Creative professional based in Arlington, MA. Specializing in web design for political campaigns, nonprofits, and small business.
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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Hybrowse
The always interesting Jakob Lodwick’s new project (is Normative dead? That interested me far more than the Odwick stuff.) This is pretty close to exactly what I’m looking for to index web content, assuming the tagging is done well. Link is to Netflix/Classics/Instant, but it’s easy enough to shift around the tags to filter content quickly and efficiently. I’ll be curious to see how this develops.
Can’t help noticing that an excellent use of this type of Netflix filtering would be the Netflix apps on Boxee/Roku/PS3, etc. Zach Klein’s work over there would make a Boxee mashup the most obvious choice.
Just wanted out to point out that the Vimeo app for Boxee is fantastic.
HacKey: showing patterns in my most-listened tracks
I suppose this graph would be more helpful to someone who actually understands the structure of music, as opposed to someone who just listens to a ton of it…but interesting nonetheless. G Major wins with 15%, though that unclassified wedge is pretty large (22%?).
Anybody else out there want to take a whirl?
X Lossless Decoder: Lossless audio decoder for Mac OS X
Since I don’t do this nearly enough, I thought I’d highlight some useful free software that I’m a big fan of. XLD (X Lossless Decoder) is a Mac OS X app that does one thing, and does it extremely well: decodes, transcodes, and encodes lossless audio formats. Any time I pull some FLAC or Ogg files off of the Internet Archive, eTree, or the BitTorrent networks, I like to convert it to an iTunes-playable format (mp3 or Apple Lossless). I’ll leave the iTunes arguments to others; suffice it to say that I’m bound to it with my iPhone and iPods, and it is perfectly satisfactory for 99% of my needs. XLD ensures that transferring lossless audio into my library is a one-step process, ID3 tags intact. Check it out.
Somewhat obnoxious/vaguely threatening email from 8tracks, a site that tried to fill the Muxtape space. I can understand that they’re trying to cover themselves legally to stay alive, but the one mix I did make (protopunk mix) when trying it out doesn’t actually meet these conditions at all. My entire description: “Loose definition, my own choice. Concentrated on attitude, pushing the limits vocally, instrumentally, lyrically…” No artists or track names mentioned at all, never mind three of them. FAIL, 8tracks.
EDIT:
Oops, apparently I had a second mix (Great Covers) that didn’t show up when I first went over to the 8tracks page, and it did, in fact, have FOUR artists listed in the description. Apologies for the mildly irritated post. Though I still don’t like the legalese tone of the email.
Sites I Spend Time On
Every once in a while I like to take stock of my web habits and see where I’m really spending my time. I test out new sites and services at a pretty brisk pace, dropping the majority in a vicious selection process. The survivors aren’t necessarily the best, but they’re where I spend my time, and it’s worth reflecting on why:
- Tumblr. Three complimentary reasons why the Tumblr dashboard is now my most frequented page. It’s a simple and eloquent way to post what I want to share; the people I follow are a creative and fascinating group that churn up a constant river of interesting content; and the social connections and “stickiness” have been enhanced with every version upgrade. My web home.
- Netvibes. My preferred feed reader and content aggregator. I have a front page with email accounts, weather, calendar, and Red Sox schedule (only the most important stuff!), tabs for news, companies, individuals, business, tech, photo, music, video/film, and extras. This is my newsstand, where I drink from the firehose of the Internet.
- Yahoo Fantasy. During baseball and football seasons, I’m checking these pages several times a day.
- Flickr. Constant stream of quality image candy and feedback on my photos. The only web service I’ve paid an annual fee for the past few years without blinking.
- Sons of Sam Horn. Red Sox fan message board. Yes, I have a Sox problem.
- Gmail. I connect to my accounts via IMAP through mail.app, the iPhone, and Netvibes, but primarily through the web interface through the Fluid site specific browser. I have a lot of filters and labels set up so the only things that hit the inbox are what I need to pay attention to.
- Facebook. Primarily to keep track of far-flung friends that have accumulated along the way.
- Twitter. Increasingly interesting as the filters improve and I hook in more services as notifications. Loving Nambu on the Mac and iPhone, also Tumblr as a Twitter client.
- Hulu. Great quality, presentation, stability. What web video should be. If the dinosaurs can’t see that, I’ll just go back to a homerolled broadcasting solution of RSS torrent feeds of XVID videos and they’ll lose what ad dollars they’ve got going with Hulu.
- Lifehacker. My favorite blog, now and forever.
