Technology

After spending a lot time surfing the net looking for the best upgrade for my Powermac, I decided on an ATi Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Edition video card. It’s the best video that will ever work in my Dual 1 GHz G4 Powermac. I know you’re all very excited for me. What’s even better about it, is that it will likely correct the KotOR problems I was having. There was an update that was supposed to correct it, but I was too disheartened to try it again. Besides, I barely have time for anything lately. I haven’t even been playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. ...

I’ve already run this idea by a couple people, but I thought I’d write about it so there’s some record that it was my damn idea. If you’ve read someone write about this or actually do it already, let me know in the comments. Tag, You’re It Many of you are already familiar with tagging, or folksonomies. Popular services use this categorization/organization paradigm to help users manage their content. For example, there’s del.icio.us for bookmarks, Flickr for pictures, 43 Things for goals, and even Technorati for blog posts such as this one. Some of these services are even beginning to list content from these other services when browsing tagged content. ...

Wired magazine has been steadily losing favor in technology circles. This isn’t because they’re a commercial giant. It’s because of piss poor reporting. In New Browsers, Same Unwanted Ads, we get to read all the same FUD that has been spread by Microsoft about other operating systems, just in the sphere of web browsers now. In other words, Firefox (and others) are only more secure now because of security through obscurity. You’re only safe because you’re using something that attackers don’t know about (yet). ...

Mozilla has updated Firefox to 1.0.1. This is primarily a bug and security fix release (recommended for all users). If you’re familiar with bittorrent, please use the Mozilla provided torrents. If not, visit their main download page. There is an unofficial changelog for the update.

Truth be known, I do have a HoTMaiL account just for registration to sites that almost certainly will spam me. There have been rumors that access to Hotmail accounts through things like Outlook Express, Entourage, and third party plugins, such as the one for Mail.app would be shut off. You’d be forced into using the web interface (which still sucks). It became official today: Dear MSN Member, Recently, Hotmail announced that in order to improve customer experience and reduce spam and junk e-mail abuse on MSN services, Hotmail will no longer allow new e-mail accounts to be accessed via Microsoft Office Outlook and Outlook Express. ...

Google‘s services are growing quickly. Very quickly. First it was just a web search engine. Then they added image searching (of course, it still has its kinks). They added newsgroups, news, and price searching, aka Froogle. That wasn’t enough though. They added a free email service (I have 6 invitations sitting around doing nothing for anyone interested) and desktop searching which still doesn’t support Macs, Firefox, or Thunderbird. I’m still leaving out countless other products and services. Very recently, their new “local” service added things like finding restaurants and other businesses. As I played with it, I noticed something. They had their own maps embedded in those searches. It wasn’t Yahoo Maps or MapQuest based. I personally preferred the former to the latter. My suspicion was well founded as Google is publically beta testing their new Map service. It uses some very new browser tricks (standards based) to make the maps interactive without any heavy Java or endless page loading. My words can’t do it justice, so check it out for yourself.

Just a quick one today. I’m sure most people have already heard of Flickr and so had I, but up until recently I hadn’t done anything with it. The buzz is well deserved. They fully support RSS, Creative Commons, as well as a million other features. I’ve barely scratched the surface. They’ll always have a free version in addition to premium accounts. I’ll probably stick with Gallery for some time to come, but this is definitely a more than worthy replacement for WebShots. So boys and girls, put up some pictures and let me see the goods.

Dear Web Community, Hard wrapping is stupid. This is important. Hard wrapping is stupid. I’m begging everyone to stop doing it. Allow me to be a bit pedantic for a moment and explain what I mean. Essentially one of the first features added to computers when they were being made was to automatically start printing text onto the next line once the current line was overfilled. This is known as wrapping. When people used typewriters, it was necessary to manually wrap and a little bell told one when to do so. ...

It’s but a few days since Apple released the Mac mini and we already have a product from another cool company with a similar (ok, exactly the same) name. Google has released the Google Mini. Before you plunk down $4,995 to get one of these neat blue boxes, you have to know that this isn’t a consumer device. Rather, it’s a server to index a business’s documents and facilitate searches of those documents. ...

All I can say is finally. Paul Beard brings us the news that CNN has finally joined the rest of modern online society and started offering their content in RSS feeds. It works great. I find it particularly useful because although the New York Times offers feeds, they’re woefully inadequate. The Front Page feed is only six long. That means for most people that unless they continually check their RSS reader, stories are likely to slide off the feed before you get a chance to look at them. Such a fast moving page needs more history in the feed. CNN’s is much longer and I honestly prefer their reporting. ...