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blog by email

So thanks to a great tutorial by Carthik here –
http://carthik.net/wpdocs/emailblog.html – I am now able to blog by
email which has some nice advantages in some mobile situations as well
as if you just want to quickly post something received in your mail
client.

I’ve got it set to post hourly so there may be something of a real-time
delay if I do pass along tidbits while on the go, though it can also be
initiated manually which is a nice option.

Of course I’ve sent this post by email to prove the concept as well.

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iTunes Idea

I love this idea and would pay the price of a CD to do it…maybe a dollar or two more. 128K AAC files are fine, but it would certainly be nice to be able to use other formats if you wanted to. Instant fulfillment plus…

Wouldn’t it be great if when you bought a CD on iTunes they would ship you the actual CD (so you have a high-quality backup, liner notes, etc) in addition to letting you download the entire album? [Photo Matt]

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Google Acquires Picasa

Picasa enables users to easily manage and share digital photographs, and its technologies complement Google’s ongoing mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful… [PhotographyBLOG]

This photo sharing – posting to blog is heating up. As JD pointed out yesterday, Flickr now also supports posting to blogs and many more types than just Google owned Blogger.

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Pocket-DVD Studio for Palm

I have yet to try this, but it seems the main limitation is the size of the SD card you carry which enables the compression size to expand. Looks like it is designed for the T3…which they say plays better than a PPC.

Carry DVD movies in your pocket. Turn boring time into fun right from your pocket, anywhere, anytime. Let your children have something to do and keep quiet while travelling. This software makes life easier with much more fun. Convert DVDs into palm video is simple and fast. Any movie less than 3 hours long can be compressed into a 128MB/256MB/512MB card. It’s a great application that justifies the purchase of your palm device. [Palm Movie]

Update – So I had downloaded this and gone to do something else. Upon coming back to my desk, I realized that this only exists as a .exe, windows only app. Guess I won’t be trying it out after all. Seems that the image on the page is a tad misleading since it seems like an Aqua screen…

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Homeland Security planning possible delay of elections

You might want to stop and think about this one for a second.

Newsweek reports: “American counterterrorism officials, citing what they call “alarming” intelligence about a possible Qaeda strike inside the United States this fall, are reviewing a proposal that could allow for the postponement of the November presidential election in the event of such an attack… The prospect that Al Qaeda might seek to disrupt the U.S. election was a major factor behind last week’s terror warning by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge… Ridge’s department last week asked the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to analyze what legal steps would be needed to permit the postponement of the election were an attack to take place.” [kuro5hin.org]

Do you think the Republican party is nervous about the new Dem ticket or what?

While I’ve got your attention, you should definitely consider watching Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Sure it’s one sided, but the facts are true (at least to the best of my ability to tell) and the events discussed are simply amazing. Personally, it’s an opinion maker. Time Magazine had an excellent cover story in case you missed that as well.

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System Optimizer X

Saw this one pop up as a new update today and gave it a whirl while eating some breakfast… It’s definitely worth a go! I knew it was chugging along a bit, but had no idea it could be clear this easily.

System Optimizer X can improve your system’s speed and stability using the following routines:

  • Update prebindings
  • Run system maintenance scripts
  • Clean system/application cache
  • Repair UNIX file permissions
  • Optimize internet buffer sizes
  • Compress minimized window buffers

Use the “Optimize” feature to run several routines automatically. You can also set the schedule to automatically run specified routines weekly, monthly or bi-monthly. [MacUpdate]

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Talking Panda

Thanks to a link at Boing Boing, I discovered this application for the iPod. Lookout Berlitz!

Talking Panda sets a new standard for language translation software. Designed for the iPod, it’s stocked with over three hundred essential words and phrases of the language you want to speak, organized for instant access. … Virtual fluency available in French, Spanish, and Japanese for $10 per language. [Talking Panda]

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Arrow Launcher 1.5

Arrow Launcher is a slick pop-up shortcut launcher for the Palm OS. It works great with both graffiti and keyboard devices…

Arrow Launcher is a new type of launcher that launches applications, e-mail, contacts, and can SMS a contact, DIAL a contact, PLAY an mp3, and load a bookmark, launch applications AND contacts AND more FAST! [mytreo.net]

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SIPphone now for OSX

Just signed up… what the hell right? If you know me and want to talk, you can send an email and we can give this a whirl. I’m still hoping that Skype is an interesting bit for Mac when it arrives and may switch over to it when that day finally comes.

With SIPphone, users get a phone number, free voicemail to email, free conference calling, free SIP-to-SIP calling anywhere in the world, very cheap International dialing, and the option of a virtual number in the US or the UK so they can receive calls from the ‘traditional’ phone network.”

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All’s Fair in Love and War?

Alleged Hacker Now Works for Microsoft

A man accused of hacking into search engine company AltaVista’s computer systems about two years ago is now employed by Microsoft, reportedly working on search technology. [eWEEK]

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Yahoo has acquired Oddpost

Competition for advanced web services is heating up! Oddpost also noted in the recent WSJ article on feedreaders, combines a nice webmail client with a feedreader… it should be very interesting to see how this falls into place in the world of Yahoo. I’ll be looking forward to giving it a whirl for sure.

Yahoo has acquired Oddpost. A couple of weeks ago I got a heads-up that this deal had been consumated and would be announced shortly. Little did I imagine then that they would pick a Friday evening to make the announcement, but that’s the way it goes. It’s a big one. Oddpost turned the idea of what you could do with a browser upside down, by producing a clone of Microsoft Outlook in JavaScript and DHTML running in MSIE. Since then, they have labored in relative obscurity, growing a customer base, raising VC money, adding people, and staying out of the way. Then Google launches Gmail, with a very Oddpostish interface, and someone at Yahoo says “Hmmm, I’ve seen that somewhere,” calls up Ethan and Iain and their new VCs and asks “Are you for sale?” and the rest is history. [Scripting News]

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Zen Portable Media Center

In addition to additional format support, I’d suggest more platform support as well. Most people using windows are not buying media center PCs which this is catered around and there are certainly people using older windows versions, not to mention Mac and Linux PCs.

I still like the Portable Media device idea, have to wait and see what else comes aroung. Archos seems to be the mindshare leader in my book. Perhaps a more powerful Palm based OS6 device will be able to handle this duty…

This new Creative unit is the first product that MS hinted at early this year. It’ll be interesting to see how well it does in the marketplace. The price is kind of high and since you’re locked into using Windows Media Video instead of Microsoft’s own AVI, DivX, and/or MPEG, I’m curious if there are enough legitimate users of wmv to create a market for this. I bet if the device played more video and audio formats (why not add ogg support?), they’d sell more.

[PVRblog]

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The Gillmor Gang

Listening now…as usual, it’s a very interesting conversation with people who are not only well connected, but highly involved.

I just posted the July 9 show with special guest Brendan Eich, chief architect, Mozilla Foundation. (Is this the start of Browser War II? Can Mozilla-based browsers corner 6% of the market by year end? And if they do, will they be targeted by the same crackers who go after IE flaws? Does the potential for “tag soup” sound like what Microsoft did to the browser market in 1996?) [Doug Kaye: Web Services Strategies]

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Card Export II Makes Treo 600 Plug and Play Storage

This is a totally cool way to access the SD slot on a Palm without removing it and having to use a card reader… works on Mac as well as PC.

TreoCentral gives a short, but very positive preview of the latest version of Card Export II, a bit of software that emulates the USB Mass Storage standard that, this time around, lets your Treo 600 plug-and-play with your PC just like a USB flash memory drive. What that means to you is that simply plugging your Treo into any random machine will enable you to copy data back and forth to the SD card without installing any drivers, greatly easing the hassle of just trying to copy a few bits of data off a work or friend’s machine. Card Export II is $15 to purchase, but they do have a free trial.

And for what it’s worth, Card Export supports many different Palm devices, not just Treos.
Read – Treo as a flash memory drive [TreoCentral]

Read – Product Page [Softick]

[Gizmodo]

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Verizon Treo 600 Launch Imminent??

Paging through the latest Fortune I came across an ad from PalmOne featuring the Treo 600 with GoodLink. The ad highlights Sprint, ATT, Cingular, T-Mobile and … Verizon Wireless. Can’t imagine what might be holding this back now. Perhaps just some pressure from Palm to VZW, to get it going already?

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WSJ on Newsreaders

Tom Weber (not Walt Mossberg) introduces Feed Readers and mass-blog reading to the audience in the latest Personal Technology column. He reviews FeedDemon, NewsGator, Oddpost and Bloglines which turns out to be his favorite based on the ability to read the same subscriptions across machines.

While he mentions the pending release of Safari RSS (coming in Tiger), it was disappointing to see that there was no mention of any actual software for the Mac. NetNewsWire is by far the most popular and mature… happens to be my reader of choice as well.

In a related note, I like the redesign of Bloglines… I’ve been trying to use it more just to keep tabs on things in the world of newsreaders. The mobile version is very slick for use on connected handhelds…