FriendFeed without the introspection
I’ve finally used Yahoo’s Pipes to do something useful: I created a customizable RSS feed for FriendFeed that filters out your own activity, leaving only the activity of your friends.
June 10, 2008
November 16, 2007
Designing for the right people
Khoi Vinh nailed it. His excellent post on Subtraction elegantly summarized something I’ve always thought about in user interface design: “most features are built for experts, but most users are intermediates”, thus design for intermediates.
April 13, 2007
User perception and marketing bungling
The customer review thread on these Western Digital drives is fascinating. It shows how user perception and screwups by marketing droids can completely ruin the reputation of a product.
April 12, 2007
Sometimes it just feels that way; sometimes it just is
while (single) {
bang_head(wall);
}
bang_head(wall);
}
February 28, 2007
Audacity tutorials
There are precious few tutorials for Audacity. Here are a few decent ones I discovered:
- Transom’s tutorial
- The Technology School of the Future - no kidding. That’s it’s real name. They have several tutorials.
According to these, the Split and Time Shift tools are your friends for doing multitrack edits. If you’re doing an interview, you’ll probably need to break each segment up onto it’s own track, shift them around until you’re happy, then collapse them into one track and continue. It’s not as flexible as Pro Tools & such, but it’s free.
February 21, 2007
Uncompressing audio for editing using dbpoweramp
An unsolved problem is catnip to an engineer. Dangle a technical difficulty in front of one and the engineer will compulsively bat at it, soon becoming obsessed and delerious in their junkie-like need for a solution. (you thought it was called “fix” because the problem was solved…) I was once an engineer and a few nights ago, encountered a problem.
Continue reading "Uncompressing audio for editing using dbpoweramp"
February 04, 2007
Killing spam with economics
The way to get a business to stop doing something is either to remove the economic incentive for doing the unpleasant behavior (i.e. kill revenue), or by raising the cost of the behavior to be prohibitive. Either way you do it, you kill profits and that kills the behavior. The thing is, nobody’s doing much of either against spam. It seems that everyone’s forgotten that spam is not a technical problem to be solved, but an economic one.
January 02, 2007
Blu-ray, & HD DVD to be stillborn?
A friend of mine works at one of the major DVD manufacturing companies. He says they’re shutting down DVD production and switching to the new HD formats. Others in the industry have said similarly. DVD is dead, long live the New Format - until, of course they come out with the Next New Format and make everyone buy all their movies all over again. This endless succession of industry forcing me to buy new copies of items I already own makes me grumpy. But I wonder if it really matters?
November 18, 2006
Mount linux partitions in windows
Here’s an Ext2/3 Installable Filesystem Service for Windows. It lets you mount linux’s ext2 and ext3 filesystems read/write under windows. Very handy if you have a multiboot machine or a pile of virtual machines as I do.
October 25, 2006
New rule: RAID 1 for all boot disks
The boot drive in my main desktop just died. Again. Data drives I don’t mind failing - I can just restore them from backup. Boot drives, however, take an entire day to repair as I’ve got to re-install everything all over again. While it is a handy practice to do every few years, a total reinstall is incredibly frustrating when it’s forced upon me.
So, I’ve decided on a new rule: all my boot drives shall henceforth be RAID 1 volumes. The downtime is much better: Hardware replacement time is just a few minutes and I can work off the laptop during the RAID rebuild. That time savings is well worth the extra $100 for a duplicate drive. (I tend to use small drives for the boot drive, then big drives for a separate data volume).
