Category: Geekdom

For those who don’t know, TypePad is the new service by Six Apart, the creators of Movable Type, the software that powers this site. What is TypePad? To quote their site:

TypePad is an upcoming hosted service providing powerful tools for creating full-featured weblogs. Built in response to the needs of webloggers, online diarists and writers, TypePad harnesses the power of Six Apart’s popular Movable Type personal publishing system into a simple service, suitable for beginners and experts alike.

The features and prices have been set for the service.

What are my thoughts? I won’t comment on the business aspects of this (though I think the prices are a bit steep, but I guess you are paying for the software and support), I kind of wonder where this leaves Movable Type supporters? There are some compelling features that have yet to be smoothly integrated into the main Movable Type distribution, and I can understand their reasoning for not including them in the free product, but why not for supporters?

I have no intention on moving my blog to a server that is not under my complete control. I would pay (and have) for a “Pro” version of a product, and there have been mumbles in the MT Support Forums for some time that a Pro version of MT is coming. But when are we going to see it? I’m a Movable Type supporter, as it’s a great product, but I worry that with TypePad, Six Apart is going to be moving towards providing the best and newest features to users of their services, and rely on plug-in developers to add all the other features to the main distro. I hope that isn’t the case, but only time will tell.

Update on 8/5: MT guru Richard has a good review of TypePad, as well as links to other reviews.

Textamerica brought photoblogs to the mass-market, but Brad Brace has been doing for nearly 10 years. He has been uploading a photo to the Internet every 12 hours since December 30, 1994. The 12hr-ISBN-JPEG project is a continuous posting of “sequenced hypermodern imagery,” usually black and white photos of city life, which are simultaneously posted to FTP sites, mailing lists, and Usenet’s alt.12hr newsgroup.

I was never a Usenet junkie (beyond technical and reference material searches), but I know that Usenet has a long history that predates the Web by more than 10 years. I wish I would’ve been online and on the ‘net more then.

Thanks to waxy.org for the link.

Try Bananaslug. From their site:

BananaSlug was designed to promote serendipitous surfing: finding the unexpected in the 3,083,324,652 web pages indexed by Google. Directed Google searches return pages most relevant to your search term, based on the pages’ popularity on the Web. You may never see some of the pages way down the list that are relevant or interesting, but off the beaten path.

So we give you a little boost. We “seed” your search with another word, chosen at random, and this accidental encounter results in pages you may have overlooked. What, if anything, do all the results have in common? You tell me! We show the seed word at the end of the page, along with the number of results, and how many seed words we needed to try before we got results (it doesn’t always happen the first time!).

An interesting concept that does give some interesting results, indeed.

“BootIt NG is a partition and multi boot manager with a powerful and simple to use set of tools for partitioning, imaging, and multi-booting your computer. It combines the features of several standalone products costing hundreds of dollars more.” Yes it does! I’ve used Partition Magic for a while, and Norton’s Ghost and the fact that this does everything they both do and more, all on one floppy, is a very nice thing. Thanks to Fred Langa for the tip.

But will anybody miss Dave Winer? I don’t know if I will. I tend to agree that he has contributed greatly to the blogging and Internet world, but I also agree with other folks who think he’s an arrogant, pompous jerk who needs to quit thinking he knows everything.

Everybody seems to think that the HotBot Deskbar is the coolest thing around. But, really, why would I use it, when I can get everything that HotBot claims is wonderful by downloading Dave’s Quick Search Toolbar? The HotBot Deskbar is based on the Dave’s Quick Search code, which I’ve been using that software since version 2.0, if I remember correctly. And with Dave’s version, there isn’t a huge HotBot logo on the thing. It’d be like if I were to download Netscape 7.0 instead of Mozilla 1.4. I’d much rather use the open-source code underneath the product, not the commercial product with all of it’s added “features.”

</RANT>

Or too many monitors to go with them.

But you could only find this stuff on a Mac, that’s for sure. The MacNTouch Keyboard integrates the “functions of a large-area super touchpad, a multi-hand, gesture input command station, and a ZeroForce keyboard, all on the same smooth surface.” It’s a totally touch-type keyboard, with no moving parts, and it also includes “gestures” functionality, which provides all sorts of shortcut customization, including mouse control by way of the keyboard. It only works with Apple G4 15″ Powerbooks and runs a cool $259, but I know those Mac guys think that’s really nothing, as they pay several grand for their laptops. Hell, Ken will probably buy one, the spoiled little bitch.

If you have ever done any major Photoshop or desktop publishing work, you know that adjusting the hue, saturation and lightness (HSL) values of colors is a quick and easy way to adjust colors, especially if you’re looking to adjust a color to make it a slightly different shade. Coming, in CSS3 is a whole new color model that will allow HSL colors to be used online. Why is this nice? The advantage of HSL over the current RGB model is that it is far more intuitive: you can guess at the colors you want, and then tweak. It is also easier to create sets of matching colors (by keeping the hue the same and varying the lightness/darkness, and saturation). Here’s an article that discusses it a bit more.

Sure, why the heck not. This is one of the coolest hacks I’ve ever seen.