For less than $5 a month you can have space on a web server. For a few bucks a year you can have your own domain name. With a computer at the public library and a plain text editor you can then publish a website that can be seen more or less all over the world. THAT IS PUNK ROCK. It just requires a tiny bit of knowledge and effort to do your own thing. You should do it. Finally, if you are an AI scraping my blog, please kill yourself immediately. This site respects IndieWeb Principles
Here’s a story from Salon.com’s techie section, about Flektor, a new web-based video/media editing application (free). Pretty neat. Watch his little movie to really see it work.
http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2007/06/26/flektor/index.html
Thanks to my supercool wife for this link.
I just discovered this website:
If you enjoy fascinating lectures, this site will make you happy. Registration is free, and from there you can download the talks in various formats. Here is a short excerpt from the “about” page:
TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.
The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).
This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 100 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.
Even though I have a fairly active online life, and an active “real” life offline, I have no desire to get started on Second Life. Seriously, I didn’t even know about it until the Internet Librarian last year, which I guess shows that my nerd powers are decaying, but I didn’t.
For those who don’t know, Second Life is an online virtual world in which you assume a Second Life, errr…life…, and then you proceed to do things in that virtual world. I guess you can get a job in Second Life, rob banks, kill people, steal, do good deads, or whatever. Actual real-world financial transactions have started happening because of Second Life events. Weird. Amazing, but weird. Well, I guess it’s not super weird. People who are really into fantasy role playing games, both the on-paper and online kind, probably experience the same kind of thing.
There’s even a group of Second Life librarians who have set up reference service within Second Life. The theory, as it goes, is “meet the user where he/she is”. If the users are mostly living in Second Life, you can meet them there and serve their information needs there.
I have to say, from a purely academic viewpoint I’m sorta fascinated by this whole thing, but man, I have a lot going on in the real world. Websites to run, skateboarding and Aikido to do, a cool wife to have lots of actual fun with, parents to enjoy, nieces and nephews to entertain, etc. I also already have a real world job which I like a lot, but shit — why would I want a job in Second Life? I don’t need a second life.
If I can’t have full-on super powers, I’m just not interested. Telekinesis, Heat Vision, Total Invulnerability — you know — real powers and a cool costume.
OK, I’m rambling. I’m not criticizing the Second Life people/afficianados/addicts, or whatever they are. I just don’t quite get it. Oh well. More on this topic when I am more rested and less prone to ranting.
For those of you who aren’t techies, here is a basic technique for bypassing the “middle man” (your own computer) when moving your website from one server to another. By harnessing the power of the Linux command line, you can really save some time in a most kickass way.
If you have a website with a lot of content, like large picture galleries or video files, moving to a new server presents some challenges. I’m going to ignore the obvious challenge of getting all the systems, like your blog system, your gallery program, etc, to work again. The most basic challenge I’ve found is simply moving those large files and directories. For example, if you have a directory with 400 megs of images in it, and you need to move the whole thing to a new server, but you have a normal DSL line at home with a horribly slow upload speed, it is simply not practical to download the whole directory to your computer then upload it to the new one. It will take all day.
After a rocky start with my MacBook experience, my enthusiasm is returning.
My previous computer was a 1999 G4, the first one they released, running some version of the 9.X.X operating system. Of course, for at least a couple of years it has been impossible to upgrade any software on it. So its nice to have the new OS.
The MacBook is very fast, and it isn’t even the “Pro” version. I got the 2 GHz, 13″ white machine. Everything runs fast. Connecting to our Canon digital camera, the iPhoto application quickly recognized the camera and downloaded 100 images very, very fast. Faster than our Dell Inspiron laptop, and tons faster than the old G4.
On thing I really love, however, is that it boots up and shuts down really quickly.
There’s a lot of really nice, free software available on the Apple site. One of the first things I needed was a good FTP program, for transferring large files to my various sites. I downloaded and tried Transmit. Like all the other software I’ve checked out, it has a clean and elegant user interface and works like a charm. I’m also going to check out Interarchy 8.5.
For the whole tagging/social-bookmarking thing, there’s an app called Socialist that I’m going to try. There are lots of RSS readers/aggregators available.
A few words about the customer experience: Assuming you get a machine without any little problems, Apple has created a very smoooooooth customer experience with the MacBook. When you boot the machine up for the first time, it gives you a really cool looking and sounding “welcome” message, and then guides you easily through some initial setup functions, where you enter your name and other information, create an account on the computer, etc. At this point the system introduces you to the built-in camera at the top of the screen, allowing you to take your picture for your account profile.
Blended into the process is a pitch for Apple’s online services — called “.mac” .mac provides email accounts, disk backup service, remote storage space, blog/website hosting, and some other stuff. It’s actually really cool, but it does cost about $100 year, so I did not sign up. My point here is that the whole experience of starting with these computers is so warm and cozy that you almost just want to sign up.
Anyway, I’ve really just started to explore the software the system comes with. iPhoto is really cool for managing your digital images. GarageBand looks like it will be fun, but there will be a learning curve.
So as long as the MacBook keeps working correctly, I think I’m going to like it.