A Little Ludwig Goes a Long Way

A smattering of opinions on technology, books, business, and culture. Now in its 4th technology iteration.

Andromeda

04 December 2002

Andromeda. Think I’ve posted this before but a reminder to self to try Andromeda personal streaming server. Oh and Phil – I haven’t forgotten about the thing you sent me to try out, just been buried with some site/net maintenance issues under the cover.

RCA Scenium DRS7000N

03 December 2002

RCA Scenium DRS7000N. Judging by my referrals, a lot of people are interested in this DVD/PVR combo. I happen to have it on good authority that I am getting one for Christmas, I’ll post a review up here as soon as I get it. Hey if you post enough comments, maybe you can convince C to give it to me early, so that I can post a review faster…

hitormiss.org : Matt's TiVo

03 December 2002

TiVo posting to blog. I am very jealous of Matt’s work to post his TiVo use to his blog. I am very scared to hack into my TiVo tho because it is the most “mission critical” box in the house – the family will flip out if it quits working. I really want a way to suck the data out without having to crack the case.

AOL pulls rug from under

03 December 2002

AOL pulls rug from under ‘Magic Carpet”. AOL has disbanded the Magic Carpet team. Is anyone really surprised? The history of industry consortiums that have come together with the sole purpose of countering some Microsoft initiative is not good. I remember viewing these consortiums with amusement because the members were never truly aligned on goals, they just all wanted to join in a Microsoft hate-fest, and that never leads to a viable software product. And it just wastes the time and energy of these companies.

What's Wrong with Messenger 5.0

02 December 2002

What’s Wrong with Messenger 5.0. Besides all these problems (some of which don’t bother me), the biggest problem is the confusion between MSN Messenger and Windows Messenger, which are both now running on my system and fighting with each other. Blake, David, Chris – help!

GB Enet

02 December 2002

GB Ethernet. After a night of trying to move captured video files around, I am ready to sign up for gigabit ethernet. At least one site recommends the dlink product line – i hope they have a switch with more than 4 ports. Surprising little discussion of gigabit ethernet on the enthusiast sites based on my quick scan – for instance i found nothing on tom’s hardware. are people really not playing around with this in the home?

Fixing Messenger

02 December 2002

Fixing Messenger. Sam Gentile points me towards the fix, thanks Sam. Forementioned MSFT execs, I hope you guys get this unsnarled so I don’t have to tell my dad to exec RunDLL32.

Direct Print Standard

02 December 2002

Direct Print Standard. If this is done right, maybe this would let us get rid of print drivers altogether? If every printer understands the DPS standard, and it is rich enough to handle arbitrary page printing, can we get rid of the need to install printer drivers altogether? I hate the fact that every HP printer comes with 10M+ of goofy software, most of which is not very helpful.

Latest Lockergnome

01 December 2002

Thumbnails, tagging from Lockergnome. Latest from Lockergnome that look interesting – KD is a program to create JPG/JPEG thumbnails from your JPG/JPEG images. You can then use the resulting thumbnails for your Web album or other presentations. KD allows you to specify the thumbnail size, JPG compression level, and an optional prefix. The preview window allows you to view the resulting images. Easy to use!

and

Media Tagger enables you to you modify any number of media files in an easy way. You can synchronize ID3 tags (v1/2), rename the files based on the tag, capitalize file names, and create Winamp playlist (m3u, pls) or file listings in Excel, text, or HTML format. Additional features include support for FreeDB (to retrieve track information from the Internet) and much more. Supports MP3, WMA, VQF, OGG, and APE files.