Author: rich.campoamor

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Star Wars Actors

Someone actually when to the trouble of using the magic of IMDB to create a list of the non Star Wars movies that have the most Star Wars actors in them. Tied for the top? Flash Gordon and Labyrinth.

This makes me think about earlier in the week when my wife and I were watching a detective show on BBCAmerica called Touching Evil. One of the characters in that episode was the same actor that plays Chancellor Palpatine/Emperor in the Star Wars movies. This caused my wife to exclaim, ‘of course he did it, he’s the Emperor!’ Turns out, he did.

uh, hope that didn’t spoil it for anybody.

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Exploring the Flickr Tagspace

information aesthetics has a pointer to two fun tools for exploring the growing Flickr tagspace: tagnautica and flickr tag browser.

Both use a similar visualization paradigm with the ‘keyword’ in the middle and related tags in a formation around the keyword. You can explore the related tags (and thus change it to the current keyword) by clicking on the bubble of your choice.

Shameless plug: I am an avid Flickr user; a random sample of some of my photos can be seen in the right gutter of this blog or directly at Flickr.

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Samsung Portable DirecTV Reciever

Gizmodo has a brief piece on a new Portable DirecTV Receiver that has been introduced by Samsung. The unit appears to be about the size of a portable DVD player, but no word on whether it even has the capabilty to run on batteries (I would guess not). One thing that is really not clear from the writeup is how you actually get the satelite signal — is there some external antenna? do you still need clear southern exposure? The answers to those last questions might make it a bit less ‘portable’.

Just think, you could combine this with some built in Tivo-like PVR capability and you have a pretty powerful combination.

Arrives in March of 2006 with a $499 price tag.

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Still Struggling to Define Web 2.0

I really enjoy the World Wide Words web site. A recent entry is struggling with a familiar issue: how does one define ‘web 2.0’. Unfortunately (and not surprisingly) they don’t have much more success than others who have tried.

That aside, I find the site fascinating — but, I have always been interested in linguistics and word origins. For example, you can find out why the abbreviation for pounds is lb, and whether the word shot (as in a shot of whiskey) has anything to do with cowboys buying liquor with bullets.

They have a site feed, so why not give it a try? It may be just the thing to get some beneficial stimulation for your brain.

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Effects of Learning and Lack of Sleep on the Brain

New research confirms something that many probably already knew: Learning new things helps to ‘rejuvenate’ the brain while lack of sleep undoes that effect.

I can definitely attest to the sleep deprivation part. There have been a few really long plane flights (New Zealand, South Africa, Thailand) combined with time zone shifts and minimal sleep that have left me struggling to do simple things like calculating the gratuity to add to a bill or to maintain any sense of direction once we are on the ground. A good nights sleep does quite a bit toward addressing this.

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802.11a Now Supported by Apple

Hidden in the announcements from Apple regarding new Intel-based Macs is the detail that they are now supporting the 802.11a wireless networking standard. Here are some of the details from TidBits:

802.11a was declared dead by Steve Jobs back in Jan. 2003 when he introduced AirPort Extreme, and it seemed rather dead at the time. The advantage of 802.11a is that it has no backwards compatible mode with the older, slower 802.11b standard.

802.11b and g work in the 2.4 GHz band, and 802.11b runs at a maximum of 11 Mbps of throughput, or a net of about 5 Mbps. 802.11g has a maximum 54 Mbps, or a net of about 20 to 30 Mbps depending on add-ons and other factors.

The reason that the lack of compatibility with 802.11b is an advantage is that a network that sports both b and g adapters has worse performance than a g-only or any 802.11a network. The older “b” devices bring down the whole network, reducing the amount of shared airtime available for faster transmission.

802.11a has emerged in corporations and universities as a preferred tool for deploying voice over IP (VoIP) whether for campus calling or Internet telephony (VoIP to a gateway out to the public switched telephone network).

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Websites in a Blink

I really enjoyed Malcom Gladwell’s book Blink and noticed that a recent article in Nature provides further evidence that all it takes is a ‘blink’ to decide if a web site is worthy of attention or not.

Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny.

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SearchFox RSS Reader to Cease Operation

I received an email from the creator of SearchFox a day or so ago stating that SearchFox would be ceasing operations as of January 25, 2006:

SearchFox Users,
Thanks for all your help in making SearchFox what it is. We have enjoyed providing this service, and hope that you have enjoyed using it. Please export all of your links and an OPML file with your RSS sources before the site shuts down. In accordance with our privacy policy, we will delete all personal information on January 25 after we shut down the services.

Esteban Kozak

I am very sorry to hear this as I had been using SearchFox as my sole newsreader for several months now. The user interface was clean and easy to use, but the feature that I liked the best was how it would notice what I read and prioritize subsequent feeds so that (more often than not) what I wanted to read was at the top of my river of news.

I guess now I need to find the second best online news reader available. Google’s offering is just horrible, Bloglines (which I started with) is still pretty feature poor and Rojo really needs to do some work on usability. Interestingly, many of the features being requested by users of Rojo would, if implemented, make it on par with SearchFox. Any suggestions on online feedreaders that you are happy with?

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Anti-Telemarketer Script

If you are prone to getting annoying telemarketing calls, you might want to try the Counterscript.

The Direct Marketing sector regards the telephone as one of its most successful tools. Consumers experience telemarketing from a completely different point of view: more than 92% perceive commercial telephone calls as a violation of privacy.

Telemarketers make use of a telescript – a guideline for a telephone conversation. This script creates an imbalance in the conversation between the marketer and the consumer. It is this imbalance, most of all, that makes telemarketing successful. The EGBG Counterscript attempts to redress that balance.

If you are highly motivated, you can send in the results of your counterscript so that it can be tabulated.

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New Yahoo Go = So What?

I read several announcements today about the new Yahoo Go service. After searching endlessly for an actual URL that linked to the offering, I finally found one. I’m sure I won’t be the first or last to say that the offering should have been called ‘Yahoo No Go’. The computer portion of it is not currently available and will be PC only, the ‘TV’ portion of it is also a PC app (and also not available). Ah, the mobile portion is available for Nokia series 60 phones — I’m in luck, I have a Nokia 6620 that fits the bill.

I download the ~1.7MB app and install in on my 6620 with great interest after having seen the screen shots and read the hyperbole from the CES announcement. The ygo.sis file expands to take nearly 4MB of phone and memory card space, then goes on to download another app for connections. After the initialization, I try out the apps. One by one, I grew less and less impressed. Yahoo Go, it turns out, is just 4MB of bloat that does nothing more than start the WAP browser on the phone (which wants you to login to Yahoo again!) to display the services that are already available to you through the Yahoo mobile site. Accessing the Yahoo mobile site directly using the Opera series 60 browser provides a much better user experience that this. What a total crock. Hell, Cingular’s J2ME IM application kicks the crap out of this thing (even as a single tasker). Google’s J2ME Maps implementation makes Yahoo’s effort look like the brown stuff in the bottom of a college dorm fridge.

I then went about removing this craplet from my phone, but, guess, what? As part of the removal process, it wants to ‘phone home’ to Yahoo and waste more bandwidth before it will remove itself (shades of Microsoft). It’s no wonder that Yahoo recommends that you allow the app to connect whenever it wants to (versus letting you know that it want to make a connection). I finally had to go into the Nokia AppManager and delete the various pieces of it manually.

Based on this experience, Yawnhoo needs to try harder and put out something useful (other than hype).

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High Tech Road Reflectors

Mavromatic has an article about a company that has created road reflectors that are capable of measuring a vehicles speed and using a built in camera, capture the license plate number (and presumably issue you a ticket).

I just wonder how well these things would do in a climate that regularly requires snow removal (and potentially inadvertent camera/detector removal).

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Macworld Expo Speculation

Not surprisingly, ThinkSecret has some interesting speculation regarding what Apple might announce at Macworld Expo next week. Seems that they believe that there will be a ‘media-savvy’ Mac mini and a content distribution system.

In an effort to appease media companies wary of the security of digital rights management technology, Apple’s new technology will deliver content such that it never actually resides on the user’s hard drive. Content purchased will be automatically made available on a user’s iDisk, which Front Row 2.0 will tap into. When the user wishes to play the content, robust caching technology — for which Apple previously received a patent — will serve it to the user’s computer as fast as their Internet connection can handle. The system will also likely support downloading the video content to supported iPods but at no time will it ever actually be stored on a computer’s hard drive.

Some of this squares with Apple bumping up the .Mac iDisk bandwidth cap to 1 terabyte per month (then removing that notation from the .Mac status screen). There was also the recent announcement of a podcasting server being made available in the Education market.

One thing is certain, the hype, rumor and speculation will only continue to heat up regarding the Macworld Expo announcements.

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ReminderFeed

If you spend entirely too much time (how could that be?) keeping up with things in your feedreader of choice, you might find the services of reminderfeed to be valuable. Basically, you set a date, time and description, then use the subscribe buttons to have your feed-based reminder delivered to you.

You could always use this in conjunction with alerts function at Yahoo to have this reminder delivered via SMS to you mobile phone. Perhaps that will be a option directly from reminderfeed in the future.

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