Finally a fast browser for OS X that supports Google apps

I like Macs, but up until recently, I wasn't happy with its available browsers. My first choice was to stick with Firefox, since I am pretty happy with it on Windows and Linux. For some reason though, Firefox has an exclusive Mac OS X feature of sucking; it hangs all the time, and seems quite a bit slower than Safari. So I tried Safari (version 2 at the time), and found it to be alright, but was disappointed that the support for google web apps on it was lacking. Gmail worked at a basic level (no chat integration though), reader sort of worked but had a bunch of subtle UI bugs, and docs just flat out wasn't supported. Camino, which uses the same layout engine as Firefox but has a native OS X UI, seemed like a good choice for a while since it supported Google apps better, but never seemed to fully meet my expectations. It wasn't quite as slick as Safari, and not quite as versatile as Firefox.

I recently upgraded to Safari 3, and was delighted to find full support for gmail, reader and docs and spreadsheets. That isn't the only improvement over Safari 2 either, it has a lot of snappy UI improvements, and seems even faster. Going to Amazon or nytimes.com is like flipping to a TV channel when I'm on a high speed connection and it's the first browser I've used that allows you to pull a tab out into its own window too, something that ends up being very useful when I find myself with 10+ tabs open.

Url Encoded Charts

Creating by encoding them in a url is just too easy.



I'm guessing we'll start to see a lot more sites like this :)

Playing WFUV on a Squeezebox

WFUV is a fantastic station my friend recently pointed me to (I was instantly sold when I heard they had a whole day devoted to Neil Young in honor of his upcoming album). I streamed their high quality stream from work via iTunes with no problem.

Then, I was disappointed when the friggin' stream wouldn't play on my squeezebox at home that evening. I found a crappy quality stream on shoutcast that worked, but at 56 kbps, it was hardly worth listening to.

Today I figured it out with curl:

$ curl http://www.wfuv.org/audio/fuv247_128k.pls
[playlist]
NumberOfEntries=1
File1=http://wfuv.ic.llnwd.net/stream/wfuv_allmusic2
Title1=FUV 24/7 All Music Channel, 128k

It turns out the .pls link returns extra information that the squeezebox can't parse, but the direct link 'http://wfuv.ic.llnwd.net/stream/wfuv_allmusic2' works great.

Kurzweil vs. Gelernter

The headline of the article, "Is Artificial Intelligence Lost in the Woods?", in the recent MIT Technology Review is compelling. I began reading it expecting that the author, David Gelernter, might be outlining some new research into what makes emulating the intelligence of the human brain / body so daunting. Instead, it is an incoherent rant that basically boils down to an argument that computers will never literally be human beings, and even if they behave exactly as intelligent, it doesn't matter.

While investigating Gelernter further online, I was happy to find that Ray Kurzweil layed the smack down in a recorded debate with him by clarifying that whether computers will ever truly be conscious in the exact same way humans are is a philosophical question, not a scientific one, and that Gelernter is rigging the argument in his favor by refusing to accept any objective way to verify that a computer has become conscious.

facebook survives the cut

Every now and then, someone invites me to join some social network, and the same thing usually happens:
- I sign up, enter in some subset of the usual 'profile' questions
- I find a few people and become "friends" with them
- I don't visit the site for a few months
- I get some spammy update email from the site encouraging me to find more friends
- I delete my profile from that site (accept for linked in, which won't let you, so in that case I just changed every entry in my profile to 'linked in sucks')

Facebook started off on the same path, but has managed to avoid the ax so far. The addition of 'news feeds' was a big reason, it's easy to log in now and then and see quickly if there is anything worth checking out (a friend posting a photo for instance). I also like how people are tagged in photo, so you are alerted when you've been tagged in a new photo for instance, or can easily see the photos of one of your friends whether it was taken by them or not. One thing I recently discovered is you can remove yourself from being tagged in an individual photo if you like; let's say someone snaps a shot of you when you weren't sucking your gut in and don't want everyone to see it every time they look at photos tagged of you, you actually can remove the tag from someone else's photo. So while you can't remove someone else's photo, you have some control over what photos of you people will easily discover. The rest of the privacy controls are good too.

Since facebook doesn't suck, I'm glad they've opened up a developer API so that every new site doesn't have to create their own half assed social networking feature. I don't want to create a profile on flixter.com just to write a couple of movie reviews, but I'm happy to add the flixter app to share reviews with my friends on facebook. My tolerance for creating profiles for new sites is at an all time low.

Embedded Slideshow

Kind of cool new feature for picasaweb:

Looks Like Someone's Got a Case of the Muunnndays

I took a look at my stats from google reader today, and was surprised that Monday was overwhelmingly the busiest for my feed reading:



I had no idea I wasted that much more time on Mondays :)

What "On the Media" and "The Daily Show" Have in Common

Two of my favorite ways to keep up with current affairs are, "The Daily Show" on comedy central, and NPR's "On the Media". They both appeal to me because they each take a step back and look at what the media, reminding me that they are not some oracle passing down "the news", but organizations, consisting of people, making sometimes flawed decisions about what to cover and how to cover it.

The Daily show makes fun of the media both directly via John Stewart's monologues, and via the parody performed by its corespondents, packing a lot of "funny cuz' it's true" punch. Of course, I don't need to tell you that; everyone loves The Daily Show!

If you do like The Daily Show, check out On the Media. It takes a more serious, thorough and legitimate approach to talking about the media, but provides a similar satisfaction. A recent example is from last weeks show, where they did a story about how the media has covered the crappy conditions of Walter Reed. The story seems to have broke only recently with The Washington Post's story, but it's pointed out that this story has been covered by Salon's Mark Benjamin for years.


On the Media (podcast)