Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

LibraryThing Screensaver (for Mac OS X)

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Are you a LibraryThing user? First off, if not, why not? It’s a great way to keep track of your library. If you’re on LT, or if you sign up, add Prairie and me to your contacts!

Now, for those of you that are LT members (and Mac OS X users), they’ve just released a new toy: the LibraryThing Mac Screensaver. It’s actually just a specialized RSS feed that grabs random book covers from your library which you can put into Mac OS X’s RSS feed screensaver. Here’s a little YouTube video showing the screensaver and how to set it up:

Basically, just add this URL (with your username, of course) to OS X’s “Mobile Me and RSS” screensaver, and you’re off and running: http://www.librarything.com/labs-screensaver.php?userid=USERNAME When I set it up for the first time, it took a few moments for the RSS feed to start generating images, so don’t worry if you get a “No Pictures Found” error at first. Just wait a moment or two and try it again, it should kick in fairly soon. This is now my screensaver of choice. Slick!

30 Years of CDs

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Looks like the venerable Compact Disc turned 30 years old on Sunday.

Compact discs weren’t always impromptu drink coasters. Once, in the not-so-distant past, they played music, contained pictures, and let people play video games with tacked-on FMV sequences. And today, the venerable CD turned 30.

Of course, the CD didn’t immediately take off right then and there…it wouldn’t be until October 1, 1982 that Billy Joel’s 52nd Street became the first CD album released. It was conveniently released in Japan alongside Sony’s brand new CDP-101 Compact Disc player. The album (and more importantly the medium it was pressed upon) changed history, as more compact disc players were introduced into the market beginning in 1983. The music CD would reach its zenith with The Beatles “1” (30 million in sales), before beginning its eventual and inevitable fall to the Mp3 in the mid-2000’s (in 2008, for example, CD sales dropped 20%).

The first CD I ever bought was purchased while on a trip of some sort — I’m not sure, but I think it was during a trip to the Episcopal Youth Event one summer. A group of us Episcopal Youth had flown from Anchorage to Seattle, from whence we’d load up in a van and drive to Missoula, Montana for the EYE. While in Seattle, we got to browse through the Pike Place Market. This was my first time there, and I remember two things clearly: seeing a prop phaser (possibly a replica, though I’ve always remembered it being an original prop) at Golden Age Collectibles for quite a few hundred dollars more than I had available to me; and browsing through one of the music stores in the Market and finding a “Limited Edition” of Queen’s “The Miracle” album.

I didn’t even have a CD player at this point, but this was a limited edition! Who knew how long it would be on the market, or whether we’d ever be able to get it in the frozen wastelands of Alaska! As a Queen fan, I had to have it, and I plunked my money down. Of course, it wasn’t long before I discovered that “Limited Editions” are rarely anything but marketing drivel, but hey, I had my first CD.

(I did this with my DVD collection as well, picking up the original, un-edited release of “The Devil’s Advocate” before that pressing was recalled to have the unauthorized appropriation of the Ex Nihilo sculpture digitally edited out. This time, I’ve got a Special Edition that’s truly special!)

Amusingly, before that point, I wasn’t convinced that CDs were going to take off. In fact, it would be far more accurate to say that I was convinced that they wouldn’t take off. I mean, really, they didn’t seem that that much of an improvement over the tapes I’d been collecting for some time by then. They didn’t seem to sound any different, and you couldn’t even repurpose them when you got tired of the music that was on them! At least with cassettes, you could tape over the little holes at the top and put whatever you wanted on there after you were bored with that album. These CD things would be useless if you decided you didn’t want the music!

Of course, better CD players and better stereos soon convinced me that yes, there was a (very) audible improvement in sound quality, my CD collection soon grew to far outstrip that of my cassette collection, and now the majority of the 1,500-some CDs I own are in storage, while any of that music (and so much more) is available at a moments notice on my computer. And yet, I spend a chunk of my free time importing old LPs, 45s, and 78s to my computer, relishing the warm tones and old, outdated, analog crackles and pops of my collection of vinyl. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

1234567890

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As of now — Feb. 13th 2009, at 3:31 (and 30 seconds) PM (PST), the Unix Time is 1234567890.

Pretty exciting, isn’t it? Hey, some people think so — there’s a listing of “1234567890 Day” parties right here.

Good Twitter Marketing is Communication

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I’ve been having fun over the past couple of weeks playing with a bit of unofficial marketing via Twitter for a couple of the local conventions. I’ve been using Twitter (djwudi, if you didn’t know already) for some time now, and I’ve been seeing a number of different companies and organizations picking up Twitter accounts, some of whom seemed to use it successfully…some of whom, less so.

To me, possibly the single most important aspect to marketing successfully on Twitter — and keep in mind that I’m not a marketing wonk in any way, I’m just an opinionated geek with a Twitter account — is having a real person behind the account. Just as people prefer to call a business and speak to a person rather than an automated machine, I like to know that there’s a real set of eyeballs paying attention to a Twitter account, and it’s not merely an automated receptacle echoing an RSS feed. Many companies seem to see Twitter as little more than an RSS reader for people who don’t grok RSS readers, and that’s a rather sad outlook.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with feeding RSS feeds into Twitter accounts. I’m doing that very thing myself, in fact. However, that shouldn’t be all that is done with the account.

Right now, I’m managing two Twitter accounts for local conventions: norwescon (for Norwescon) and steamcon (for Steamcon). Both of these are unofficial (i.e., I’m not actually involved with the production of either ‘con, but just do this because I can and because it’s fun to play with this stuff), but the Steamcon account is slightly less unofficial…that is, I’ve received a nice thanks from the Steamcon Powers-That-Be along with a link on their homepage to the Twitter account. Both accounts are somewhat automated, using Twitterfeed to pipe in RSS feeds. However, I also take care to make sure that neither account is a simple infodump.

Here’s the steps I’ve taken so far:

  1. Use multiple sources.

    Each account actually has multiple RSS feeds contributing content. For Norwescon, that’s the LiveJournal group, the Flickr group photo pool, and the Flickr group discussions; likewise, Steamcon gets their LiveJournal group, their Flickr group photo pool, and their Flickr group discussions. At the moment, there’s very little activity on Flickr, and most of the posts come from announcements on LiveJournal, but the Flickr feeds will come in handy post-con.

  2. Find the people that might be interested.

    I knew that since these weren’t official accounts, the chances of people stumbling across them were pretty slim. So, rather than just set them up and toss them into the electronic wind of the ‘net to see if they caught anyone’s eye, I set up two Twitter searches and subscribed to the RSS feeds. I use the same syntax for each search, just changing the name of the ‘con: norwescon -from:norwescon. This shows me any Tweets mentioning the ‘con, while excluding those sent by the Norwescon Twitter account (I originally also appended -"@norwescon" to exclude reply Tweets, as those have their own tab in the Twitter interface, but I’m finding it handy to have those included in the RSS feed as well). When I see someone’s tweet pop up, I take a look at their Twitter account, and if they look like they’re interested, I follow them.

  3. Interact!

    As evidenced by how I started this post out, I think this is the most important of the three. Rather than letting the RSS feeds take care of everything, I check in on the accounts myself off and on when I can. Admittedly, it’s not as often as I check my personal Twitter account, but it’s often enough that I can catch mentions, reply to any Tweets directed to the account, and so on. I also post Tweets myself when I find something interesting or worth sharing that fits the theme (such as Star Trek corsets or steampunk Lego). Any indication that there’s a real personality behind the account handle is good, and is more likely to get not just subscribers, but active subscribers. Twitter should be a conversation, not a lecture.

In the end, I’m having a lot of fun with this little experiment. It seems to be working well enough — the Norwescon account is up to 40 followers just through my dinking around and word-of-tweet, while the Steamcon account is now up to 38, most of whom have just shown up in the past two days after the Twitter logo and link hit the Steamcon website. Not huge numbers by many estimations, but both accounts are relatively new, and I’m sure both will continue to grow as the cons get closer and as word continues to spread.

Now if only I could figure out how to get paid for this kind of stuff full-time, instead of doing it for free during lunch breaks and evenings at home! ;)

Vinylicious

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Introducing a new blog: Vinylicious! I’m no hardcore vinyl collector, but I do keep an eye out for fun oddities to add to the collection I do have (which itself owes a large debt of gratitude to my dad), and I’m planning on using Vinylicious to share some of the goodies I’ve found.

The plan is to update weekly on Sundays with another album. We’ll see how long I can stick to that schedule. ;) For now, I have two albums to get started: Discotheque for Polka Lovers and It Happened in Sun Valley.

Print Stylesheets Return

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One of my website pet peeves is the lack of attention to how a site behaves when printed. All too often, there’s either an assumption that we live in a truly online-only world, or simply a lack of thought about how any given page will look when printed. Consequently, there are a lot of websites that look like crud when printed: navigation links and ads all over the page taking up unnecessary space, content crammed into a narrow column, an extra half page of junk after the actual content ends, etc.

Some sites give a ‘print view’ link that produces a print-optimized version of the page, but I’d be willing to bet that a lot of people never see that — especially given the number of times I’ve had to actively hunt for such a link, and found it shoved off in some corner, not obviously tied to the content at all. Besides, having a specialized page seems like unnecessary overhead on the server when better solutions exist.

To that end — and this is a project that I’ve been meaning to do for a while (I never even got around to it with my last design) — I’ve resurrected the print stylesheet for my site. Admittedly, I have no idea how often people print something they find here (and I would guess that it’s not very often at all), but at least now I know that if they do, they’ll get something useful.

There’s an older, but still relevant, more detailed look at the techniques I use in this post from 2003, but here’s a rundown of the results:

  1. No navigation links below the website title.
  2. No sidebar at all.
  3. No comment entry form.
  4. No Google ads.
  5. The content fills the page, with a wider left-hand margin to allow room for binding.
  6. Rather than coloring links (useless on a printed page), the URLs display after the linked text, using Markdown style formatting.

The only issue I’m having is the same issue I had the first time I set up a print stylesheet: the code that inserts URLs after linked items borks up the clean display of inline images (for an example, try printing this post). I’m (still) stumped on how to exclude images from the link insertion code, though, so for now, I’m just going with what I’ve got.

Happy 25th Birthday Macintosh!

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Twenty-five years ago today, Steve Jobs introduced the original Macintosh: “The computer for the rest of us.”

It’s funny to see just how much hasn’t changed in the past 25 years — especially Jobs’ consummate showmanship and flair — and how much has. That little machine that started it all is certainly a far cry from what’s being offered today, but it’s very easy to see how much today’s Mac still owes to the original, in everything from the interface to the advertising (I was really amused at how similar the two ads at the very end of the above clip are to many of today’s ads from Apple).

So happy birthday, Macintosh! And here’s to another 25 years to come!

The New Me

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Last week sometime, I was brainstorming with ways to personalize the design of my site a bit while still working within my limited artistic and design sensibilities. On a whim, I emailed Shari, a comic artist whose blog I’ve been reading and whose artwork I enjoy, to see if she might be willing to sketch a version of me that I’d be able to work into the design somehow.

Shari was kind enough to agree, and since I didn’t have a particular image or pose in mind beyond knowing that I wanted to be wearing a Utilikilt, I directed her to my Narcissism set on Flickr and let her go to town.

A day or so later, Shari sent me a first set of preliminary sketches. There were a number of versions of ‘me’ that looked very promising, but down in the middle of the page was a funny little very anime-style version that she’d dubbed the ‘Valiant Camera Warrior’ which I got a big kick out of. When I wrote back to confirm that I liked the direction she was heading with the sketches, I also mentioned how much I enjoyed the Valiant Camera Warrior.

A couple days later she sent me the final artwork…and I was floored! Not only has Shari come up with an incredible comic version of ‘me,’ but she went ahead and inked the Valiant Camera Warrior as a bonus! I’ve worked the artwork into a few different places into the site design now, but under the cut are larger versions of her work.

Read more

Postalicious Excerpts

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For some time now I’ve been using the Postalicious WordPress plug-in to automatically create the link posts aggregating stuff that I toss into my delicous account. As I’ve been tweaking and fine-tuning the templates for the new version of the site, though, I (re-)discovered one minor annoyance.

I like to use post excerpts for my archive pages (more detail than simply listing the title, easier to skim through archives using the full body for every post), but Postalicious didn’t have a way to set an excerpt. Each Postalicious post would then end up with an autogenerated excerpt, which tend to trail away in the middle of the first link in the post, leaving something like this:

Links for January 15th through January 16th
Sometime between January 15th and January 16th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!
no news is bad news: An expression of the value of local news, especially in Seattle, especially in these uncertain times. Cool Stuff: Olly Moss’s Poster Remakes: 21-year old UK artist Olly Moss is probably best known for his […]

It works, but it’s not pretty.

A couple days ago I dropped a line to Postalicious’ creator, asking it might be possible to add excerpt templates in a future revision. He wrote back to say that he’d work on that when he got a chance…and just one day later, version 2.6 of Postalicous was posted with support for excerpt templates!

Nicely done, and very quick response. I’m impressed! Postalicious is all updated, and from here on out, link posts shouldn’t look so cluttered in my archive pages. Now to see about tweaking the excerpts on all those earlier posts….