I found it very strange to see this in my list of recommended books on Amazon’s home page.  Clicking through on the “Why is this recommended for you?” link pointed out that this book is written by David Allen.  No, it doesn’t appear that it is that David Allen, but obviously Amazon doesn’t know that.

In quite a departure from their original stance on digital music distribution, Metallica is selling each of their shows from their current North America tour as a digital download.  I picked up the FLAC version of their Houston show for $13.  They also have MP3s for $10.  The quality is really good.  They have the right amount of crowd noise, and the balance between James and the band is good.

Browsing around their site, they also have 20 older concerts available for free download.

For years, my employer has been almost anti-Microsoft.  Yes, we always had Windows laptops with Office on them, but the entire network backend was Sun.  My mailbox is on a Sun Java System Communication server, which I access via LDAP.  We also have a Sun online calendar server, but I've never used it.  I've actually always just had Outlook on my work machine also access my personal Exchange account.  Tasks, Calendar entries, and Contacts lived in my personal account, and was easily synchronized to my phone.

Now my employer is testing Microsoft Exchange as a mail and calendar environment.  I'm not on that pilot, but I do have a new laptop with our newly released Vista image, which appears to assume I'm on that pilot.  I attempted to add my personal Exchange account to Outlook, which ended up in a vicious cycle of authentication pop-ups for the Global Catalog on my personal network and the work network.  This has caused it to have a ton of trouble actually receiving any mail.  I usually take my Mac to the office, and Outlook Web Access works quite well, so I don't have an issue reading my personal mail, but I do only want to have a single calendar, which is available to my on my personal machines, on my phone, and on my work machine.

After a bit of Googling, I decided Google was the answer.  Google calendar and the Google Calendar Sync plugin for Outlook.  Basically what this does is on a scheduled basis, it synchronizes your Outlook calendar (in my case a local PST based one on my work machine, and an Exchange based one on a machine on my home network) with your Google Calendar.  It can either be two way or one way (you specify which one way.)  I'm using two-way on both machine.  So far I haven't had any sync issues.

My only complaint so far is that Google's calendar doesn't have any tagging, labeling, categorizing support.  Using the web interface only, you can create separate calendars, and they are color coded.  I suspect that this is how they intend people to segregate their different appointment types.  Unfortunately, the Outlook sync app can only sync one Outlook calendar with your main Google calendar.  I generally categorize (which color codes) all my Outlook calendar items.  Personal, work, Scouts, etc.  Unfortunately for now, all that data doesn't make it into Google's world, so also doesn't make it back and forth between the two copies of Outlook.

I was hoping that Windows Live Calendar would be a solution, but it doesn't seem to sync, that plugin seems to add Live as a new data store in Outlook.  Thread here.

Even though it has been out for a while, I just attempted to use the Amazon Universal Wish List feature.  This is really cool.  It found the product image, and grabbed the Web Page title.  I was given the opportunity to change the item title, price, and add a comment.  When viewing my wishlist, it sits right along side everything else, with only slight differences.  Great job Amazon.

I'm been reading feeds in Google Reader for quite a while now.  It's full of AJAX-y goodness, plus the convenience of being able to read my feeds anywhere is fantastic.  I recently started "sharing" feed items that interest me.  (Mostly to enhance my own memory, but they are also down there in the left sidebar, or you can subscribe here.) 

Google recently added a notes feature to Google Reader, which allows you to add a note to any shared items, but also allows you to create notes and share items from any page on the web via a bookmarklet.  At this point Google Reader could almost be used as a full-fledged blogging platform.  Neat.

On both a Windows XP and a Leopard Mac machine, today's Firefox update failed when trying to use the partial update, and had to resort to a full update download.  The Full download seems to have worked on both machines.

A New ASCII?  Well, something.  I've seen this before, but it is always brilliant.  Star Wars Episode IV via Telnet all done in ASCII art.  Just  telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

 

I have 10 invites to the Evernote beta if you're interested in checking it out.  Just comment here (make sure you give me a real email address) and I'll have them send you one.

Wow, this is cool.  Adobe now has a beta of their online, flash-based, light image editor, Adobe Photoshop Express.  It is seriously fast.  It can do most of the basic editing things that you expect from a free app (crop, rotate, red-eye removal, color balance, change to B&W, etc.)

The service comes with 2GB of storage, and a flash based photo gallery.  The only thing that wasn't obvious is how to download the images in the gallery.  The images in the gallery also don't seem to have much in the way of metadata.

Cool.

and it can purchase and download books over the air.  I'm a big fan of eReader, having found them to have a good selection of current titles, a nice reader, and a sensible DRM scheme (encrypted with your CC#.)  This just makes it better.  Access to your online bookshelf does indeed work, and with 3G downloading a title is pretty quick.  And you can't beat the price.

thanks jkOnTheRun

I was taking a quick look at my blog statistics to see if people were handing the redirect ok, and noticed some interesting data in the User Agent info.  Four obvious online news readers are subscribed to my blog, and as you can see, at least among my few readers, Google Reader is the most popular.  It goes right along with what Carl said last month.

NewsAlloy/1.1 (http://www.NewsAlloy.com; 1 subscribers)
Bloglines/3.1 (http://www.bloglines.com; 1 subscriber)
Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 4 subscribers; fee...
NewsGatorOnline/2.0 (http://www.newsgator.com; 1 subscribers)

Scott Handelman is pointing to the updated Windows Live Writer, and is including some hacks to it and dasBlog which make it even more useful.  The thing that really interests me is its ability to upload images using the metaWebLog newMediaObject method.  This was the main thing holding me back from using WLW all the time.  I think I'll have to check it out.

No this isn't some smack the monkey flash ad, but rather an art/web expirement by Bill Shackleford of The Ohio State University Art and Technology show "Digescape".  Basically, every unique incoming click adds one second to the air compressor, with the hope of popping a six foot diameter baloon in less than one day.

"Blogged"click here

One of my colleagues showed me the Google Photo Screensaver, and I thought it was quite nice, so I wanted to install it.  The unfortunate thing is it is part of the Google Pack, and requires you to install it through the Google Updater, which for some reason isn't Run as friendly.  Oh well.  There are a collection of site pointing to a Google stripped version of it, but I'm a little nervous about that one.

So I got it installed, and the screensaver is pretty good.  The fact that the first four images are the Google logo (on my dual-screen system) is a little annoying, but I can live with it.  I like the fact that you can add multiple sources for the images (that's much better than the XP default one.)  I stuck a bunch of photos from My Pictures, as well as the share on our server where we store our digital photos.  It seems to handle it ok, except it doesn't do such a good job of randomizing.  It seems to select a few subdirectories, and randomizes from within those.

Craig Pringle shows us how you can use one of the higher SKUs of Windows Vista and a Wacom digitizer to have a true ink experience, including TIP, flicks, and ink in One Note.  Maybe I should put Vista on my desktop, just for this...

I got home last night, and Mary says, I left a surprise for you on your desk.

Jeri Ryan is on the cover if this month's FHM magazine, and she picked me up a copy.  How cool is that?

Microsoft/Sysinternals has migrated most (all?) of their utilities onto a MS.com site.  Interstinngly enough, for all the Microsoft look that it has, it still has a Sysinternal feel.  They've updatted several tools, as well as combining a few of my favorites (RegMon and FileMon).  Take a look.  I've already downloaded Process Monitor.

Finally.  Now all I need to do is backup, and upgrade.  I'm excited.  Check out all the details at Scott's blog.

This is just brilliant.  Chris Pratley points to Mike Tholfsen's upcoming smash hit "My One and Only OneNote".  Ok, so smash hit is probably a bit far fetched, but Mike is definitely talented.  The music is good, and he has a good singing voice.  Plus, who can beat a song based about everyone's favorite cult note taking app?

I like it.  I'm going to download it.

Horray, Scott Hanselman has added the ability for dasBlog to select a different theme for Mobile devices.  This is something I asked about a while ago, and I'm really glad to see its finally coming out.  That is, if 1.9 ever ships.

Holy hand grenades, Batman.  Check out this list of indispensable tools that Scott Hanselman has put together.  I'm going to be rebuilding my work machine next month.  I need to do this list for myself, so I'll plan on posting it here.  (by the way. my list is way shorter.)

Gallery has released a VMWare image with a fully functioning LAMP environment with both current versions of Gallery.  I think this is fantastic.  Our Gallery is running on VMWare Server, and I find the whole environment to work really well.  However, I do see some challenges if you deploy your Gallery from this image, and don't know anything about it.  How do you do upgrades?  Maybe they will encourage the use of the Pre-Installer?

I'm sure you've heard about the Chuck Norris Facts.  Well, now's there's another site along the same vein, except on crypto.  Enter Bruce Schneier Facts.  hilarious.

I downloaded a copy of Windows Live Writer, and I'd have to say its pretty slick.  It looks pretty, and has a Drafts and Recent Posts support that looks really nice.  dasBlog doesn't support uploading images from it, so if someone is reading, that would be a nice feature.  Otherwise, I can always use the web interface for loading images.  The other thing it doesn't support which would be nice is post dating (that doesn't even seem to be a feature of the app, at least not yet.  It is beta.)

 

I think I'll play around with this a bit.

BTW, this is being posted with it.

I noticed a bright an shiny new item on Google's homepage this morning:
New! Personalize your computer with gadgets from Google Desktop.  They look just like Yahoo Widgets, Vista Gadgets, or Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets.  Do we really need another source for these things?  (although this one does look interesting, if you're already using Google Calendar - I'm not.)

Cnet is reporting that Microsoft has bought Winternals, including its products, and the Sysinternals freeware tools and community.  The article says that the purchase was less about the products, and more as a way to hire the two co-founders of Winternals.  Sysinternals website is getting hammered, but I was able to get in to Mark's blog.  Whew, 240 comments so far.  nothing terribly interesting in the blog entry that isn't covered in the cnet article, except Mark's commitment to continue to blog on the sysinternal's site.

I've used both the sysinternals and wininternal's tools, and they are top notch.  This is a great move for those guys, and I hope that it will bring great new things to windows as a platform.  Hopefully Mark will still have time to debug Sony's future rootkits.  8-)

Roy Osherove is running a geek desktop contest.  The grand prize is a Premium MSDN subscription (that's a seriously cool prize.)  Here's my entry:

Click to view a larger size.

A long, long time ago (I can still remember), Toys R Us had their own website, complete with a B2C engine for online purchases, wish lists, etc.  Several years ago, they moved their entire operation to Amazon.  Today I received an email announcing their new online store, which appears to be totally separate again.  I wonderd what happened, so off to google I went.  MSNBC.com reports that Toys R Us sued Amazon, for diluting their online presense, by allowing other toy companies onto Amazon.com.  The judge agreed with Toys R Us, but didn't award any monetary damages.

I have to say that Amazon.com has really been pissing me off these days.  There are so many different companies selling stuff through Amazon, I rarely find things that are actually sold by Amazon (except books.)  An of course Amazon doesn't control anything except the clicks when purchasing from one of these stores.  Now, don't get me wrong, there's still value in the commentary that other people provide on products there, but its no longer my first online stop for purchases.

In an apparent move to combat lost sales due to VMWare Player being free, Microsoft has decided to give away Virtual PC 2004 SP1 for free.  It also says that versio 2007 will be free come next year.  I think I'll stick with VMWare, but this is cool anyway.

Check out Stellarium, this month's SF project of the month.  Stellarium is a cross platform, open source, planetarium for your PC.  Cool.

David Rasmussen (presumably a member of the One Note team) has started a new One Note focused blog.  This will be one to watch.

I still think online backups have a place in most people's backup strategy.  Lifehacker points to a PC World article reviewing 17 offerings.  I've yet to find the perfect choice for our home network, but that's not for lack of offerings.

ABC has started streaming full episodes of their Prime Time shows, starting the day after they air over the air.  The above screenshot (click for the full sized view) is of the viewer on a 1024x768 machine.  I didn't seem to be able to make the video any larger (although I didn't read the help, so it may be there.)  The player is flash based.  The ads are annoying.  They obliterate the entire player, and thus are much larger than the video size.  You also have to click to continue the video after the ad finishes playing.

I can't see that this will get much use.  Who wants to watch a tiny video on your PC, while you have a fast enough connection to stream it.  I can see downloading, but I guess they don't want to infringe on the iTunes sales.  I suspect I'll have to be really desparate to watch one of these completely.

I've been interested in trying Vault for years, but can't seem to overcome the, "but Source Safe is free argument."  Assuming you're in the market for one of SourceGear's tools, they are offering a discount, as an excuse to try out their shopping cart software.

In the ad email I received from eReader.com (my favorite eBook store, in case you didn't know) they had a small sidebar listing several books you should have read to prepare you for the daVinci Code movie coming out next month.  Here's the list:

• The Da Vinci Code
• The Sion Revelation
• Templar Revelation
• The Jesus Paper
• Secrets of Judas