Tag: geekiness

GMail!!! and more!

So then, this blogging has paid off in one way at least! Today, Blogger (as a service owned by Google) has invited me to sign up for GMail. Woooo hoooo!!

/me dances around in joy!

So yes, I went right off and created my GMail account. It’s quite nice and I like it. Maybe in a future post I will post some screenshots and more impressions about it. For now suffice it to say I’m very excited!

What’s more then? Well, I was poking about Jason Shellen’s blog and at the bottom I saw a link to bStats. This is a website stats thing provided by Blogger! And I never knew about it!! It used to be only for the Blogger Pro (read paid) users, but since Blogger Pro has been eliminated, it works for everyone now! Wooo hooo again. I went and installed that into my blogger template too. I’m not removing my eXTReMe Tracking counter yet. But If I grow to like bStats (which I think I will), out goes the eXTReMe tracker!

Today’s bits of randomness

Right now I’m listening to the music of 1942 – A Love Story. Once again, I can’t remember how I got there. I remember reading something about Kavita Krishnamurthy and suddenly decided I needed to listen to the music from this movie. Lovely songs.

I finally did my taxes today. I had all the forms and crap ready, just was too lazy to fill the damn things out and mail them. Well, now that’s done. So I should get my return soon. I really need it, it’s around 500 bucks!! 🙂 It’s not fair that I’m not allowed to file online. It is so easy to do it online!

Speaking of which, my life is rapidly transforming into a complete online existance. I spend my time on my computer recording bee dances, writing software for the lab, reading papers, and I even do my notes on it. For the classes I teach, I make my presentations, find videos, visuals, resources all online. My bank and credit cards don’t send me statements in the mail. All online. When I do get bills from the university, I get them online. My electricity, cable, phone, all online. Wheeeee! And not to mention all the time I spend chatting on flickr!

I got mad today. Maybe also a bit sad. I’m wondering if I’m too pushy online. Maybe I’m trying to be friends with people who would rather keep their distance from me. I posted a couple of comment on someone’s blog and soon after those comments were posted, that blog was made “friends only” and hence locked me out. It wasn’t the first time I’ve commented there, but I guess I rubbed that person the wrong way this time. I wouldn’t be so mad, if at least I was told that I was not wanted. I hate the indirectness of the whole thing. There’s also an element of hypocrisy involved, but lets not go into that here. For all I know that person is reading this now. Well, see, I don’t care. This is what I feel, and I don’t need to hide it from the world.

Well, it’s also possible I’m being paranoid and overreacting (I tend to do the latter a lot) but somehow I don’t think that’s the case this time.

Anyway, this incident kind of made me think a bit about my online presence. I do tend to insinuate myself into conversations, posts, etc. I never really thought that if I was unwelcome I wouldn’t be told so. What if I’m the online equivalent of that guy no one really wants to talk to but don’t know how to say so? Oh man, now I’m horrified. Have I just been bugging a lot of people all these months? So I’ve decided then to tone down all the chatting, posting, silly jokes, stupid crap that I’m always spouting. Maybe even be more insular too. Ok, that’s done.

Just had to mention here, Shambly Hermit met hey leto on flickr and pointed me at her blog. This is really good reading! I so wish I could write like her! Oddly, I have not met her on flickr yet, but I think when I do, I might just gush all about how much I like her blog. hehe…

IE is dead! Long live Firefox!

No, no… mozilla.org is not paying me to publicize them… I just like Firefox so much and have got used to a lot of the features now that there’s no way I’m going back to IE.

I only use IE for some sites that have ActiveX controls (usually the Windows Media Player control.) I know there’s a plugin that will allow WMP to work in Firefox, but the last time I installed that it messed up my Firefox install after a couple of days and I had to wipe it and reinstall.

Readers of my blog that use IE will probably notice there’s two things broken. The “currently reading” list is literally broken into two bits in IE. I’ve yet to figure out why. It renders perfectly on Firefox. The second thing is the GNE neighbourhood browser. In IE it opens as a pop up window rather than as a drop down menu type thing.

I can’t really be bothered, if you don’t like the way my blog looks in IE, learn to live with it… or… get Firefox! 🙂

Great Online Music service!

I love having my music as mp3s to play on my computer and not so long ago used to spend a lot of my time on Kazaa or various other p2p apps downloading music illegally. When I began to hear of legal music download services, I decided that it seemed the right way to go.

I spent a lot of time reading up and finally decided that iTunes was the music service I should use. Well, it’s a few months later, and I’m wondering why people have raved about iTunes. Undoubtedly it is the best of the paid legal music services in the US. Nevertheless it’s still tied down by the music industry’s stupidity. All files you download are protected and can only be played on the iTunes player or on your iPod. I don’t own an iPod or any other mp3 player and don’t plan to in the future either, (Just too expensive for me) and I don’t particularly like the iTunes player or interface. So that’s two reasons why iTunes doesn’t work for me.

You could say those are mere quibbles. Possibly. So then here’s the clincher. iTunes refuses to burn CDs on my computer. I have no idea why and the error message quite helpully says “Unknown error.” I can’t seem to find anyone who is having a similar problem with iTunes even after myriad Google searches. So it’s just one of those mysterious voodoo errors I’m stuck with, (and no I can’t buy a new computer and/or CD burner either!)

So just when I thought I was done with online music services for the nonce, someone points out AllOfMP3 to me. Almost any artist you want (even the Beatles and Michael Jackson) available at any bitrate you want, upto CD quality music. On the fly encoding with whichever encoder you choose, MP3, Ogg, WMA or lossless encoding formats. Price? As cheap as $0.01 per MB downloaded and no membership fees! Holy Cow!! I just couldn’t believe this is legal!

But, apparently, it is! As is explained at that link, allfomp3 is situated in Russia and according to Russian law, all digital IP rights rest with a single entity called ROMS (link to English version of site) and ROMS pays out the licensing fees to the artists/owners. So apparently anyone can offer music/content downloads online as long as they pay ROMS for it. I’m still confused as to how this works, but I assume the dollar to ruble conversion rate also plays a role in keeping prices low.

It gets better, AllofMP3 has a client called the AllofMP3 Explorer (thank Microsoft for that ubiquitous Explorer suffix) which when you have it running on your computer will automatically download your purchased music for you. You will still need to find the music using your browser and the web interface, but nothing more after that. The Explorer will start downloading the files as soon as they have been encoded and made available.

Still doesn’t sound good? Just registering on the site (for free) gives you access to all of their music as 24kbps MP3s. These are for previewing purposes, so you can actually listen to entire songs/albums to see if you’d like them before you buy them. You can also download an mru of an album to load as a playlist in winamp/[insert media player of your choice here] which will stream the mp3s for you!

Ok, a little exploration and you will be able to figure out whether you like it or not. I know I do. I’m busy purchasing a lot of music from there already. I’m just worried the RIAA (or whoever are the current bad guys) will discover this loophole in Russian copyright laws and lobby for it to be closed or made illegal for download in the US, so that they can all pay themselves hefty bonuses once more.

Add-ons to the blog… or How I love the free services on the Internet

So while spending time chatting on flickr, I came across this website called AllConsuming, mostly because the guy behind AllConsuming, Erik Benson, created a service tied into your contact list on flickr called Connectr. I’ll let you go to those sites and see what they’re all about. What I do want to tell you here, is that AllConsuming allows me to put in a snazzy “currently reading” list into my blog with minimal fuss and with all working links to Amazon and whatnot.

To coin a phrase… “That totally rocks, duuuude!!”

The next thing, HaloScan, the service I have been using for commenting, has now implemented trackback too. More power to them! (More power to us bloggers too!)

And if I hadn’t mentioned this before, both these services are totally free. No strings attached. No pop-up ads, no spyware installed on your computer, no… oh well you get the point.

Let’s tally up a few things that go into this blog: I create it using blogger, that’s free. I host it at webspace my school gives me, that’s free. I use DynDns‘s WebHop service to cloak and redirect requests from oook.blogsite.org to the actual url, that’s free too (with one single small pop-up), and, using HaloScan, I have commenting and trackback, all free. I Love the Internet!! 😉

Firefox, the browser reloaded

Ok, sure, cheesy tagline… but the browser is far from cheesy!

For those who don’t know what the hell I’m talking about… it’s about Firefox 0.8, the next generation browser from mozilla.org Too many improvements and generally goodiness in it for me to list here, so instead, you can surf over to their website and read all about it there.

I’m no Bill-basher… in fact, I like and use a lot of MS products… but heck… I just like Firefox so much, I’m beginning to use it as my default browser and phasing out IE. Yay me!!

I’ve done my bit by adding a “Get Firefox” button in my nav bar on the right. Oh and btw, Firefox is the new name of Firebird.

RSS??

For all web-designers in India and people that live off news and feeds from the web, RSS might be a little hard to get used to. Yes, it’s the greatest thing since hyperlinks (or sliced bread, whichever way you see it) but… (aha, bet you saw that coming!) it’s also the acronym of a fundamentalist political organisation in India!

So, anyway… I just discovered RSS (the web version!) a few days ago… after puzzling over the XML links on the GNE discussion boards, I finally figured out what it was all about.

I downloaded this news aggregator and started playing about with it.

…. and I’m still playing…