Rants & Ramblings & Other Rubbish

Where's the blog gone

Haven't updated here in MONTHS! Mostly because I've been testing drupal and wordpress. Those sites are somewhat harder to find, and the work is very preliminary.

Cleaning up a list of things...

Checkout MusicBridge, it looks pretty good for keeping an iPod and Windows Media content lists in sync. I'd offer a link, but the one I found was from a Google search listing download.com I'm afraid if I listing something it would change.

Checkout eRightSoft.com: SUPER © (Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer) a GUI to ffmpeg, mencoder, mplayer, x264, ffmpeg2theora and the theora/vorbis RealProducer plugIn. Player and Encoder of various types of multimedia files.

PageDeFrag: from Microsoft, this link should be good.

More diverse audio content, now, horror stories to GO, or if you're into science fiction ...

If you're into home automation, PVR's , more home automation , home automation from HomeSeer

Multi-factor Authentication

Multi-factor authentication was first discussed extensively on Security Now podcast, Episode 90. In Episode 101, during the reader-mail section, the Paypal Security key was mentioned, and was thoroughly discussed with Michael Vergara, PayPal's Director of Account Protections, in Episode 103.

I've gotten a Paypal security key, and I'm studying the specification as outlined in the OpenID Book by Rafeeq Ur Rehman.

I think it's an excellent idea and encourage all who read to follow-up and implement personally. The proliferation of OpenID could really help reduce the confusion of multiple passwords and login IDs that may of us have, AND, reduce the number of weak passwords we use.

Tues - 4 Sep 2007

It's been a month. I've been working, but not blogging.

In regards to the "webified life" research, a new site came to my attention which looks interesting.

www.iscrybe.com opened up for a day or so for a few new testers. I'm involved in a little beta testing and like most of what I've seen so far.

Once upon a time, when handwriting recognition was young, the challenge was to get the computer to understand handwriting. Once we figured out how to write so the computer understood US, thing went much better. What I'm trying to say is "once I change HOW I put my work on the web, maybe I'll find the solution.

A little more on the webified life...

Another website I forgot to mention, that I am impressed with is a pretty easy little todo list at www.toodledo.com. If nothing else, I really think the little folded organizer is pretty cool. You can't ALWAYS carry a Palm or Day Planner with you, so this seems to be a good solution to me.

And, while I'm catching up on things forgotten, in addition to the S3 and GSpace options for "on-line storage", I hear about Carbonite and their online backup solution whenever I listen to one of the TwIT podcasts. Sounds like unlimited storage, $50/year, secure,...what's not to like? They offer a 15-day free trial than I need to get around to one of these days.

Oh, Sun, where are you now?? Yes the "network" IS the computer...

These are a few of the things I've been watching in regards to web-ifying life.

The most obvious is this "thingamablog" which seems OK.

If you are a David Allen fan, you've heard of GTD. If you're disorganized in an "obtuse" kind of way, maybe you should learn about GTD (I'm still obtuse, so it's a work in progress). A couple of things in this vein are: GTDTiddlyWiki and MonkeyGTD.

Paul Thurrott of the WindowsWeekly podcast has been hailing GMail and Google Calendar.

Amazon is offering their S3 disk services at a very reasonable rate. For those that are more of the "re-use what I've already got" and also the "well this is FREE", there is a really cool plugin for Firefox called GSpace, probably avaiable for Internet Exploder as well, that utilizes the 2.8G of free storage space provided with your GMail account.

One other offeror of webservices is at www.37signals.com. They have several intriging services that I need to get my head wrapped around and see if there isn't some kind of mashup that won't just be the new NextBigThing.

More later....