My Gadget Life

OK, I finally decided to try Vonage. So far, so good. The quality is great, can’t tell the difference between it and my Verizon land line. This will save me a lot of money in long distance calls! I don’t use my cell phone that much for talking long distance from home because the coverage from AT&T wireless is not very good in my house in Somerville. So now I’m using Vonage. And when I move (late July), I’ll keep this new Vonage phone number and not get a land line at all from Verizon. My cell phone will be my backup if my Internet connection is down.

One thing I really like is that you can set it to send you an email whenever you have voicemail. Then you can go to your Vonage web page and listen to your voicemail online (and save the file if you want). So that’s cool. It also has a lot of extras included with your account, such as 3-way calling, call forwarding, etc.

There is a little box that plugs into your router or cable modem that has a phone jack on it and that allows you to plug any regular phone into it. Or multiple phones, with adapters from radio shack.

The only thing that was a pain is that when you call to sign up, they automatically send you a free router with a Vonage phone port, but I already have a wireless router and you can’t use both their router and your own without a hassle (disabling DHCP on one of them). What you need instead is a little Vonage box that plugs into your router, but they don’t send you those. (called a PAP2 phone adapter) Instead you have to buy one in a store (such as Best Buy, for $60) and deal with their rebate system (which makes it free in the end). So that was a hassle. They weren’t clear about that when I signed up and they won’t even send you the box (do they assume that most customers don’t have routers already? or at least don’t have wireless routers?) They tell you to go to a store and buy one! (crazy marketing schemes) They also won’t send you a wireless router with the Vonage port. Only the wired one.

Other than that, I’m very happy with Vonage so far. I have the $24.99/month plan which includes free long distance to the U.S. and Canada with unlimited minutes. Free voicemail included. Here’s a photo of the adapter. I like the little blue lights shining when it’s dark in the room.

Another thing I demo’ed at the awards dinner last night was Audioblogger. What you can do is save their number in your cell phone, call it, say whatever you want, or interview someone with your phone, and it gets immediately posted to your blog as an MP3 file. Here’s the link to the audio post from last night’s dinner.

At the NEASIST awards dinner last night, I gave a talk about gadgets (my gadget life). One of the things I demo’ed was Blogger Mobile. With it you can take a photo with your cameraphone, then send the photo to this address: go@blogger.com. It gets posted to your blog immediately. Here is the temporary blog I set up for the event: http://booads3.blogspot.com/.

Some thoughts from Michael’s talk:
- Control your technolust - sexy technology
- beware “technomust”
- technodivorce - can we let go of dead tech?, cabinet of dead & dying technology, library garage sale
- article: “planning for wireless in kansas city”
- user-centered planning
- expose hidden costs: training, staff time, promotion
- technology landscape: bringing structure to unstructured data, open source software, security, authentication and DRM, distributed, component-based software
- best practices for instant messaging: make IM part of your technology plan (”the millienials”), promote your screen name, add your IM name to your business cards, sig files, web site, use a multi-client, use away messages well
- report and de-brief your staff, give them numbers
- blog/wiki your planning for new projects
- be discoverable: offer access via handhelds, check your search rankings, offer RSS feeds of important content
- Stephen Abram: The Google Opportunity
- new Mac OS (Tiger) has screensave with RSS feeds built in (he demo’ed this), also Safari browser has RSS button built in
- make your own downloadable toolbar for users
- jybe.com (co-browsing plugin)
- unplug - get away from the computer!

Some ideas from Jenny’s talk:
- use a wiki for OPAC documentation: let users ask questions
- password protect your wiki to hide from spammers (most people don’t have time to keep doing the rollbacks to kill spam)
- del.icio.us has 50,000 users & growing 20-30%/month
- ideas for del.icio.us for libraries: Thomas Ford Memorial Library:
Here is a list of things we’ve bookmarked recently - they show that with RSS feed for their tags. Cool.
- del.icio.us / popular/ reference: Google cheatsheet is number 1
- people use the tag: howto
- del.icio.us: inbox - subscribe to people you think are interesting
- Furl is not as social as del.icio.us - really cool but not as many people using it. They give you 5 Gb of space. When you bookmark, it saves the whole page.
- Furl tags are not public - you can only access your own stuff.
- How Joe Q. is using social bookmark managers:
Furl ideas from the public - gift ideas, xmas wish list, housing rental listings, streaming music stations, job listings, school work - save and retrieve online research, reading lists.
- Rubric and Unalog
- Citeulike.org (academic del.icio.us)
- Connotea
- U.Minnesota blogs: integrated SFX into blogs: link to SFX URL (I’ve seen this before, it’s great).
- Flickr could be a daylong session.
- Flickr great for current events.
- SeattlePublicLibrary on Flickr.
- Flickr calendar view - show when your books are due.
- make a tag for your library on Flickr
- photos of books, add comments with links to the OPAC
- more Flickr ideas: teaching 7th grade math, geography (Mappr - uses Flickr photos to do cool stuff), available for reference within Flickr - going where your users are!
- promote the Yahoo Worldcat toolbar to get direcctly to your holdings
- Technorati
- we should be making our own toolbars for libraries
- “books we like” - tagging recommendations
- libraries could add “tags” in addition to subject headings
- getting our information, expertise and resources in the mix (of social tools)
- we should examine tags and folksonomies
- use RSS to put your content somewhere else, you can appear in other people’s web sites and aggregators
- rss feeds for new books, etc.
- spurl.net (js button) - they give you the HTML to put their feed into your web site
- blogs + RSS = better ranking in Google, Bloglines, Feedster, PubSub, BlogPulse, puts you into the online conversation
- Yahoo360, 43 Things, Audioscrobbler, Last.FM, NetFlix, GPS, RFID
- http://www.sls.lib.il.us/infotech/presentations/2005/neasist.pdf

Megan Fox is giving an overview: Tools in Personal Environments: A Taste of New Technologies. Here are a few ideas that I’m interested in:
- there is a mobile edition of Bloglines (for phones)
- Personalized RSS: Library Elf (I’m using this one already)
- Podcast: Schoolhouse Rock
- use wikis for staff manuals (reference docs) (UWinnipeg Library)
- Wiki for the ALA Conference in Chicago, everyone can contribute, local restaurants, free wifi hotspots, etc.
- let your users create subject guides using Wikis, or book recommendations from users
- IM for reference (taking off)
- Dawgtel (Southern Illinois Univ. Carbondale): text message service
- Google Toolbar (I just started using the A9 Toolbar myself).
- desktop search: she talked about Google Deskbar (for Windows), but now that the new Mac OS Tiger is out, I’ll be trying Spotlight as soon as I get my new Powerbook (coming soon!)
- Bloglines bookmarklet
- Yahoo MyWeb
- A9 toolbar: just got this myself yesterday
- idea: take a photo of the library’s new books, put it on Flickr, and link to the new book list on the library’s web site

There is a lot more, but I just wanted to capture a few thoughts for myself here.

I’ve been coming across info lately about videoblogging. Cool! I’m going to try Ant as my program to subscribe to and download video:

And “mefeedia” allows you to tag video (just like Flickr). Cool!

Here’s my del.icio.us tag for videoblogs: http://del.icio.us/nic221/videoblogs

Check out Google maps combined with Craigslist for housing searches:
http://www.paulrademacher.com/housing/

This is really cool. You can see all the listings in Craigslist on the map and immediately get a visual idea of where they are as you are browsing through the listings. This is great!

I’m working with the NEASIST Program Committee on our spring program about various new technolgies that libraries are experimenting with. Just finished a bibliography for the event. And we have a blog. I just love all this stuff: rss, syndication, podcasting, social bookmarking, etc. I’ve been feeling so many “wows!” and “aha’s!” lately when I try all these new tools. It seems like we’re in a period of more intense and quick change (than usual) with Internet technologies these days. It’s fun!

Check out my photos from the antiwar rally yesterday:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nic221/tags/antiwar/show/

Also posted some of them to Indymedia:
http://boston.indymedia.org/newswire/display/34057/index.php

I’ve been enjoying working with Indymedia Boston lately. Lots of fun people, lots going on! Eventually we’ll be working to improve the web site, and maybe even get a Podcast going for the site. See: http://boston.indymedia.org/

By the way, all these photos were taken with my little Nokia camera phone. It’s quite handy for snapping quick shots while walking around. No need to mess around with settings or fumbling with a big camera. Just hold up the little phone and shoot!

So last night I finally had time to play around with Flickr - you know, the trendy photo service that lets you “tag” your photos (i.e., personal metadata), and then search by tag to see just your own photos, or everyone else’s too. You can make up any tags you want and assign as many as you want to each photo or group of photos.

The thing that really made me want to try it, was the fact that you can set up an RSS feed for any of your tags. Now that is really cool! So it means that you can provide a feed that contains photos based on a certain subject or word and whenever you add new photos to Flickr with that tag, your readers who have subscribed to your feed will see the new photos.

Here’s my Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nic221/

So for example, here are the feeds for:

• my whole Flickr site: RSS feed | view photos
• just the tag “friends”: RSS feed | view photos
• just the tag “glass”: RSS feed | view photos

I don’t have very many photos uploaded yet, but I’ll gradually add them. I can see right now that I’m going to want a paid account…. the free one only let’s you make 3 “sets”, and I want lots of sets. Though of course you could just use the tags as virtual sets, but I like the “sets” feature for grouping photos into albums.

Also, this makes me want to get a “real” digital camera… I only have my Nokia camera phone…. it takes OK photos, but not great or high resolution… it’s very basic. Another gadget I want to buy!

OK youguys who know me. You will laugh at this one. I love this. It’s a free service called “Audlink.” I can call a phone number, leave a voice message, and it gets automatically uploaded to my web site, so I can link to it here. Here’s a test:
Hi everyone!

I’m just starting to think of some ways I could use this. Here is where I first read about it: How to create podcasts with a smartphone.

I’ve been playing with extensions to Firefox (my current favorite web browser). Here’s one I’ve been using for a while, ForecastFox, which displays weather forcasts and current temperature in the status bar on the bottom of my brower window. Here’s what it looks like right now:

When I hover my mouse over it, it shows more detailed info. The two icons after today’s temperature and forecast are for tonight (4 degrees) and tomorrow (24 degrees and sunny).

I’ve just recently started using Gmail for some of my email. I have two accounts, one with my real name and one with a pen name. I came across this great set of Gmail tips, which has inspired me to start using Gmail more.

One thing I love is the idea of labels instead of mailboxes or folders for storing mail. You can assign multiple labels to each message and then click on that label name to see all the messages filed in that category. I wish I had this in Apple Mail for my MIT mail! I’m always forgetting what category I filed an old message in. (could be under the project name or the person’s name or whatever).

I also love the tip about maintaining “notes” in Gmail, because I often email myself notes on things I want to remember.

Another related thing I like is the Firefox extension for notifying you if you have email in your Gmail account. You can download it from the Firefox extensions page on Mozilla.org - it’s called Gmail Notifier.

Last night I was looking around in the Apple Store and I asked them if they have refurbished products in the store or only online. They said no refurbs. So then I asked if they ever have returned items on sale, and it turns out they do! They call them “refreshed” products. And it turns out they had just what I had been thinking of buying online: an Airport Express. They had 1 “refreshed” one for $99 (full price is $129, educational price is $119). So I bought it and now I’m listening to music from my iTunes music library on my Mac cube (in my bedroom) on the stereo in my living room. This is great because it’s hooked up to speakers in the living room, kitchen, and the cellar (so I can continue to hear it when I’m down there doing my laundry).

Of course, installing it wasn’t totally trouble-free. There was a problem at first. I plugged it in near the stereo and went over to my Mac to install the software and set it up. Somehow it couldn’t find the Express using my existing wireless network. After a bit of Google searching I found this page, which had the answer. It involved updating the software from Apple’s site, updating the firmware, and then plugging it into my Ethernet cable while setting it up. Turns out third party wireless routers use IP addresses beginning with 192 and Apple’s product is set up to use addresses beginning with 10. So this workaround helped me fix that, and now all is fine.

It was great to listen to some of my favorite podcasts today all around the house while I was doing other things. Usually I only listen to them on my iPod. Of course I can plug my iPod directly into my stereo, too, but that runs down the battery, and there is a lot more music on my computer than on the pod (since it’s a mini).

The other reason I wanted an Airport Express was to extend the range of my wireless network so my laptop will work more reliably in the living room. (I have a Titanium Powerbook, which is known for poor wireless reception). The only problem is, that doesn’t seem to be working. The network fades out when my laptop is in the living room. But I’m too tired to troubleshoot that today, so it will have to wait for another time. It’s probably some setting I didn’t set up when I installed it.

At least the music plays, which is great. Oh, and I’m using Veta Universal on my cell phone to control iTunes remotely. (see previous post about that) It’s so cool to be sitting at the kitchen table with my cell phone and if I don’t want to hear a particular tune, I can advance to the next one by hitting a button on my phone (it doesn’t have to be in a line of site with my Mac, because it’s Bluetooth, which is radio waves). So that’s really cool. (Veta Universal is shareware for $8).

Ever since I read an article in 2600 magazine about viewing movies on portable devices, I’ve been wanting to try that on my Palm. So last night I finally had a chance.

I used Kinoma Player Ex and Kinoma Producer to do it.

Now I can convert movies to a format viewable on my Palm. I’m limited a bit by storage space… currently I have a 128Mb SD card, so I’m thinking of getting a bigger one (saw a deal recently for 256 Mb for $10 after rebates).

My goal would be to watch movies that I’ve downloaded from the web of lectures or events that I missed, but are available online. One example is the Lessig video I mentioned in a previous post. It’s about an hour long and the file is about 15.1 Mb, which will just fit on the room I have left on my SD card. (I haven’t had a chance to try it yet). So I could watch it with headphones on my Palm while on the subway. It seems like a lecture or little movie would translate well to a small screen.

In addition to lectures there are a lot of free movies in the public domain available in the Internet Archive, the Prelinger Archives and other sources.

In fact there is some amazing footage of the recent Tsunami disaster available in the Internet Archive.

Last night I set up my Nokia 3650 cell phone to use as a remote for controlling iTunes on my Mac. It’s so great! I used Romeo and Veta Universal shareware to do it. Romeo installs on the Mac and Veta on the Palm or cell and now I can use either device to control iTunes and other apps on my Mac. This is great! I can control Powerpoint, DVD Player, iTunes, the system (turn volume up or down or mute, etc.), and more. Here’s what the screen looks like on my phone:

Have you ever heard your own voice as the opposite gender? It’s SO funny! On Christmas we were playing around with sound software for the Mac, called Amadeus II. We used my Powerbook to record ourselves having a conversation for about 1-2 minutes. Then we played with changing the pitch and speed when we played it back. We decided that the funniest thing was to keep the normal speed, but turn down the pitch just enough so the women and kids among us sounded like adult men. I was with my 2 friends, Sandy and Melissa, and their kids, Rosa, 14, Isaiah, 11, and Xavier, 20. Xavier has a very low voice anyway, so his sounded totally ghoulish. Then of course we speeded it up to sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks, which is always good for a laugh.

We realized that hearing ourselves as men brought forward the fact that as women we tend to use certain inflections and ways of speaking that were still there even though the pitch was lower. We totally sounded like an episode from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy! We loved it! All of us were in hysterical fits of laughter for quite some time.

By the way, that program, Amadeus, is a great piece of shareware. I used it to digitize my old piano recitals from my undergrad years that were on cassette tape. I could use the white noise filter to edit out the tape hiss from the old cassettes and it was also very convenient for editing out the empty space at the beginning, fading out the applause at the end, and splitting it up into separate tracks. I saved it as mp3, burned a couple of CDs to give as gifts, and put the files on my iPod. I highly recommend Amadeus!

There are 2 recent articles I found helpful about how to digitize your cassettes and vinyl, see MacWorld, Jan. 2005: “From Tape to CD: Bring your old recordings into the digital future,” or Playlist, Winter 2005: “Digitize Me: Convert your tapes and records, before it’s too late.” Both are by the same author, but the second article also covers Windows software.

So right now I’m on a walk through the vast underground tunnels of MIT (since it’s SO cold outside today). It’s lunch time and I’m doing this for exercise, since my usual exercise classes at the MIT fitness center have ended for the semester. I’m listening to a hacker radio show in my iPod, which makes the walk more interesting. The radio show is a “podcast” from 2600.com. I’ve listened to their show for years via their web site… it’s broadcast on a radio station in New York, but they put the MP3 files on their web site to download. The show is called “off the hook.”

I’ve stopped in an “athena cluster” to see how this blog looks on a UNIX workstation. The font is nice! It’s Lucida Sans Unicode, which is set in my stylesheet to appear if the user doesn’t have Lucida Grande. Time to get off the blog now and check some other web sites I’m working on for work.

I now realize what all the hype is about. It’s one thing to read about iPods, but another to own one. It’s so great to have everything on this little device that’s always with me… not just songs, but lectures, radio shows, podcasts, exercise classes (my Pilates class from last year), copies of my old piano and organ recitals, archives of mini-disc recordings I’ve been making of Xmas celebrations for the past few years (each kid and each adult is interviewed and talks about their year and then we listen to the previous years), comedy shows, audiobooks, etc.

And the thing about iTunes and iPod together is that it’s so easy to create all kinds of playlists (that just point to 1 copy of the tune). So I can mix and match things in all kinds of creative ways… mellow tunes, exercise tunes, favorites, certain genres, etc.

I’ve been reading 2 good books for ideas about my iPod: iPod Fan Book by Yasukuni Notomi, and iPod & iTunes Hacks (O’Reilly). I highly recommend both books for iPod lovers.

The next step is to import my contacts from my Palm address book, and start playing around with text notes also. I really want to get the Style Master CSS podGuide from Westciv, which is freely available as text notes for your iPod. More on that later.