Please stop trying to advertise on my blog. I've removed the comment in question (posted by one 'iMobimac_Guru', from a Brazilian IP address no less) and will do the same to any other obviously commercial comments. Feel free to contact me directly if you'd like ad space on Fibble.org, but the price just went up. Way up.

As a side note, I'm not opposed to iMobimac - there are models of BlackBerry out there who won't be able to connect any other way. But if you own a bluetooth-capable BlackBerry that can be upgraded to OS 4.2.1 or later, you're wasting your money by buying someone's software to accomplish what you can do yourself for free, with very little effort.

Dreamhost had an extended outage over the last twenty four hours - there's a good chance any mail I received between 7PM PST yesterday and now is lost. So if you sent me something important, please re-send.

Wow, it's been a while. Here's what's going on:

• Mark's now six months old! Time flies. He's huge and adorable. Check out the gallery for new photos, including our first hiking trip in our new backpack carrier! (Okay, it was only to the local park, but hey. Plus, bonus photos of his first time in a real swing!)
• SpotDJ now has a Facebook app! Check it out and let me know what you think. I'm having a lot of fun using it as a personal jukebox during the day.
• I've upgraded my BlackBerry Pearl to the latest OS from T-Mobile, and now I'm unable to tether it to my Mac successfully - after one successful connect, it won't reconnect until I pull the battery to reset it. Cingular users have been reporting this for ages, but I couldn't reproduce it until now. Here's hoping there's a simple solution.
• DisableTextAds has been updated - I was contacted by the developers of the Lingospot inline ad system. They actually provided me with a simple hook for disabling their ads. Kudos to them for giving users the chance to opt out.

I'm in lovely Portland, Oregon for the rest of the week for RailsConf 2007. As such, I'll likely be slow to respond to email until I get back on Sunday. Expect occasional reports from the field as time and sobriety permit (hey, it's a big geek party in the beer capital of the west coast).

Two months since the last update, and two new ad networks blocked. AdBrite and LingoSpot ads are now blocked by version 6.0 of DisableTextAds. LingoSpot is especially annoying - they make use of the browser's text selection mechanism improperly (meaning if you select some text on the page that includes one of their adwords and then right click on it, strange things happen).

But none of that matters to you, gentle reader. Just install the latest version (requires Firefox and GreaseMonkey) and browse away.

Probably the most common question I get about the modem script I wrote for the BlackBerry Pearl is "Does this work for the 87xx"? Sadly, the answer has always been no - the 8700 series doesn't have the proper Bluetooth profiles for a simple modem script like mine to work.

That is, however, until now. Someone over at the BlackBerry forums has reported success with an 8700g and the standard modem script. The secret? He upgraded his BlackBerry to OS 4.2, which apparently adds the proper DUN profile to enable simple, painless tethering via bluetooth. Now, I've only heard from one person, and upgrading your OS is a rather drastic step to take (especially if your carrier hasn't released a customized version for your device yet!), but if anyone out there decides to take the plunge let me know!

User fdesir over in the forums has braved uncharted waters and reports that the script for the Pearl also works with the new BlackBerry 8800! So I've done a bit of cosmetic work to the script and posted it here. If you've already set up your Pearl as a modem, the same instructions apply; if you haven't, head on over to the new 8800 forum and check out the howto post there.

Caveats - I don't have an 8800 myself to test with, but if you run into trouble feel free to post a comment here or over in the forums and I'll see what I can do.

Okay, my original post on using your Blackberry Pearl as a modem under OS X has almost three hundred comments and weighs in at a 284k download just for html. Ouch. So, I'm taking steps.

I really like the lightweight nature of blog comments, as I don't want people to feel that I'm setting up barriers to their getting help. However, their unthreaded nature means it's difficult to hold three threads of conversation at once. So, I'm proposing a change. I'll be closing that thread for comments at some point in the near future, and I've set up a small set of forums at forums.fibble.org to handle all tech support and general help around my scripts. They do require a sign-up process to use, but I promise I'll do nothing with your information - it's strictly a barrier against spam.

So, we'll see how it goes. If it seems people continue to use the blog more than the forums, I may go back to the blog support model. Feedback gratefully accepted, of course.

Okay, I admit I didn't actually change anything, but a few people have mentioned that the script I wrote for the BlackBerry 8100 also works with the Nokia E61. Neat!

So, for the more aesthetically inclined among you, I've made a few modifications to the original script. You can download the E61 version here - just follow the directions in my earlier post to install it. Everywhere it says 'BlackBerry 8100', substitute 'Nokia E61' and you should be all set.

I don't have an E61 to test this on, so I'd appreciate reports of success or failure, as well as the results of any speed testing you do. Thanks!

I've had a couple of people email me to ask if my modem script will work with the forthcoming BlackBerry 8800. As nice as it would be to have early access to RIM's latest toys, the short answer is I have no idea, and won't until the new hardware comes out.

Now, if some beta tester out there were to give it a shot and report back the results anonymously (say, in a blog comment), there's not much I could do about that, is there? I'm sure a lot of Mac users would be ecstatic to find out it'll work. Of course, if RIM would like me to beta test it for them, I wouldn't be opposed to that either. Heh.

So, my day job just hit a big milestone. We released our open beta today, so our latest and greatest site and client are out there for the world to see! It's been a busy couple of months getting things ready for release, and I'm sure it will be a a busy week or two seeing how real people (read: not us) use the site and using that information to choose the next set of features to implement.

In other news, we received a really favorable writeup over at TechCrunch! You can check out what Marshall has to say here. It's very gratifying to have such a well-connected publication review us this early. Hopefully their readers are chatty music lovers ready to spot their favorite songs at the drop of a hat. :)

Several people have reported that the process of connecting to T-Mobile works, but that they're disconnected thirty seconds to a minute later. Usually this sort of thing happens in areas of weak signal, but it seems like there's some other reason for it as well. A couple of people have reported seeing Connection Log entries that look like the following:

No response to 4 echo-requests
Serial link appears to be disconnected.
ipcp: down
sent [LCP TermReq id=0x3 "Peer not responding"]
rcvd [LCP TermAck id=0x3]
Connection terminated.
Connect time 1.2 minutes.

If your logs have similar entries (you can check by choosing 'Connection Log' from the Window menu of the Internet Connect application), then try the following and see if it helps:

First, does your Bluetooth connection show up in System Preferences -> Network? If it does, select it and click the 'Configure...' button. Click the 'PPP Options...' and verify the settings are the following:

• All Session Options are unchecked.
• Send PPP Echo Packets is unchecked. (I have it checked and have no problems, but others have reported success with this turned off.)
• Connect using a Terminal Window is unchecked.
• Prompt for password after dialing is unchecked.
• Use verbose logging is checked.

If your Bluetooth connection doesn't show up in the Network preferences pane, you can get it to show up by selecting the Devices tab in Bluetooth preferences, selecting your 8100 from the list, and clicking on 'Edit Serial Ports'. Pick the Serial Port with Dialup Networking listed in the service column, then check the 'Show in Network Preferences' checkbox. (You might want to check that the port type is set to Modem while you're there, too.)

Hope that helps!

Hi gang! Well, my real life job has been soaking up a bit of time, but I've managed to find a spare hour or two to muck about with the modem script. I exchanged a few emails with Ross Barkman, but unfortunately it doesn't seem that there's any magic setting accessible through the standard scripting interface. Bummer. I was holding off on publishing the new version of the script until I verified that, which hopefully explains why 'this weekend' turned out to be so freaking long.

However, there's hope. I've had one user report an upload speed of 34kbps, which is several times faster than anything I've seen personally. Hopefully, I can convince him/her to share some information about their configuration and pass the mojo on to the rest of you good people. Stay tuned!

(Oh, and a side note to whomever dugg me - thanks! That's my first time on digg - glad it was for something useful and not someone else's YouTube video.)

Okay, I've spent the last couple of days hacking out the stuff that doesn't matter, the stuff that isn't relevant for the BlackBerry and the stuff that didn't change anything when I took it out. The end result? No change in either download or upload speed. sigh

So, looks like I'll be working on this some more this weekend. I've finally got a handle on the modem commands the Pearl likes and doesn't like, and I now know more about Apple Remote Access scripts than I ever expected to. So I've turned to the master himself, Ross Barkman. Hopefully he'll respond to my email with some major mojo I missed, but as it stands this thing's as fast as I can make it. I'll release a cleaned-up version early next week for those who care (or want to hack around themselves), and I'll keep plugging away at it this weekend. Keep your fingers crossed.

For the graphically inclined: Dave Taylor has kindly cleaned up my directions and added screen shots of both your Pearl and your Mac during the entire process - something I should've done long ago. You can check it out here. Thanks Dave!

Last Update (I hope): This page is now a 284k download before images - more, now that I'm updating it. Ouch. So, I've set up forums to try and make the tech support and help process easier for everyone. I've tried to include all of the valuable information in this post into forum posts already, and I'm going to direct folks over there from here on out rather than answering technical questions here. This is an experiment, so I reserve the right to backpedal at any time. :)

Read all about it here, or head over to the forums.

Update 6: Tom from our nation's capital has posted the correct login information for Cingular - I've updated the post to include it. Thanks Tom!

Update 5: Helpful reader JohnnyC pointed out that if your default editor is TextEdit, and you're opening the downloaded file with TextEdit in order to remove the extension, it's likely that you're converting the script to TextEdit's default Rich Text Format (rtf). This will cause problems, as Internet Connect doesn't know how to deal with rtf files.

So, either make sure you're saving it in plain text format or rename it by highlighting the file on your desktop and then clicking once (just once!) on the name of the file. Hope that helps those with the 'Connect Failed' error.

A clarification: the APN "wap.voicestream.com" only works for T-Mobile USA as far as I know. If you're with Cingular, Rogers, or any other cell provider, you'll need a different APN. In addition, your provider may require a username and password to use their EDGE data service - T-Mobile doesn't. (Okay, they require that something be sent, but they don't check it - hence the 'guest/guest' suggestion below.)

Update 4: I've posted some additional tips for those with the disconnect problem here. Let me know if they help.

Update 3: A few people have pointed out that my directions are incomplete - I've updated them to include a few extra steps. If everything's working for you, I doubt you'll see any benefit from setting things up again.

Update 2: I just registered 208kbps download speed on the Speakeasy speed test, which is pushing the practical limits of EDGE. I'm therefore prepared to say the download speed's about as good as it'll get.

The upload speed, however, is another matter. I'm getting 8kbps on that same test, which seems really low. So further work is necessary. If you get a better upload speed than me, by all means let me know.

Update: I've uploaded a new version that improves performance (at least download performance) by a factor of 2x for me - I'm now reliably getting 135-150kbps speeds. It's only a one character difference from the previous version - what have you got to lose!

In the long tradition of only writing software when it solves something that annoys me, I've written an OS X modem script for the BlackBerry 8100 (a.k.a. Pearl). If you have an 8100, you can now use it as a Bluetooth modem with your Mac. Here's how you use it:

1. Download the script here. Please Right-Click and Choose 'Save As'.
2. Copy the script into /Library/Modem Scripts.
3. If you've already paired your Pearl with your Mac, open Bluetooth Preferences, Select your Pearl from the list of devices and press 'Configure...'. (If you haven't, choose 'Set up Bluetooth Device' - the following dialogs will be shown after you've paired your phone with your Mac. Make sure your Pearl doesn't require a password for your mac to connect to it - the 'Trusted Connection' option for the pairing should be set to 'Yes' on your phone, not 'Ask'.)
4. Make sure 'Access the Internet with your phone's data connection' is checked. Also, make sure 'Use a direct, higher speed connection' is selected. Click Continue.
5. In the Modem Script pulldown on the following screen, Select 'BlackBerry 8100'. Use the following settings for the other fields, then click Continue:
   • Username, Password: leave blank
   • GPRS CID: *99***1#
6. Open the Internet Connect application. Select the Bluetooth icon at the top. Under Phone Number, put your APN (for T-Mobile and the BlackBerry Unlimited plan, I use wap.voicestream.com, for Cingular it's "wap.cingular"). Type a username and password (I use guest/guest, for Cingular you'll use "WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM" as the username and "CINGULAR1" as the password) in the appropriate fields.

That's it! Let me know if it works for you. I don't believe my settings are getting the most out of the device's EDGE support, so I'll be tweaking as I learn more. Credit to Ross Barkman and Tim Hatch for the original scripts I tweaked to make it work.

Caveats: I've only tested this with my G4 PowerBook and OS X 10.4.7, so I have no idea if it works with anything else.

Update 2: DisableIntelliTXT is now DisableTextAds! Check it out here.

Update: Version 3.2 is up - thanks to those who pointed out I was eating words in Kontera multi-word links. Their generated HTML is truly... interesting.

Only takes a few people pointing out my flaws to get me off my duff. New release can be found on Userscripts or installed by right-clicking here.

I spent a month or so trying to prevent the Vibrant Media javascript from executing, but it seems impossible given the current limitations of Greasemonkey. So I've adopted an approach first used by Brian Donovan, which is both clean and more correct than my css hack.

So you might've noticed I've been a bit quiet recently - well, I've had a few good reasons. The main one is covered in this post, but work's been keeping me pretty busy too. You see, SpotDJ is entering the last phase of its closed, private life; soon, the doors will be thrown open for all to see. We've released a new version of the site, added a mac client, introduced features galore and generally made something we're pretty excited about.

If you'd like, you (as my personal guest!) can try it out. It's still very much a work in progress, and we may not have any content for your favorite Def Leppard song, but give it a try. Feedback warmly welcomed. You can sign up by clicking here.

Update 2: DisableIntelliTXT is now DisableTextAds! Check it out here.

UPDATE: A newer version is up! You can read about it here, or you can install it using the links below.

Well, I finally got around to updating my GreaseMonkey plugin for blocking contextual ads. Around June, Vibrant Media figured out what I was doing and modified their system to render my plugin ineffective, at least for sites that don't explicitly allow disabling of intelliTXT ads. So, I've modified the plugin to work by modifying the page itself. The end effect is the same; in fact, it's slightly better, as there's no need to reload the page to see the results.

As an added bonus, I've added preliminary support for blocking similar ads by Kontera - guess I need to think about a name change! At any rate, you can grab the latest version here or over at UserScripts.

(Okay, I realize that this is actually week 2, but hey, better late than never right?)

The building is classic dot-com era architecture - old brick, exposed beams and ductwork - the works. I'm pretty sure it used to be a brewery or bottling company of some sort - there are enormous side-sliding metal doors dotting the place with faded stenciling that suggests as much. Context Optional takes up exactly three desks in a corner. Wow.

The first week was great! (Hey, my boss reads this.) There's a lot of uncertaintly, but we keep finding obvious bits we can tear off and and complete, thereby shortening the list of depserately needed features/bugs/plans. Or if not shortening it, then at least making room for all the new 'must-do' items. I realize I'm being a bit vague about what I'm doing exactly - blah blah "stealth" mode blah blah. More detail soon, I promise. The short version is:

• Radio DJs suck.
• Spoken content can add a lot of value to a music stream or playlist if it's the right content.
• People have metric tons of interesting content we want to share with the world.

So, we're developing a platform to let people do exactly that. Watch this space.

Here's the big news: I'm leaving Reactivity. Again.

Yes, I've only been back nine months. No, there's nothing wrong with the company - frankly, they're the most vibrant I've seen them in the last two years. In a couple of months I think Reactivity's going to blow the doors off the competition.

So why leave? Well, I've been asked to join a startup as employee number one. It's a couple of friends, so I trust them. The idea's super cool; I'll be able to tell you more when I've actually joined. It's very new media/Web 2.0, so that's a big change. Frankly, I'm a bit intimidated at the thought of working on a project that might be used by more than a handful of people. And you know. normal people. Not hardcore geeks.

Why now? Well, these opportunities don't exactly grow on trees. Plus it's experience that I'll be able to use when I start my own company down the road (and that is the plan). So wish me (us) luck!

If you search google for "disable IntelliTxt", my script is the second hit! Granted, it's the copy that's hosted on userscripts.org, but it's still pretty cool.

In case you haven't heard of AllOfMP3, here's the scoop. They're a web site, based in the Russian Federation, that allows you to buy digital music by the megabyte. You buy $10 or $25 blocks of credits, then choose the songs you like at your leisure. You can download them at whatever fidelity you like, all the way up to and including the raw uncompressed audio that was on the original CD in many cases. It's quasi-legal there (at least, they withstood a legal challenge on their home turf recently), but the odds of it being legal where you live are slim to none. This hasn't stopped them from being hotter than the guy what swiped the crown jewels in some circles, of course.

All this is old news. The new news is this - they've recently released a software client that runs on a large percentage of the smartphones in the world. So now you can download anything in their catalog to your phone through a nice little custom app, encoded appropriately for your phone and small enough to fit. Small == cheap in their model, so it's entirely likely that you can get your favorite song as a ringtone from them for far less than your mobile service provider is charging. ($2.99 for Snow's Informer? Come on, T-Mobile.) How long before the cell networks start blocking this? Start your stopwatches.

From zero to automated in an afternoon! You'll need Firefox and GreaseMonkey. Once you've got both, you can install the script by right-clicking on this link. You can also check out the page on userscripts.org.

Update #2 I've further modified my script to block ads from Kontera as well. Still available here and over at UserScripts.

Update: I've created a GreaseMonkey script that automates all this. You can find it here or over at userscripts.org. More installation info here.

You might have noticed a recent trend in web advertising - keyword linking. Essentially, web sites are contracting a company named Vibrant Media to scan their web pages, find keywords that advertisers have paid for and link them to advertisements that appear when your mouse hovers over the word. These links are recognizable by the double underline beneath them (and of course, the big ad that pops up when you put your mouse near them). You can see an example and more information on the technique here. I'm using this site because they, unlike most other sites using the technology, provide a link to turn them off.

Personally, I see enough advertising in the average day to choke a whole team of horses, so I immediately started looking for a way to turn these ads off. It would seem that Vibrant Media doesn't provide any sort of general opt-out page. Meh. So, time for a bit of sleuthing. It turns out that disabling IntelliTXT ads for any random site is pretty easy - here's what you do:

1. Find the front page of your favorite IntelliTXT-using site.



2. View the source of the front page - the raw html (both Firefox and IE have ways of doing this). What you're looking for is a URL of the form:

   http://SITE_NAME.us.intellitxt.com/intellitxt/front.asp?ipid=ID

   Make a note of the text in SITE_NAME (likely to be the name of the web site you're viewing) and ID (likely to be a four-digit number). You'll need them.



3. Now we're going to construct the URL that turns off IntelliTXT. It's going to look like this (I've split the URL across two lines for clarity - be sure and remove the line break and backslash to make this all one line):

   http://SITE_NAME.us.intellitxt.com/intellitxt/switch.asp? \
   ipid=ID&state=off&url=http://www.SITE_NAME.com/

   Copy the values of SITE_NAME and ID into the URL above, then paste the result into your browser.



4. That's it! You should be redirected to the front page of your chosen site, which should be blissfully free of double underlined words.

Now, go try it out on a couple of sites and let me know how it works for you.

The good news is that the free software that came with my Korg microKontrol finally arrived. I've been reluctant to start a new project using GarageBand, as GarageBand wasn't able to take advantage of many of the new features of the microKontrol; basically, only the piano keys were recognized as input. Korg is gracious enough to include feature-limited copies of two of the most popular music software packages available today, Reason 3 and Ableton Live 4.

I'm a relative newcomer to music software, but I've had a great deal of exposure to shareware and feature-limited demo software (called "crippleware") over the years. Many shareware authors have adopted the simple approach of nagging the user periodically to register the software, or simply restricting the number of days the software will work without a license. The limitations imposed by the authors of crippleware usually fall into one or more of the following broad categories:

1. Disabling or removing key features
2. Preventing the user from saving their work.
3. Watermarking their output in some limited but undesirable way.

The authors of Reason and Live have approached the notion of crippleware in two very different ways. After trying them both out, I'm far more likely to use one of them than the other. Here's the breakdown on the two approaches.

Reason Adapted

The "Adapted" version of Reason 3 is a fantastic demonstration of the Korg microKontrol's integration with the software. Start Reason up, and the Korg automatically configures itself for use with the software. Change virtual 'instruments', and the keyboard changes to best control that instrument. All in all, a very slick package. Reason's interface is geared toward people who've used hardware synthesizers and drum machines before; you can even 'turn the rack around' and manually move patch cables to connect devices together. Since I don't have that hardware background, Reason is not immediately approachable for me - I definitely needed some tutorial work. Reason Adapted came with a single ten-minute video tutorial of a hip-looking guy who walks you through the basic features of the software.

During the course of the video, the speaker refers several times to ways in which the full version of Reason is better - unlimited instruments, chain them together in more ways, more modules, and so forth. There's no real clue from using the software that these capabilities exist; if you didn't watch the video or read their upgrade literature, you'd never know.

Ableton Live Lite

Live Lite demonstrates far less integration with the microKontrol - the user can upload standard control setups to the keyboard so that it works with Live, but there's none of the fancy automation that made the Reason software so impressive. Live's interface is very different than Reason's; without a tutorial, I'd never have had a clue how to use the software. The tutorials are shown within Live, rather than as a video - there are basically a set of instructions that display on the right side of the user interface that tell you what to do next, so you're actually using the software as part of the demo.

The demos use features that aren't part of the Lite version of Live; when I tried to use those features, I was shown a warning dialog box. If I agreed, the software would switch to 'demo mode'; I could use all the features of the full version of Live, but I couldn't save my work.

The Pitch

So, given all that, which one am I going to continue using? Which am I most likely to upgrade to the full version? Easy: Ableton Live. Here's why: Ableton was able to engage me as a new user. They accomplished this in a couple of ways.

• By integrating the tutorial into the software, Ableton made the process of learning Live much more enjoyable. I was able to try different things in a particular tutorial step before moving on, for example. Demonstrating music software via a talking-head video is counter-productive - I have someone talking over the cool sounds I'm trying to produce.

• Ableton's ability to switch to a full-featured Demo Mode let me experience the benefits of the full software. By seeing very clearly where the line between what I had and what I could have was, and seeing how it improved the music I was creating, Ableton made very clear the upgrade value proposition. Reason does have a full version of their software available for download - I believe it's a 30-day time-limited demo, and of course you can't save your work. I'm not sure if I'd have to uninstall the Adapted version to install the full demo.

There's an important lesson here for software authors. In fact, I'd say it extends to anyone who tries to attract new customers by offering a limited version of their product or service. It can be clear as day to the customer what's better about your main offering, but unless you engage them with the limited offering your conversion rate will suffer.

So now that the new look's in place, I thought I'd point out a few of the highlights of the new look. Porting a theme from one blog engine to another also forced me to look closely at the inner workings of my site; there are a few changes here and there that some of you might find interesting or useful.

The bar at the top of the screen is something of a control panel - with the controls up there, you can personalize the look of the site a bit, making the text bigger and changing how the different elements of the page interact with one another. So if, for example, you preferred the old layout's leftist approach to sidebar content, you can get it back with the 'Left Navigation' button. (Leave your mouse pointer over the individual buttons to see what they do.) You can get a full explanation of the panel's capabilitites by clicking the 'help?' link in the upper left hand corner of the site.

The site is now being indexed by both category and date, as evidenced by the new 'Categories' sidebar item. (I know the checkboxes next to the archive links are a bit borked at the moment - I'm looking into it.) Comments can now be entered directly into the web page of an entry, rather than the old popup method. You're still welcome to leave an email address and web site link when you post - click the 'leave your email or website' link in the comment form to expose those (optional) fields.

Perhaps my favorite feature is the new per-post comment feed. This will probably only appeal to me, but I get a kick out of it. If you're reading my site through a feed reader such as Bloglines and have an interest in a particular post's comments, you can now subscribe to an RSS feed of those comments and be notified when I or someone else posts a comment about that post. Silly, I know, but how often have you commented on something and then wondered whether or not I'd replied? Never? Well, fine.

Add that to all of the general 'should've worked in the first place' stuff - a 404 page that actually looks good (try it out!), search results that look good, a bunch of refactoring to make these changes easier next time I get a burr under my saddle, and so forth, and it's almost as though I care about this blog. Who knew?

(And before anyone asks - I did all of this Monday night, while semi-high on cold medicine. Remarkable stuff - no wonder it goes into crystal meth.)

Well, as you can see there have been a few changes around here. I can't claim even a tenth of the credit - almost all of what you see is from a typo theme named Origami, though I've had to do some extensive nipping and tucking to get it to play nice with Movable Type. I'm pretty pleased with the result.

That being said, there are still a few rough edges to be worked out, and I'm not entirely certain I like the color scheme. So, expect to see more noodling about as the urge finds me. Or, if history is any indication, expect to see exactly this layout for the next three to five years.

Well, with any luck you didn't notice a thing. We switched to a new hosting provider about a month ago, and we flipped the switch on the DNS entries just this weekend. Everything seems to be running just swell - Mel's Site now has its own gallery for all her knitty things, we've got oodles more space, and I can finally back up our sites using rsync over ssh! (Don't worry if you don't know what that means; you're the lucky ones.)

So, now I can claim this is why I've been silent for so long; I didn't want to have to migrate content over past the initial day we copied everything, back in early February. Of course, I didn't bother to tell Mel this, so we still had a tiny amount of pain (hint: don't try to copy gallery 2 albums between installations), but all in all it was reasonably pain-free.

What's that, you ask? Where's the shiny new site layout I've been promising? Look, a puppy! *runs*

In today's episode, we're going to address an extremely important aspect of automotive performance: what your ride sounds like. You obviously noticed by now that the coffee can you welded onto your muffler makes your car sound almost exactly like a high-powered sports car. But what if almost isn't good enough? Well, the good folks at VroomBox have gotcha covered.

Yes, for the low low price of One Hundred and Sixty Dollars (that's 1.6 Benjamins for the math pimps out there) you can buy a box that connects to both your ignition coil and your vacuum line (special rodent wheel speed sensor extra). Advanced Hooptytronics™ detect the rpm your struggling pinto wing-laden civic fly ride is revving at and play your choice of bangin' engine sounds through a special set of speakers under your car, loud enough for you and everyone within five feet to hear. Now that's livin' large!

Downsides include the price, which does not include the speakers or amplifier (which surely your local swap meet or pawn shop can provide), and the inexplicable lack of a 'Star Trek Warp Drive' setting. That said, this is definitely the sort of mod that will turn that '73 Vega into, well, a '73 Vega that plays tinny pre-recorded engine sounds from somewhere under the chassis.

Wow, I've really let this thing slide, haven't I? Okay, new year, new resolve; more regular updates in the future are now the order of the day.

Let's see, what's going on right now? Geoff and Nneka are getting married! June 17th is the official date. Geoff has asked me to be in the wedding - w00t! I'm a lucky guy to get to spend so much time in a penguin suit for friends. Plus we finally get to see Boston when it's not covered in snow. Should be interesting.

On the home front, Mel is off to Germany on Saturday, alone this time. I had been hoping to tag along on the end of her trip like last time, but I couldn't get the time off. So, hoosband will be spending a week at home alone, playing World of Warcraft and annoying the cats. Work is going great (part of why I couldn't get the time off) - we're doing crazy new blue sky stuff that's gonna wow the world when we release it later this year. It's kinda cool hearing that we're the 'best in the world' at something - especially when it's not coming from the director of marketing (sorry, Joelle).

Judging by the number of downloads I've been getting, people seem to like my mash-up - thanks for the positive feedback and support. I'm currently waiting on some software before I begin my next song stay tuned. The web site update has stalled, largely due to my dissatisfaction with the cross-browser compatibility of my last design. As such, I'm stripping it down to the basics and starting over, with an eye toward more testing this time. Updates as they arise.

In geeky tech news, Apple announced a luscious new laptop at MacWorld today - the MacBook Pro. It's the new Powerbook, with a dual-core intel processor inside. Yummy. I think I'm gonna try and convince my boss I need one for a work machine. I'm still using my personal Powerbook from school at the moment - can't go back to Windows, sorry.

I think that's everything - if it's not, I'll let you know, I promise.

Yeah, yeah. Where have I been the last year, right. In upstate New York, that's where! Still, it was incredibly easy to add the new flickr badge you see at left, and their interface couldn't be simpler. If I had the ability to generate custom gallery looks rather than their single style, I'd probably just point gallery.fibble.org at flickr's site and call it a day.

No, I haven't finished yet. I have a great mockup, which I've done a fair amount of translating into HTML. However, I discovered that things look pretty horrible in Internet Explorer, so it's back to the drawing board. Expect something before mid-November, I think.

I'm also cooking up a review of Yahoo!'s Yahoo! Music Unlimited, a music subscription service based on Windows DRM, at Bill's suggestion. Expect that sometime this week.

Well, I've finally grown tired of the blue and white simplicity - a schmancy facelift for Fibble is in the works! Mel and I sat down and hashed out the visual design yesterday (Thanks again. Dan, for the Photoshop!), and now I need to figure out how to bend ImageReady's slicing capabilities to my will. Once I've got the CSS and images worked out, expect retro-hipster goodness (without any copyright violations, no less!).

After much rumor and speculation, Apple announced today that Tiger would be arriving 'by April 29'. In fact, their press release notes that special events will be held at Apple stores that Friday evening to give the faithful the chance to stomp each other like Cabbage Patch Kids shoppers the day before Christmas. I've decided to skip the festivities (I'll be in Seattle visiting Ryan and Sara that weekend anyway), so I ordered a copy via the student store. Gotta take full advantage of that student discount while I can! (Speaking of which, if anyone needs a new Powerbook or mini, now's the time to ask...)

This page has a nice list of the many new features in Tiger. Some of my personal favorites not mentioned in the earlier marketing material:

• Spotlight (the new system-wide search engine) will be available from the shell via the mdls and mdfind commands.
• Apple is including a new Certificate Authority application for small workgroups.
• Tiger not only supports the use of a Bluetooth headset as a speaker/microphone combo for iChat, but will allow the use of Bluetooth mobile phones as remotely controlled cameras.

Pretty sweet stuff. That said, I'll probably hold off on installing it until after I've given my final presentations, wrapped up coding on my MEng project, etc. etc. Can't be too careful...

Hitachi has made news in recent weeks with their announcement of a new hard drive technology that will allow them to increase areal density by up to ten times over previous generation technology. In essence, the new technology vertically aligns the 'bits' (areas of positive or negative charge) on the disk, whereas current technology aligns them horizontally (a technique known as longitudinal recording). Vertically aligning the bits allows them to be packed closer together without spontaneously flipping due the presence of neighboring bits, resulting in more bits per square inch.

Sound dull? Too techy? Maybe you'll like it better with a back beat. I can't believe they got actual marketing dollars to make that animation...

Bloglines just added a new feature whereby you can create a custom rss feed containing the tracking details for packages currently in transit. UPS, FedEx and the good ol' USPS are supported. This is exactly why I want a server-side web based feed reader - this sort of thing is so much easier for someone with a server to implement and roll out.

As I now know a few people who have switched to using feed readers rather than reading everyone's web sites directly, I thought it was time to share the fruits of my ongoing search for the perfect feed reader. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, this probably doesn't apply to you; you're probably one of those lucky souls whose daily routine doesn't involve keeping up to date on some thirty-odd web sites. Revel in your semi-Luddite status.

For the rest of you, here's the deal - I can't bring myself to pay for a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) reader. Oh, I've thought about it - back when I was a PC person, I thought about registering NewsGator, since I spent most of my time in Outlook anyway. (Okay, before I lose all geek cred, I spent most of my time in Emacs, but Gnus doesn't do it for me and I wanted something more full-featured than newsticker.el.) Once I moved over to the Mac, I fell in love with NewsFire - I used the beta extensively, but my usage pattern was always far simpler than the rapidly expanding feature set.

And really, at the end of my day I didn't see paying money for an application to view what is essentially web content. See, I remember the days of the Great Browser Wars, and one of the big takeaways was that no matter how complex the technical underpinnings may be, Web Browsers are Free Software. (Sorry, Opera.) Just because the web page I'm viewing is easier to render doesn't make me more inclined to spend money on a custom app to read it. Also, I had grown attached to the ubiquity of web access - why should I give up the ability to conveniently read RSS feeds because I'd switched computers? I realize that RDF is the tip of the Semantic Web iceberg, but for now it's still web content to me.

So in a sense I've always been looking for a web-based RSS reader. My current favorite is Bloglines - completely free, with a clean site layout and all of the important features I care about. I can import my list of blogs as an OPML file rather than typing in the 30-odd addresses by hand, I can group feeds into my own categories (though moving content around is tedious, and the mechanism for adding a folder is buried in the individual feed options) and I can control the display of individual feed items to a certain extent. I even get a handy dandy notifier in the bottom corner of my FireFox window to tell me when I have unread news items (which, given the number of feeds I read, is essentially all the time). Oh, and they now support all major formats of feed (RSS and Atom), so I can read pretty much any standard feed.

However, other big players are starting to get into the act. Yahoo has added the ability to display RSS content in your My Yahoo page (haven't really tried it much, but seems nice). MSN has an incubator project that looks really nice - they're using a number of javascript tricks a la GMail and Google Maps to do a lot of the work on the client side without refreshing the page. It's still rough around the edges, but I think Microsoft's entry has a lot of potential. It's integrated into their search engine, so when you search for a term the results of that search appear in a special section of your blogroll - not a big deal, but nice nonetheless. The important thing for me is the ability to store my feeds on a web site somewhere rather than on the local machine - how many times have you tried to go to a web site you have bookmarked at home, only to discover you don't remember the url because you never type it - it's bookmarked! Yeah, me too.

Other contenders include the new Pluck Web Edition, which has a more outlook-like web interface and also serves as a central repository for your web bookmarks (which I like). However, I found their interface was less responsive than Bloglines'. Pluck also appears to have fewer knobs to tweak the actual display of feeds (though I haven't dug through their options pages as extensively). I haven't tried RocketInfo's RSS reader, but it appears to be similar to Pluck in its imitation of the Outlook three-pane interface.

I'm still waiting for someone to take all of these good ideas and build the killer web-based RSS reader, but for now Bloglines is sufficient for me. You hear me, Google? Make with the reader already! For pete's sake, you own Blogger!

As I've grown tired of having people comment on my blog entries solely to point out my spelling mistakes, I decided to investigate a means of spell checking my entries. The basic options are:

• Use a text editor with spell checking built in, then paste the entry into the web UI; or
• Use a 3rd party blogging application,

As it turns out, there's a third option - use a Firefox plugin! The Spellbound plugin incorporates a spell checker into my favorite browser - simple right click access means I don't have put up with my lovely wife's jibes any more. What can't you do in firefox these days?

I've literally been waiting years for this product. There are several types of A/V switcher on the market, but none of them do the one thing I've been waiting for - switching digital audio as well as video and analog audio. But this one does. In fact, it even goes so far as to switch ethernet connections as well! I've no idea how well it works, but if the choice is this or upgrading to a new receiver that has enough inputs to properly connect all my gear, I'd say $90 is a bargain.

In an effort to preserve the flow of free speech, I've made a few behind-the-scenes changes to our blogs to attempt to prevent comment spam without requiring registration or moderation. For the curious (yes, both of you), I've added Movable Type's nofollow and MT-Blacklist plugins to prevent comment spammers from posting, and to remove any benefit they might see if they do get through. Hopefully this works - I'll keep you posted.

Update: Blacklist prevented two comment spam entries already today. Yay! Much better.