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Where I live, there’s a new radio station called “93.7 Mike FM”, a station that “plays anything”. And, apparently, this type of format is rapidly spreading across the country, having been “invented” in Canada, by what are known as “Jack” and “Bob” stations. SFGate.com has a great article exploring this phenomenon..

One important point brought up in this article is that all this randomness is not as random as you might think.

The stations tell listeners “we play what we want” or “we play anything.” But they’re really carefully crafted to keep advertisers happy, observers say. Song choices target a lucrative but musically hard-to-define demographic, 25- to 54-year-olds who want to hear new music but not rap and bubblegum pop and who declare themselves too young to listen to the oldies.

“This is oldies wrapped up in new wrapping paper and a new bow,” said Tom Taylor, editor of Inside Radio, a trade publication owned by Clear Channel Communications Inc.

The comment about “oldies” is an interesting one. My musical tastes lean towards “Indie Pop”, “Electronica”, and “Garage Rock”. But, in the car, what do I often listen to? Oldies. Yup, the 50’s and 60’s stuff. Why? Because the music I really enjoy is rarely playing anywhere outside of hard-to-find college radio, so I’m usually stuck trying to choose music I tolerate, rather than what I really enjoy. Yes, I know I can listen to CD’s and iPods and such but they’re not always and option, and I also feel a bit isolated if I don’t tune in to actual broadcast media once in a while - both to experience songs that are new to me, and to make sure I’m reachable by the Emergency Broadcast System, should the world around me suddenly fall apart.

Anyway, back to the oldies. I geniunely like certain “oldies” songs but, for the most part, I consider them pleasant background noise. So, why is my fallback plan listening to oldies, instead of finding tolerable Adult Oriented Radio (AOR)? Variety! Oldies stations have thousands of mediocre to excellent tracks to choose from, whereas “contemporary” stations have a much more limited playlist, and don’t have the advantage of knowing if certain songs are good enough to “stand the test of time”.

People my age or older often joke about “nostalgia” for the 80’s and 90’s. But, guess what? It’s getting less and less funny. Time is marching on, and the 80’s began over a quarter century ago. Even though “whatever” stations like Mike FM throw in a new song here and there, I’m listening for the exact same reason I listen to oldies. Mr. Taylor is right - random is the new old.

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As a hobbyist computer builder, and someone whose PC resides in his bedroom, I would like to officially join in on the blue LED backlash. It seems nearly impossible to buy system components these days without accumulating more damn blue lights. It’s as if car dealers ONLY stocked spinning rims. Try as I might to keep my custom PC looking subdued and tasteful, my bedroom always ends up looking like the Starship Enterprise at night, and I’m forced to put the computer into suspend mode just to get some sleep!

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If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been feeling rather profilic with this blog lately, and have been spewing some extended missives. Because of this, I decided to tweak the way paragraphs are rendered, to better suit the volume of the text. I increased the space between paragraphs and justified the text, for starters. But, I also wanted to add a typesetting nicety that seems to have been lost when text moved from physical books to the World Wide Web - indenting the first line of a paragraph.

I recall commenting about this loss to someone a while ago but, at the time, didn’t actually investigate what it would take to bring it back. Surely, it must be difficult, since you hardly ever see it in use. CNN? Nope. Zeldman? Nope. Kottke? Nope. Adobe? Nope.

So, what’s the deal? Too hard for mere mortals to implement?

Nope. You just do this:

p + p {text-indent: 1.5em;}

(the “+ p” makes the indent NOT happen on the first paragraph of any group of paragraphs. Your call.)

CSS is funny. You think you’re an expert, and then you discover one line of code that does something you didn’t even think was possible. Thanks go directly to the w3c for this tip.

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The Greasemonkey extension [for Firefox] allows users to alter the content and behavior of any website through user scripts which work inside the browser.

What Greasemonkey does is not rocket science (not to knock the skills of creator Aaron Boodman, aka YoungPup - a DHTML god among men - currently hacking at Blogger/Google, of course), but it’s capable of completely altering the “rules” of the web as we know it. Check out all of the sites already being targeted. Is your site on it?

First of all, if you generate revenue via anything that annoys users, guess what? Consider those revenue streams gone. But, more importantly, get ready for seriously cutthroat competition. If you have the world’s best organized database of products, but don’t offer the best prices, with a simple bit of JavaScript, users can redirect all the “Buy Now” buttons on your site to somewhere with cheaper prices. It used to be that if someone didn’t like what they saw in your site, they could leave via a bookmark or a quick URL entered in their browser. That was already bad enough. Now, users can take their business elsewhere without ever leaving your site! It’s as if you were able to shop at Target, then pull an entire Wal-Mart out of your back pocket when the time came to make your final purchase.

Clearly, Greasemonkey can be used for good or for evil. All the best tools can. I’m a firm believer that once bits enter my computer, they’re mine to do with as I please. So, philosophically, I’m pro-Greasemonkey, but man… things are sure going to get ugly. The arms race is already beginning.

Filed under Cool Stuff, The Internet Biz 1 Comment »

Lately, I’ve been trying to find a good application for jotting down all kinds of random things that pop into my head. I tried getting used to “OneNote”, but boy that program is really overkill when you just want to jot down bits of text. I looked into “mindmapping” programs (most are too expensive - nor do they really seem to work for me). I tried some “outliners” - didn’t really do it for me either. Anyway, I found a very nifty free little application called Genius, which might finally do the trick. It’s a very simple program, so it would be quicker for you to download and play around with it, than to read a long review from me, so go get it!

Filed under Cool Stuff, General Computing 1 Comment »

I somehow stumbled across this blog post which provides a brilliantly simple way to devise color schemes for web sites or other projects (something I often have trouble with). Just poke around a stock photography site, find a picture you like, and save it. Then load it up in Photoshop, apply the “Mosaic” filter, and voila! — Instant color palette. Genius!

When I (re)designed this site, I tried picking colors from the banner image above to provide heading colors and such, but I never thought to “pixellate” the image to simplify things.

In case you were wondering, the scene in the banner is a picture I took of Halibut Point State Park, which is where I proposed to my finacée, Anastasia. The color levels were tweaked a bit to suit my purposes, but it’s a beautiful place, even without Photoshop

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Having gotten myself acquainted with Yahoo Music Engine, I think that Steve Jobs may need to re-evaluate his “people don’t like renting music” theory (much as he recanted on his “flash memory MP3 players suck” stance with the iPod Shuffle). However, should Apple offer unlimited streaming music via iTunes store? Probably not. Read on.

Yahoo Music Engine (more specifically, their “Y! Unlimited” service - hereafter referred to as “Yahoo Music”), allows you to collect and listen to over 1,000,000 tracks as much as you want, for $7.99 a month, or less if you pay annually. And their user interface, while still needing some work, is very agreeable (not as slick as iTunes, but far better than Napster) - and they’re still in Beta.

Bitch all you want about DRM, that’s not the point with a service like this. The point is that it’s radio-on-demand. Listen to anything you want, at any time. That is absolutely, positively, worth 8 bucks a month. People are paying more than that for XM radio, which only offers pre-set DJ playlists.

So, let’s say you’re a die-hard “I must OWN my music” believer. Well, you STILL should subscribe to Yahoo Music. Why? Because you’ll save a hell of a lot of money. Your listening habits may vary, but I know that for every 10 albums I buy, at least half of them don’t get much listening after a month or two. But, I still like to listen to them for that month, so I’ll put up with the “limitations” of a DRM-based service for those albums.

When an album truly proves its merit and I decide it deserves a permanent spot in my collection, I’ll get the CD (or a permanent download). But, the $7.99 I spent this month on Yahoo Music just saved me at least $50 on CD’s I don’t really want.

Now, here’s the thing, from a business standpoint. How in the world is Yahoo making money on this? Answer: they probably aren’t. There’s a major “bubble” mentality in the online music industry, with the players trying to undercut each other in various ways to achieve some sort of critical mass, usually at a loss. Some companies may have a clear end goal - involving predictable profit - in sight, but I think some aren’t even quite sure what their goal is.

Subscription services like Yahoo Music only exist because the record industry is convinced that cheap streaming leads to CD sales (or at least “permanent download” sales). In some cases, this is true. But, as I described, it can also lead to CD non-sales. Whether or not supporting streaming services is more profitable than NOT supporting them is a calculus equation that only time and some serious analysis can figure out.

Where does Apple and iTunes Music Store fit into all this? Well, although I have said that I enjoy ulimited streaming services - and predict that many other people will learn to as well - Apple is doing exactly the right thing by staying out of that space.

As I said, the subscription music service business is a cutthroat industry right now, where no one is likely making a sizeable profit. These services don’t make money from the subscriptions, they make money when someone decides to plunk down more cash to own the album permanently. So, where are people going to plunk down that cash? Perhaps on a physical CD. But otherwise, they’ll spend it where they have the most user-friendly shopping experience (iTunes Music Store?), an elegant way to store and categorize their collection (iTunes), and perhaps somewhere that will easily allow them to store their songs on the world’s favorite portable digital music device (iPod).

Apple is making a smart move here. They’re taking the profit from permanent album purchases, while leaving the overhead costs of DRM/stream-only non-purchases to someone else to deal with. Do people want to rent music? Yes. But, in this case, by not offering their customers something they want, Apple may have made a brilliant business move. Think Different.

Filed under Cool Stuff, The Internet Biz 1 Comment »

Do a search for “Desktop Wallpaper” and you’re bound to be led to really horrible web sites that try to install spyware, lead you endlessly on a loop around other horrible web sites, and do other shady things. Then, if you actually find a site where you can really download stuff, you’re bound to find 10,000 pictures of semi-naked women (not necessarily a BAD thing, but maybe not best for your work PC) and maybe one or two pictures of puppies. And, most likely, the images are at some pathetic resolution like 800 x 600, usually with ugly high-compression JPG artifacts to boot.

Where, oh where, is one to go, to find desktop wallpapers that are free, tasteful, artistic, and high-resolution? Well, here’s one awesome site I just found:

Desktop Wallpaper at InterfaceLIFT.com.

If your tastes lean more toward geeky abstract 3D stuff, the Wallpaper section at Customize.org has almost 10,000 options. There are some really cool works there though, personally, I find the stuff a bit too “pointy” and distracting. However, I’m an ultra-minimalist when it comes to my desktop. Here’s the one I’m using right now (from Interface-Lift). Simple, soothing, and just textured enough to differentiate the desktop from active programs. That’s what I like. But, hey, it’s your desktop. Do what you want with it.

Filed under General Computing 2 Comments »

I’ve never used this website for this sort of thing before, but I just have to spread the word about this ridiculous deal I found on a 20″ Dell LCD monitor. Right now you can get it for $396.85, with free shipping - which is an absolutely amazing price. This monitor (Model #2005FPW) uses the EXACT same display panel as the Apple 20″ Cinema Display (details here), which goes for twice the price.

So, if you’re in the market for a nice big monitor, here’s how to get the deal.

Filed under Gear and Gadgets 1 Comment »

Griffin isn’t the only company making pointless Apple accessories. Here’s a great one, the NuClear mini:

This clear acrylic base will make your new mini a hit! It lifts the mini 1.5 inches off your desktop and makes it more stable on your desktop.

Since the “more stable” comment makes zero sense, you’re paying $25 for a hunk of iMac-shaped plastic, to make your iMac mini 1.5 inches taller. But why stop at only one? For only $200, you can raise the iMac ONE ENTIRE FOOT off of your desk. How cool would that be?!

Filed under Gear and Gadgets 2 Comments »

I’ve been pondering the best way to brainstorm software design ideas while lounging on my couch and my mind keeps returning to the same thing: Few tools are as ideal for spontaneous brainstorming as the ubiquitous dry-erase whiteboard. It takes no time to set up, there is no interface to learn, you can easily designate different aspects of the project via different colors, and you can make modifications simply by wiping the problematic sections away with your finger.

The problem with whiteboards is that A.) They’re usually big and stuck to a wall, and B.) There’s no way to permanently record the data drawn upon them.

Of course, there ARE small whiteboards available (though I’ve yet to see one designed for handheld use) and there are, in fact, solutions to problem B out there, but I don’t think anyone has yet come up with the following:

Digital Whiteboard Tablet

The Digital Whiteboard Tablet is a lightweight notebook-sized device with a glass screen (backed with a white surface for readability) which is simply drawn upon using standard dry-erase markers (the storage of which may be integrated into the device). When the user wants to store the image permanently, he or she presses a single button which scans the image and stores it digitally via an integrated memory card. The user can then erase the image and begin the next. When complete, the user can transfer the images for future use by downloading them from the memory card to their PC.

Potential additional features: Send drawings by e-mail or WiFi, saving of images as digital ink.

This is one of those ideas that inevitably leads to comments like “Why don’t you just use XYZ?” Yes, there are many solutions that come close to this one, but none yet that allow you to semi-mindlessly brainstorm ideas using a physical medium, while lounging on your couch, and permanently commiting them to storage with one button click. A Tablet PC perhaps comes close but it must frequently be charged, requires a distracting software UI, and costs well over $1000. The Digital Whiteboard Tablet could easily be sold for under $200.

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With the launch of the Tiger OS X, Apple introduced Spotlight, a radical search engine designed for quickly finding things on your desktop.

I had no idea that Microsoft already has a nearly identical technology available free for Windows, called Windows Desktop Search.

Why didn’t I know this? Because it’s bundled with “MSN Search Toolbar“. I don’t really care for MSN, nor do I care for “toolbars”, especially since I generally use Mozilla, and methinks MSN Search Toolbar would not be designed for Mozilla. Besides, browser toolbars are usually just a attempt to get lazy people locked into a particular company’s web properties.

I saw Windows Desktop Search demonstrated on a co-worker’s computer, and I was blown away. It sits in your Windows taskbar and does an incremental search of your system as you type, just like Spotlight. It’s very sweet.

But bundling it with a stupid browser toolbar? That’s like bundling a free car with a set of steak knives. A great deal, but really dumb marketing.

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I’m somewhat infamous (amongst friends) for coming up with clever ideas, then never getting around to implementing them. So I’ve decided that, from now on, whenever I get one of these ideas that I know I’ll never get around to doing, I’ll just give them away for whoever cares to run with them.

I actually had the idea for something very much like BitTorrent, almost 5 years ago (I called it CacheWave) but, unfortunately, I can’t prove it. I’m not about to start filing predatory patents, I just want bragging rights for thinking of things first. To rectify this problem, I’m starting a new feature called Steal My Idea™. At least this way, I can get some small credit for having proof that I came up with an idea before someone else implemented it - whether or not they got the idea from me.

Anyway, here’s idea #1 for you to steal:

Premium Tech Support Club

For a monthly fee, you can join a club which is affiliated with many major technology companies (Dell, Microsoft, Comcast, etc.) Membership in this club entitles you to guaranteed expert tech support via a dedicated members’-only toll-free phone number. This means NO touch-tone menu system and NO offshore call centers. You always get to talk to an actual knowledgable engineer NOT working from a script.

How do I make money?

You get a portion of the monthly fees. For the most part, you only need to maintain a database, so the overhead is minimal.

How do I get customers?

Since, a.) Your overhead is so low, and b.) Your business is worthless without a large number of participating corporations, you can afford to pay a large percentage of the monthly fees to whichever corporation referred the user to join. Therefore, it behooves the participating corporations to find customers for you.

Potential problems?

Of course, by participating in this program, companies are, in a sense, saying that their standard tech support sucks. This can easily be worked around via clever wording and marketing. Companies have been getting people to pay for things that should be free for years now. It’s not marketing rocket-science. One possible angle is to keep the existence of this club semi-secret, thereby adding a sense of prestige to club membership (enabling higher fees) at the expense of a larger user-base.

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Xplane is a company that’s really good at taking incredibly complex enterprise-class whoosie-ma-whatsit processes and boiling them down into really cool cartoon-style “visual stories”.

If your company is in the business of selling complicated enterprise-class whoosie-ma-whatsit solutions, then perhaps you should give them a call.

This is a completely unsolicited plug. I just really hate wading through gobs of whitepapers, FAQ’s and such, simply trying to figure out what a company does. But I do like cartoons. So, I generally consider their work a Good Thing. The buyer must beware, however: If a picture is worth a thousand words, one can easily hide 10,000 words of B.S. in a diagram like this. Of course, depending on the quality of the solution you’re trying to sell, perhaps that’s your goal.

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Google, the search engine that became a worldwide powerhouse by providing super-fast, streamlined, no-frills search when all the other search companies wasted their time building portals is, apparently…

(wait for it)

…building a portal.

Now, Google is jam-packed with absolutely brilliant people, but their “throw a bunch of shit at a wall and see what sticks” attitude as of late kind of worries me, from a business standpoint.

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Sorry for the weird title, but I wanted something short and keyword-heavy to help people find this information via Google search.

Anyway, I’m currently working on sharpening my .NET skills and recently began a very project that starts with a very simple login page. Two fields (name and password) and a “Submit” button. Much to my surprise, having made a bazillion pages like this with ColdFusion and PHP, hitting Enter on the .NET version does NOT submit the form. Apparently, this is a “feature” of the way ASP.NET pages work. And it’s one of those things that, from an engineering standpoint, makes perfect sense, though usability-wise is completely unacceptable.

Anyway, if you’re reading this, you probably got here via a Google search and know exactly what I’m talking about (unless you’re just a friend who reads everything I post, in which case I apologize for the geekery), so here’s a solution that someone - Darrell Norton - came up with.

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Now, Griffin Technology makes some cool things, but I sometimes get the sense that they make stuff just because they can. For example, Apple designs a wireless router that is small enough to simply plug directly into a wall and leave out of sight, and Griffin invents a stand to help put it on your desk. Hmm…

Also reference “iBeams” Yeah.

And, unless I’m missing something, the “BlueTrip” seems pretty silly, too. Now, normally, I’m a big fan of Bluetooth stuff (conceptually, at least - implementations often leave something to be desired) . But the whole point of Bluetooth is to leverage existing Bluetooth-enabled devices to interact to your device.

With the BlueTrip, you get a BlueTooth thingy for your iPod that only interacts with the Bluetooth thingy in the BlueTrip receiver. And the Bluetooth thingy in the BlueTrip receiver only interacts with the Bluetooth thingy that they give you to plug into your iPod. This could quite easily be accomplished with regular-ol’ RF technology, but that wouldn’t be buzzword-compliant, would it?

Filed under Gear and Gadgets 2 Comments »

Those Blogger folks are pretty clever. They’ve created the world’s easiest photo blog* setup process. If you have a camera phone, try it out right now. It’s free, nothing to lose, yadda yadda.

Here’s how it works:

• Take a photo
• Email it to go@blogger.com
• You now have a photo blog. **

Try it! Now! It’s cool! Here’s my new Photo Blog***

* Sorry, but I can’t bring myself to use the term “Moblog”. My brain can’t help but parse it as “Mob Log”, which would be something different entirely.

** OK, there are a couple more steps involved to “claim” the blog, but that’s just a minor technicality, and I don’t want to spoil the brilliant simplicity of the system by boring you with details.

*** This is just for demonstration purposes, I’ll probably keep using Flickr for my photo blogging needs, for various reasons. But this is still cool!

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With the release of iTunes 4.8, Apple has quietly started selling video content - so far only as “bonuses” with album purchases.

For example, if you buy the new Gorillaz single, you get 4 videos with it for free. Since I’m a Gorillaz fan anyway, I figured it was worth the 99 cents to check it out. If you have the Gorillaz’ “Celebrity Take-Down” DVD, you’ll recognize these videos as small bits from that DVD.

You can choose to view iTunes videos within the “Album Art” window, as a pop-up window, or full-screen. Note the new option for this under the “Advanced” tab in Preferences.

You can also add arbitrary QuickTime videos into your iTunes library. There’s no special way (that I can find) to browse only videos. However, a Smart Playlist with “QuickTime” in the “Kind” field can easily solve that.

As a classic case of “bug or feature?”, when you have a video playing in a pop-up window, and you poke around elsewhere within iTunes, so that the video is no longer selected, the video simply disappears, though the audio keeps playing. Bug or feature? You decide.

There is also at least one iTMS album which gives you a free PDF brochure on purchase (Jack Johnson’s In Between Dreams). I’m not sure quite how this is implemented, as I don’t want to buy the album to find out.

In any case, with these new features, it seems Apple is trying to capture a new kind of reluctant “switcher”, the folks (myself included) who are still reluctant to buy entire albums online, when it’s not much more expensive to get a physical copy with nicely printed liner notes and possibly other included goodies. A stack of Sharpie-markered CD-R’s is simply not the same a display rack of “real” CD’s. I’m sorry, maybe I’m just old-fashioned.

Almost all of my iTunes purchases fit the following criteron: a song that I really like, on an album I otherwise have no interest in. Example: Steriogram’s “Walkie Talkie Man” - Great song, iffy album.

Will extra digital goodies with online album purchases change my reluctance to abandon physical “album” artifacts? We’ll see. But it looks like Apple is making a smart, low-risk attempt at making that happen.

Filed under General Computing 1 Comment »

This is just one of those gotta-have freebie software products that fills a gaping hole in Windows’ functionality and does it very well. PrimoPDF allows you to “print” anything printable to a PDF file, much like Mac OS X allows you to do natively. Download it now.

Filed under General Computing 4 Comments »