January 2008 Archives

I'm a big Pandora fan. Ad-free music streaming at my computer with songs that match my tastes really well. They introduced me to a number of cool songs, like Party's Over by Son of Dork. I liked it so much I wanted to pay for it (shocking in this day and age, I know).

So I clicked the Buy from Amazon button in Pandora. Amazon wants to sell me the album--a UK import--for $37.49. F that noise. I go to the Amazon MP3 store (better than iTunes. Cheaper and no DRM). The song isn't available there. I checked iTunes and it is there. But now that I've tasted the sweet nectar of DRM-free downloads, I just can't pay for that crap anymore.

So here's my idea. Every musical artist, song, movie etc. should have a "tip jar" on the web somewhere. A place I can go and say, "Hey, I enjoyed your content so much, I want to give you a little something to show my appreciation." The nice thing is that I know 98% of the money goes directly to the artist. No middlemen taking out their "cut" leaving mere pennies on the dollar for the artist.

Is any mainstream artist out there doing this?

Update (6/30/08): TipJoy is doing a tipping mechanism for any page on the web. It's a clever system, with extremely low barrier to entry. I might just start using them...

This entry was composed, edited (probably poorly), published and viewed entirely on my Eee PC. That's not that remarkable if you compare an Eee PC to an ordinary laptop, but it is somewhat interesting if you compare it to a hand-held or pocket computer. Tiny computer bloggers always seem to be making a big deal out of using pocket devices to post weblog entries. I understand this to some extent, as when I live on the technical edge I want to believe that I'm blazing a new path that others might want to follow. But none of this applies to the Eee PC -- it's just a small, workable, no frills laptop computer. Blogging on it is no big deal.

Though it may not be perfect, the Eee PC succeeds because it strips computing to its bare essence. It is just enough computer to type comfortably and see the results on a screen. It can browse the web and handle email competently, if not luxuriously. It can play music and movies and reasonably handle all of the usual mundane personal computing tasks. It's cheap and easy to hack on -- both from a software and hardware perspective. Asus even seems to be encouraging this.

The Eee PC reminds me of the old VW Beetle: cute, fits the task with minimal fuss and no flair, inexpensive, hackable, durable. Using the Eee PC for basic computing tasks (like blogging) is no more surprising that using a VW Beetle for a trip to the grocery store.

Dear Patelco, 

I am not a graphic designer. But as an interaction designer, it is extremely valuable if I can at least envision a visual direction for my designs and rough them out so the whole design holds together cohesively in the final product. Plus at my new job as the solo designer, we don't always have the time or resources to hire a graphic designer.

So I started to read up on graphic design, teaching myself the principles. I checked out a lot of books from the library, and bought others. And the best overall book: The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams. There are 4 basic principles: Contrast, Alignment, Repetition and Proximity. Learn theses basics and apply them to your designs, and you'll do at least as well as me :-)

Here's an example of a web application I designed entirely by myself; it's a Facebook app called Where I Hang. What do you think? Leave me a comment!

Poaching is one of the big factors in driving large animals—rhinos, tigers, elephants—toward extinction. The people who poach these animals are really just interested in the market value of their parts: rhino horns, tiger penises, and elephant tusks. From basic supply & demand economics, if one could flood the market with these items, their value would tank it would remove the economic incentive for people to poach.

So what we should be doing is perfecting the ability to grow these items in the lab. Scientists already are working on techniques to grow replacement organs and edible meat in the lab. I don't think it would be that big of a stretch to apply these techniques to help the plight of endangered species.

The question isn't whether it can be done. It is, "Who will undertake this important work?".

First a confession (if it's not already obvious): I like the idea of mobile computing way to much to be objective in thinking about all these crazy mobile gadgets. The six (five?) of you reading the this are all probably saying "duh!" right now, but anyway...

A while back I mentioned that I was trying to use a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet as something of a laptop replacement. My laptop needs are modest, as I have a computer at work and at home, and the MacBook I had was overkill. In a fit of insanity, I gave the MacBook away, and switched to the Nokia. I'll write more about life with the Nokia later, but that lifestyle change just didn't work for me.

So next in the never ending line of geek-products is an Asus Eee PC. This time I think we have a winner. The Eee PC isn't perfect, but it's amazingly inexpensive and gets nearly all of the trade-offs right. The keyboard is as small as it can be while still being touch-type friendly. The screen is as small as it can be while still being readable and useful for web pages. The CPU is as low-power as it can be while still being capable enough for all general-purpose tasks. And so on -- you get the idea.

You can't put the computer in any reasonable pocket -- but honestly I wasn't carrying the N800 around with me either. When I want to have something more than a phone with me, the Eee is just the right size. At $350 (for the model I have -- some are even cheaper) the Eee PC is a great deal.

There are a few problems with this first-generation product. I would make the trackpad larger, and less sunk into the case. I also think the quality of the keyboard could be greatly improved without effecting size and weight. (As an aside, I don't understand how a computer maker can spend the time to make a great machine then cripple it with junk keyboards and trackpads. The Dell M1330 has this problem -- it's a great computer in almost every way, but with a squishy keyboard and a tiny, shitty trackpad. These are two of the the three components that people use 100% of the time when at the computer -- they should be as high quality as possible). (Grrr!).

Back to the Eee PC. The microphone quality and placement are also crappy, though the speakers are fine. Finally, the trackpad buttons are poorly designed -- they take too much force to click. Then of course there are a bunch of improvements that *would* increase the cost -- such as a larger screen or integrated Bluetooth. I would certainly pay more for those, but I understand keeping the costs down.

All things considered, the Eee PC is very well done, and I enjoy using it.

I've been interesting in spam ever since my days working on Claris Emailer and thinking about ways to filter out spam messages. They started off pretty straight-forward, then they started to appear as if they came from you or people you might know, they started putting random expository text in the body to get around keyword filters, and they even used images with text to prevent text parsing altogether.

Today I got a clever one I hadn't seen before. It was clearly a spam message, but it has a "button bar" looking thing at the top that had a button labeled "spam". Viewing the source of the message confirmed that the link in the button was the same as the call-to-action link in the body of the message. Tricky.

Really funny series of videos ostensibly about a guy demoing Photoshop features, but with a really funny subtext. I love the details, like the filenames and the other images he has in his library. The first one is the best:



Go here for all of them.

Oh, and check out his eBay auction that he posted in video #4.

The Microsoft hardware group (which makes mice and keyboards) has been supporting the Mac for years. And now they're finally marketing to that audience.

Check out the packaging for the exact same mouse, the first for the PC market and the second for Mac. They certainly nailed the elegant, minimal feel that Apple has. But my question is, why don't they apply these same design principles to the PC packaging? Do PC consumers really want a massively cluttered packaging experience?

Look, I know the reality. Dennis Kucinich likely isn't electable, even if he got the nomination (which he won't). But I like him better than the other Democratic candidates, and that's why I'll be voting for him in the primary. But I didn't contribute to his campaign, despite the fact that I wanted to.

Dennis' web site has some really horrible graphic design going on. His logo has 3 different font faces in it. A transparent background on the icon rather than white. Bad alignment. It's not a total disaster, but it's clearly an amateur job.

So I wrote to him and politely suggested some changes he could make to his logo to make it look better—more professional. I even included some mock-ups I created that I thought were better, including the one attached to this post. His response? Silence. I even resent a few weeks later as a follow up. Still no response.

Now I didn't really expect him to swap out his logo with mine. But I did expect some sort of positive reply. After all, here is a passionate supporter who has an opinion about helping the campaign. Even if it's a bad idea, you send back a thank you note. With a campaign like Dennis', the only hope is to really engage the base, suck the wavering into the base, and get them to convert others.

This could have been a very different post, about how Dennis is the only candidate you should consider, and why you and all of the people you know need to work to get him elected. But for the cost of not even responding to my suggestion, they lost my donation, and they lost my verbal support.

I'm a big fan of Hat Tamales, the chewy cinnamon candy. They've got a great consistency, firm outer shell that gives way to chewy goodness as you eat it. Sweet and slightly spicy flavor. Appealing shape.

But my favorite thing about eating them is the fun experience of occasionally getting a really spicy one. It seems that maybe 1 out of 20 of the candies is extra spicy. So you're going along, happily eating and you get to one that—wow!—really makes your eyes water. Not in a bad, spit-it-out way, but in a hey-this-is-interesting way. That sort of unpredictability sets it apart from other candies and makes the experience remarkable. It's the main reason I keep choosing them over the myriad of alternatives in the candy aisle.

In my current role as all-around designer, I've had to ramp up quickly on basic graphic design skills. One of my favorite tricks for creating visually pleasing designs is by using the golden ratio (phi) for proportions within my designs. These proportions are all around us in nature, so they appear naturally pleasing to the eye.

I created this simple Excel spreadsheet (phi.xls) for generating multiples of a given number after I got sick of doing it manually in the calculator. I hope you find it useful. Let me know in the comments if you like it.

Jeff Hawkins offered up a fascinating model of intelligence at this TED talk.

Is there a really good use case for the Caps Lock key? Was there ever a good reason to have it on a computer keyboard? The only use case I can think of is when using a typewriter and wanting to have titles or section headers appear in a different “typeface”, so you use ALL CAPS to poorly emulate true small caps. So really it's a vestige left over from a long-obsolete technology.

So what can you do about it? Well, turn it off for starters. You can find several ways to disable the caps lock key out there. My preference is by using AutoHotKey. I use this for other keyboard re-mapping functions, so adding another line to my script is easy. Here's the code:

*CapsLock::SetCapslockState AlwaysOff

Translated into English: “whenever I press the Caps Lock key, regardless of if any modifier keys are held down, turn off Caps Lock”.

Another reason to not disable the key entirely at the system level is because you can use this key for fun and profit—or as another useful modifier key. Stay tuned for the post on how to do that.

I took a (virtual) look at the new MacBook Air today. It's very, very thin, and light and beautiful to look at. But it has no replaceable battery and no Ethernet port and it uses a slow 1.8" 80 GB hard drive. (That is, unless you want to pay $1000 more for a 65 GB solid-state disk). Plus it's expensive.

Yes, yes I know that Apple was among the first to drop legacy serial, etc. ports in favor of USB, and among the first to recognize the need for built-in WiFi. And Apple was among the first to realize that consumers value design in the products they buy.  But who will but the MacBook Air? There's always the people "working on their novels" (or business plans) at the local Starbucks, but that's a small market segment and everyone hates those people anyway. If the MacBook Air is designed as a product leader -- to attract attention to other Apple products, then you want attractive people (in some sense) buying them. Dorks at Starbucks are not trend-setters .

There is of course the international jet-setting road warrior. Those folks might buy this product. They will need to bring their DVI / VGA dongles with them to plug into the projector to give presentations. And they of course need the power adapter, so that means the system is going into a bag. The 13" screen with big keyboard form-factor is also usually too big for a coach airplane seat / tray, especially if the fat guy in front of you puts his seat back, which he always does. (Though maybe this isn't a problem for the international jet-setters, as they never fly coach).

I can't help but think that in the form vs. function debate, Apple has finally jumped the shark.

This article is a great example of the myriad of possible design solutions to any problem. These alarm clocks each show real ingenuity above and beyond the typical beep-beep/snooze.

I like the elegance of the tilt alarm clock (pictured here). And the concept of Clocky never fails to make me smile. Luckily I have a job where I don't need an alarm clock most days, so I can appreciate these as a detached observer.

Actually I do have two alarm clocks – my dogs. They wake me up every morning around 7am at prospect of breakfast.

The composers of this piece used the results of a survey to combine the collective favorite musical components into a single song. Apparently people like R&B ballad duets with sax solos.

Also check out the most unwanted song in the world. Good for a laugh. You'll not often hear an operatic soprano rap about cowboys accompanied by accordion and bagpipes.

I admit I'm not the best driver in the world. But I do have one golden rule that I try my best not to break. Don't do anything that would impede the flow of the other drivers on the road. Here are some of the things that annoy me the most:

• changing lanes and then immediately braking
• merging onto the freeway, then immediately changing lanes to the left when there are no cars in front of them
• accelerating only when I try to pass
  
• tailgating when the lane to the left is wide open
• going the same speed as the car in the lane to your right

But I do admit, I have one weakness for asshole behavior. I hate it when someone tries to pass me on the right when I"m doing everything I can to keep the flow of traffic moving. Generally it's someone just trying to move up a slot or two in the line of cars. So I'll close the gap and prevent it from happening. Like I said, it's a weakness. I'm trying to work on it. But I'm not the Dali Lama, that's for sure.

Everytime I read Best of Craigslist, I literally laugh out loud. Some classic lines from recent entries:

• On chili-flavored beer: “most girly Smirnoff Ice-drinking teenagers would cry after one sip of this.”
  
  
• On Christmas gifts I don’t need: “Wow, $10 to Barney’s New York! Now if I can just scrape together another 10 out of my own pocket, they’ll let me lie on the floor while the night janitor urinates on my chest and face.”
  
  
• On giving away a fridge: “I am not a fridge pimp. I don't have any more fridges at that price.No i don't have one in a different color to match your other appliances, No, I don't know where you can get another fridge just like this one for your friend.”

And every once in a while, a touching story that restores your faith in humanity:

Our 14 year old dog, Abbey, died last month. The day after she died, my 4 year old daughter Meredith was crying and talking about how much she missed Abbey. She asked if we could write a letter to God so that when Abbey got to heaven, God would recognize her…

Yesterday, there was a package wrapped in gold paper on our front porch addressed, 'To Meredith' in an unfamiliar hand. Meredith opened it. Inside was a book by Mr. Rogers called, 'When a Pet Dies.' Taped to the inside front cover was the letter we had written to God in its opened envelope. On the opposite page was the picture of Abbey & Meredith and this note:

Dear Meredith,

Abbey arrived safely in heaven. Having the picture was a big help. I recognized Abbey right away. Abbey isn't sick anymore.

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/tus/487665904.html

There are a lot of TED Talk videos.  Some are awesome, others a bit flat.  As I slowly work through them I will post those which I found especially thought-provoking and worthwhile.

A Soviet patent examiner in the 1960s studied over 200,000 patents and distilled them into 40 high-level principles – the TRIZ 40. There are a lot of them that are specific to physical devices (of course, this was 50 years ago well before the digital age). But they are still interesting to read.

The design of the web site is pretty appalling, but it's the content you're after. I found turning off some of the CSS in Firebug really helped with the readability.

Here's an example:

5. Merging
Bring closer together (or merge) identical or similar objects, assemble identical or similar parts to perform parallel operations.

• Personal computers in a network
• Thousands of microprocessors in a parallel processor computer
• Vanes in a ventilation system
• Electronic chips mounted on both sides of a circuit board or subassembly

Make operations contiguous or parallel; bring them together in time.

• Link slats together in Venetian or vertical blinds.
• Medical diagnostic instruments that analyze multiple blood parameters simultaneously
• Mulching lawnmower

I created a new entry for today (following my "one entry per day" goal), went to upload a picture for it and found out that "a picture with that name already exists." Turns out I already wrote an entry on this topic (Seeqpod). I'm getting old and senile. But hey, it gave me a story and a blog entry :-)

If you're looking for a healthy and tasty spread, then look no further than Garlic Zing. It goes great on bread or toast, or even as a spread in sandwiches (a healthier replacement for mayo). Availability is spotty, so you'd best call one of their retailers to make sure they have it before making the trip out to get it.

Despite what the RIAA (and soon the MPAA) would like to believe, you can’t stuff the jinni back in the bottle. The waypeople consume music—especially the Gen Y teens and 20-somethings—isn't FM radio and LP albums anymore. The stats are telling: overall album sales were down 15% in 2007 compared to 2006, whereas digital music sales was up 45%. A music industry lawyer said, “We've lost a whole generation of kids who grew up downloading free music from the web and cannot fathom paying for it.”

That's why it’s refreshing to see a musician like Jonathan Coulton, a musician who’s really embracing the new state of affairs. He self-publishes his own music and has a bunch of tracks on his site available for free. All of his songs are available for download for $1 each, albums for $10, and his whole catalog for $70. Or you can go to SongSlide and name your price – crazy! Plus they come in high–bit-rate copy-protection–free formats, or you can even get them in FLAC if you're that hardcore.

But what I like is that he pragmatically has a donation section of his site where you can “donate” if you like (or stole) his music. Or for a bit more levity, buy a icon plus a custom message that shows up on the site. He states “please remember I do make a living this way, so you like what you hear I’d certainly appreciate you throwing a little payment or donation my way.” I've always thought that bands should have some sort of tip jar online. I personally feel a lot better about paying a few bucks to a musician knowing that he's going to get all of the revenue, rather than buying a copy of the album used from Amazon Marketplace where no money flows back to the artist at all.

Plus, he's actually pretty good. Definitely above average songwriting skills and solid musicianship. Check out Chiron Beta Prime for a fun tongue-in-cheek holiday song. And the Flickr video is well worth watching.

A common meme in society is that traumatic events cause people to radically change their habits. People who suffer massive heart attacks give up smoking and drinking, people in car collisions drive more defensively, and those who have near-death experiences give greater priority to relationships with loved ones.

Since these traumatic events cause positive changes in people's lives, it would seem that the more people who went through them, the better off we would be. Of course it wouldn't be very ethical to put people through actual trauma, but we could simulate the trauma without the actual risk using a virtual environment.

It would also be tricky to require someone to subject them self to this. But in the case of getting a driver's license or as a sentence for reckless driving, we could certainly require it. There could even be incentives from health insurance companies or the government for people who smoke or have bad diets to go through this to encourage them to live a healthier life.

Alliteration? Always appropriate. Anyway…

One task I undertook over the holiday break was to organize my music files and then set up an automated backup process. Wow was this annoying. Ripped music defaults to filename of the form # - Artist - Song, whereas I wanted my files of the form Song - Artist. Since I store music by artist, the artist name is secondary information. And the whole concept of track number is an artifact of linear media. I operate on shuffle 100% of the time.

I did find a great file renaming tool to use, but even with this help, it was a massive time sink. What I really wanted is a tool that would pull the data out of the ID3 tag and auto-generate the filename in the format I want it. It would give me a reasonable UI for dealing with missing meta-data, or conflicting filenames. But of course those are the exception. The whole process shouldn't take more than an hour, instead of the multi-day fiasco it was for me.

There's probably a tool out there that does what I want but I don't know of it. If you do, please tell me in the comments.

I never understood why we—and by “we” I mean “society”—celebrates arbitrary milestones like the first of the year (today), or even the round number anniversaries like 10 and 25. I suppose it's a forcing function. It's good to have a forcing function that makes you stop and reflect on the past, and these are like default milestones that you can adopt.

But being the contrarian thinker I am, how about reflecting and celebrating using more practical choices rather than round numbers? I think the winter solstice is a much better date to reflect on the old year and celebrate the new, as  the days stop getting shorter and start getting longer. In a brilliant marketing move, the early Christian church placed Christmas so close to the solstice to entice converts without requiring that they give up their current winter celebrations.

As for resolutions to be a better person, another New Year’s tradition, now is always the best time to take that on. Don’t wait for some arbitrary date to come by. If you want to eat healthier, or get in shape, or work on a financial plan, or be a nicer person – start now. And the time to reflect should be at least 4–7× per year. Waiting a year to reflect on how you’re doing is simply too long of a cycle.