh the pros and cons before making a decision and thats the way it should be.

28 Weeks of Intensity

~ randyaa ~ Leave a comment

28 weeks laterWow! Rachel and I watched 28 weeks later last night rented from redbox with a free promotion code. This movie was absolutely great! I liked 28 days later but the intense fast paced parts of the first were my favorite. In 28 weeks later that’s all you get. there’s about 20-30 minutes of slower lead in, but after that it’s none stop action, fast paced evasion and of course you get to see first hand the transformation of normal to infected in detail this time! If you liked the first one you’ll definitely like this one. I give it a 10/10.

If you’re interested check out the trailer.

Ask the winner

~ randyaa ~ Leave a comment

Ask.comA few days ago I was watching Webb Alert when she mentioned the search result differences between Google and Ask. It was clear that Ask is the winner. I couldn’t believe the difference. Take a Google search for the San Fransisco 49ers for example. The top Google search results are mostly sponsored links and ticket sales. Do the same search for the San Fransisco 49ers on Ask.com and you get much more meaningful results. In fact as you’re typing ask even suggests searches for you. Google has had Google Suggest for a long time but for some reason they’ve never pushed it into their main search.

Now that Ask has turned around, will Google see them as a threat and make some changes?

GENI can't be pushed back in the bottle

~ randyaa ~ Leave a comment

Friday some friends from work and I went to RIT‘s first Dean’s Lecture Series talk of the year by Peter Freeman. This talk, about GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovation), was informative but a lot less interesting than I imagined. I thought there would be discussion about their thoughts for the next internet and where we might be going. Instead we were inundated with boring generic statements of how GENI will be a testing bed for experiments dealing with the next internet. All of this is available at their website but to summarize, GENI’s primary objectives are:

  • To develop and evaluate ideas for future network design
  • To encourage related research

Some things that struck me during the talk:

  1. The importance of a comprehensive coordinated effort in order to avoid the same defects existing in today’s solution was one of their key points. In almost in the same breath they mentioned the different approaches by Japan, The European Union and The United States.
  2. Their basic architecture included devices named super routers. If these are like today’s routers they’re already building some very blatant similarities into what’s supposed to be a test bed for a new architecture. One of the things they mentioned was changing the TCP/IP stack. Routers are level 3 devices and as such currently utilize the TCP/IP stack. If these new devices are different than today’s routers they should have a different name.
  3. It seemed to me they were concentrating purely on the hardware networking part of things. Isn’t our hardware pretty solid? Can’t we already have 5×1028 addresses for each of the estimated 6.5 billion people alive today with IPv6 (wikipedia)? Can’t we already handle that bandwidth with the existing broadband technology? I would think the bigger concern is archaic protocols such as FTP and HTTP and their underlying stacks like TCP/IP, which have been hacked together over the years. DZone recently posted an article about why FTP Must Die and its definitely worth a read.
  4. If the hardware is redefined but the software and protocols are not, won’t we just end up with one giant hack which fits all of today’s technology into tomorrows architecture? This just seems like adding an extra layer to me.

GENI has a good idea with their general principle. We do need to be looking to the future, some of our current internet practices simply wont be able to hold up when

Every Light switch has an IP address.

However; they’re going down the wrong path and it seems like they’re creating too much (hardware) infrastructure to really inspire the creation of a new and unique solution.

Replacing Feed43

~ randyaa ~ Leave a comment

I happened across Kathleen Connally’s Photostream this morning and couldn’t find a feed for it through Google Reader or Firefox. Eventually I did find the RSS 2.0 button at the bottom, but before I found that I thought I’d create a quick (should take less than a minute) feed using Feed43. Unfortunately it appears Feed43 is down this morning. This is not good as I have several feeds created with the service that I read regularly. I’m hoping this is just a temporary hiccup and that they’ll be back but we’ll see.

If you’re looking for a replacement for Feed43 here are some options:

I’ll probably try them all in the next few days (especially if feed43 remains down) and offer my impressions of each.