Are Seven

I’m a glutton. I want to take in everything at once in huge gulps. I’m not even done with one bite before I want another one.  I should stop to savor, but I just have a hard time with self-control.

I have the same problem with music.  I want to listen to everything at once, and in the days when I listened to CDs, I would listen to a minute or two of one song before that reminded me of another song that I wanted to listen to immediately.  I would listen to music for hours, but rarely, if ever, finish a full song.

Things are a little bit different now that I’m totally digital. The fact that iTunes won’t mark a song as played until it’s reached the very end of the song means that I’ll listen to a full song so that I can give it credit, which satisfies the part of me obsessed with stats.

But things are also a little different now in that I can no longer look at a few hundred CDs and decide what to listen to, and no longer have a car with 10 CDs that I never change out, meaning that it’s harder to get to know songs very well.  If I don’t like things right off the bat, I have all of my favorite music right in my iPod to listen to.  It’s too tempting to just switch something off if it doesn’t immediately impress.

I’ve turned to playlists made in iTunes to help me discover and re-discover music and to allow me to be a total glutton, to just open up my ears and let the music slide in.  Now that my library’s over 21,000 songs, I need to be reminded of what I haven’t listened to, and with the speed at which I’m adding stuff, I need something that will force me to re-listen to things; to give them a chance for a while and let them sink in.

The first playlist is a little complex, but it’s one of my favorites.  I call it Recent Radio, and it’s the substitute for listening to CDs in my car.  It takes everything from the current year, won’t play anything I’ve listened to in the last few days, makes songs move off of the list after two months, but keeps the songs that I’ve rated three songs or above in for four months (to provide a little more of that “this songs reminds me of this year” spice).  The recipe takes three different playlists, thanks to iTunes not allowing for “unless” statements in their playlists.

Playlist One: “Radio all”
Match all of the following rules:

• Year is 2008 (or whatever the current year is, obviously)
• Date Added is in the last 2 months
• Last Played is not in the last 4 days
• Rating is not 2 stars
• Rating is not 1 star (so that I can remove anything from the playlist that I don’t want to hear anymore)

Playlist #2: “Radio Select”
Match all of the following rules:

• Year is 2008
• Rating is greater than two stars
• Last Played is not in the last 4 days
• Date Added is in the last 4 months

Playlist #3: “Recent Radio” (this is the one that combines the two)
Match any of the following rules:

• Playlist is “Radio All”
• Playlist is “Radio Select”

These playlists give me a fantastic stroll through all of the music from the year, forcing me to listen to stuff that I might otherwise ignore.

But what about the thousands of other songs in my library?  There’s tons of stuff in there that I love, but my constant curiosity about new music keeps me from really listening.  For this, I recently came up with my “Random Neglected” playlist:

• Last played is not in the last 12 months
• Rating is not one star
• Rating is not two stars
• Limit to 100 items

It’s extremely simple, but even as I listen to it now, I get huge spoonfuls of songs that I haven’t listened to in at least a year.  It takes in my Never Played playlist as well, and gives me an incredible overview of my library, while not taking in some of the stuff that I’ve given more than enough attention to.

Obviously, you could change these playlists to suit your own tastes.  If you aren’t as into new music as I am, you could simply remove the “Year is 2008″ from the Radio playlists and just have a good overview of the music you’ve added in.  You could decrease the time of the neglected playlist to let a little more in.

I’m telling you this only because it’s extremely important and could well save your life one day.  I hope to God you read the whole thing.

My latest thought: Apple’s fortunes will take a dive again, just like they did in the late ’90’s.

Now, pretty much everyone who knows me knows I’m a Mac guy.  I converted back when iPods were still only available for Macs, I really love my MacBook Pro, they’ve done an amazing job with marketing and making a computer that’s a joy to use and upgrade, and I’m planning on buying an iPhone, though I’ve been increasingly hesitant about that.

I learned computers on Macs.  But I switched in the late 90’s to PCs because Macs cost 2 to 3 times as much, didn’t have as much software being made for it, and what software there was didn’t come out until well after the PC version had been released.  It was a no-brainer at the time, and it seemed that way to many people, as Apple almost went bust before the iPod and OSX were released.

A lot has changed: applications are increasingly web-based, which means it doesn’t really matter what OS you’re using, and the software and games are almost always released for both PC and Mac at the same time, which is an argument in favor of Apple being able to stay alive.

But there’s no getting around the fact that Macs, iPods and iPhones are gourmet electronics, and it’s the gourmet things that are the first to go when people need to trim their budgets. You can already get twice the system for the same amount of money (or even less) if you buy a Windows machine over a Mac.  Again, I love my Mac, but I would never recommend to anyone to buy it.  And I think that, as the economy worsens and gas prices go up, it’s going to be harder and harder for people to justify spending that kind of money.

The field is wide open for a hardware maker to compete with Apple.  They need to develop their own, free flavor of Linux that focuses on the same kind of “it just works” ease-of-use that Macs have and then make their money by selling high-quality, good-looking machines.  Do the same thing for mp3 players and phones.  Make millions.

Blogger in Draft
After saying last week that Blogger is well behind Wordpress in terms of features, Blogger goes and releases a bunch of new features for Blogger In Draft, their test version of the blogging software.  And it reminds me why I love Google.  Their products may not be perfect, but you always know that they’re working on it. It makes it a whole lot easier to be happy with the free products that they keep putting out.

I’m going to do my best impression of Paul Revere as a Tech guy here and let you know that there’s a little bit of a bug in gmail, where if you enter your reply into the text box below a message, it does “reply-all” instead of just “reply”.  So if you’ve noticed that you’ve replied-all when you didn’t mean to or are getting really inconsequential emails sent to reply-all…that’s why. It’s probably safer to actually click on the “Reply” button instead of just up and typing in the box at the bottom.

And while I’m at it, there’s a Google Calendar phishing attempt going around, too, which you can read about here. As with this and everything else, it’s always safest to enter in passwords only by typing in the address in a browser. People like Google or your bank or credit card company will NEVER write to you saying that they need you to enter in your password.

In spite of all this, I still say you’re a fool if you don’t use gmail.

I’ve been meaning to try and go back to writing about Tech, but just about every time I think of something, it seems as though it’ll take ages of considered writing to do anything, and then I don’t write. The answer to this, of course, is a weekly feature, so here it is: the launch. It’ll go on Tuesday, just because of the alliteration and all, and it’s boringly titled specificially so you know what you’re getting into.

A lot of what I’ll be writing about may be a little more tech-y than you want, but I would like to try and offer things that could be tips to those of you who don’t want to read Techcrunch or Lifehacker all the time but still want ways to improve your computery lives a little more. I’ll try to keep it clear when I’m geeking out and when I’m offering up tips, but if you have any suggestions or find any part of it especially useful, let me know.

I’ll kick things off with a little bit of a whimper, and that’s my slight change in email.  I think I’m about done with Thunderbird as an email client and am switching to the web gmail as my main mail.  Thunderbird is still a necessity for me, since it’s the easiest way to check multiple email accounts, and the only way to pull my old hotmail accounts into my gmail.  But it’s a real pain and it’s just not necessary anymore.

Of course, it’s still taking some getting used to.  I accidentally did a “reply all” to a barbecue invitation today.  You could have barbecued a few steaks on my cheeks due to my blushing when I realized my mistake.  I hate being “that guy”.

In other news, I geekily enjoyed downloading Firefox 3 today.  There’s still a few extensions that don’t work (del.icio.us? Seriously?), but it looks a lot better on my Mac.  It was definitely worth the 45 minutes I had to wait for it to download.

I would promise that Tech Tuesday will get a little better from here on out, but we all know that I can’t promise that.

When you’re on vacation, it’s hard to imagine that everyone else isn’t on vacation. Seriously, I thought on Saturday morning how great it was going to be to get up on Monday and not go into work, but then Monday morning came around and it already seemed like the standard thing to get up and then go sit on a beach, and it was hard to imagine everyone in the world wasn’t doing exactly the same thing.  Being on a beach with your brain switched off is like being a little kid again, except all you want to do is sit on the beach and read, which, as a little kid, seemed like the most boring thing in the world.  So to refine it, it’s like a kid attitude at adult speed.  It’s pretty great.

But don’t think I’m rubbing it in. One day, you can return this favor, reminding me you’re on vacation when I’m spending time in my flourescent box.  And besides, there’s ways you can still entertain yourselves even while you’re in not at the beach.  If you haven’t seen Hulu yet, you need to check it out.  It’s legal internet TV, and besides the fact that you can watch all of Arrested Development and new episodes of the The Simpsons and 30 Rock, they’re now putting entire episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on there.

And before you tell me to get off the computer and go down to the beach, look through this post and tell me it didn’t seem like I wrote it in about three minutes.  Which is exactly what happened.

Nutshell: Use MSN’s SkyDrive and/or Wordpress.com to create an inline mp3 player (like the one I have on this site) on any site or blog, even non-Wordpress.com blogs without any hosting fees.

You’ve seen the little grey music players all over the web. They’re probably the best music player out there, and you’ve coveted them, only to find after a search that you have to have hosting space for the player in order to make it work. And besides that, you need hosting space for the mp3s you’d be serving up with the player anywhere. But there you are, with zero hosting space and no desire to cough up the money to pay for some. Looks like you’re out of luck. Until now.

Yes, I finally figured out a way to host your mp3s in a free file storage so that you can link to them in this player that comes standard with a wordpress.com blog with no hosting fees.

Prerequisite: you need to have an account on MSN’s SkyDrive. It offers 5 GB of free storage space, which, for you, means 5 GB of room for your music files. That’s a lot.

Go to skydrive.live.com and sign in with your Hotmail or Live account. Create one if you don’t have one, obviously. Actually, it’d probably be smart at this point to create a separate account, just in case, but it’s probably not a big deal.

Create a new folder in the public space that will host your files.

- OR -

Select the “Music” folder that’s there by default, then select “Permissions” and change it to “Anyone on the Internet”.

That’s one of the steps here that you only have to do once. You’re going to add your music files that you’ll share to this folder, so you need to make sure that the whole internet can access it, see. Then, to store an mp3 here and get the URL:

Upload your file into this folder

In the “Music” folder view, click on the file you want to embed so that you’re looking at the view of the file itself.

Right-click on the “Download” button at the top of the page and select “Copy the link location”. That’s your URL. I remove the “?download” from the end, but it seems to work even if you don’t.

On your Wordpress.com blog, go into the post and type:

[audio big_long_crazy_skydrive_url.mp3]

And then it appears–as if by magic!–on your blog.

But…what if you don’t have your blog in Wordpress.com?

Oh, you tricky bastard. You figured it out. If you don’t have a Wordpress blog, that means you don’t have access to that nice little audio player, huh? Well, you can get that player anyway, but it means that you have to find somewhere to host the swf file that runs the whole show, and you’re right back at square one.

Do this: go get a Wordpress.com blog. No, you’re not switching your blog’s host; you’re just going to be borrowing the swf from Wordpress. All you have to do is start one up and leave it there with the “Hello World” post. Don’t have to post, don’t have to do nuthin’.

In your blog (Blogger or wherever), fire up a new post, select the “Edit HTML” view (because you’re copying in code, and paste in this snippet of code.

<object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” data=”http://WORDPRESSBLOGNAME.wordpress.com/wp-content/plugins/audio-player/player.swf” id=”player11240701” height=”24″ width=”290″><param name=”movie” value=”http://WORDPRESSBLOGNAME.wordpress.com/wp-content/plugins/audio-player/player.swf”><param name=”FlashVars” value=”playerID=npmrvsy&soundFile=COPY_FILE_URL_HERE“><param name=”quality” value=”high”>
<param name=”menu” value=”false”><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></object>

Then you need to change a few things, listed above in bold. Change:

1. “WORDPRESSBLOGNAME” to whatever you named your Wordpress.com blog
2. id to a name that is unique. I call it player and then give it today’s date, followed by a two more digits in case I have more than one player on one day.
3. copy in the mp3’s URL where it says “COPY_FILE_URL_HERE” (remembering to leave that trailing quote mark).

Once you have your own blog name in there, the only things you have to change each time you paste in the code is the player name and the mp3 you want it to play. Again, if the id isn’t unique, it’ll get all confused if there’s more than one player on a page with the same id. So remember to change that each time.

That seems like one huge, hot mess of instructions, but it isn’t really. I just gave you more specifics than you really need. Once you get your SkyDrive account, your entire set of instructions for Wordpress is:

1. Upload the file
2. Copy the URL
3. Put it in your post

For non-Wordpress blogs, there’s a few more steps, but it’s still easy

1. Paste the object code into a blog post
2. Upload the file
3. Copy the file’s URL
4. Paste the file’s URL in the appropriate place in the code
5. Change the object code’s id to something unique

And there you have it. Well, until Wordpress and/or MSN close the loopholes.

Since I first wrote about trying to get people to use FriendFeed, I’ve been getting more than a few friends (actual, real-life friends) telling me, “I don’t get it.” And I don’t blame them. It seems alternately too simple and something that only a pile-on tech geek could love.

So let me try to make the case again in a slightly different way: a nice story. Grab your juice boxes, put your alphabet books back in their cubbies, curl up with your nap blankets and settle down for a nice reading of…Hans, stop poking the gerbil! I’ve told you a million times: It is dead. Leave it alone. Lie down quietly with the rest of the class. Okay? We all settled? Here’s the story:

“Two Guys” by A. Seven

Once upon a time there was a guy named Huckleberry but was better known to his friends as “Ted”. Ted was absolutely crazy about social media. He joined EVERYthing, and bugged his friends about it.

“Hey, friends! I’ve just joined backlesplack.com and lammylammykazatt.com! You should add me as friends and subscribe to my rss feeds on both of those!” And they would, because they’re good friends and were slightly curious about such things, but they didn’t have nearly as much time or interest as Ted, and certainly didn’t get to do it for their job like Ted did.

Then, only a few weeks later, Ted would write to his friends again and say something annoying like, “So I stopped using backlesplack.com and have switched to gozzleflack.com, which is almost identical to BackleSplack, but slightly different and MUCH better. So unsubscribe to my backlesplack.com feed and log in to the site to stop getting the spam you started getting when you signed up.”

And Ted’s friends would, but they were getting pretty fucking annoyed with it all and were just about ready to give up entirely.

Then one day, Ted wrote and said, “Hey guys! I just joined FriendFeed! You should too!” And all Ted’s friends thought, “Here we go again.” But then they realized that all FriendFeed was doing was aggregating all of Ted’s services into one place. When Ted signed up for the newest thing, they saw it on the FriendFeed page. When he stopped using a service, it just didn’t show up on the FriendFeed anymore. They could subscribe to his FriendFeed RSS feed and just get all of the various crap he subscribed to. When he added in a new service about the books he was reading or the stories he was sharing or the songs he was listening to, his friends didn’t have to do a damn thing. If he added something in that they didn’t want to see anymore, they could just hide that service from Ted’s FriendFeed, and he’d be none the wiser.

And in spite of his internet overkill, Ted had some interesting things to say and some good articles to share, and FriendFeed allowed all of his friends to leave comments on absolutely anything that came through FriendFeed; comments like “Woah!” and “Wow!” and “Hot” and “Meh.”

Ted had a friend…

…named Dynomutt. Where Dynomutt was from, the name “Dynomutt” was really common, so everyone just used his nickname: “Pete”. Pete wasn’t so into all the various internet apps. He liked Facebook and used an RSS reader, but he has better things to do with his time than try out every internet app out there. MUCH better things to do with his time. Like, say, almost anything else.

But Pete liked sharing articles with Google Reader and he used GoodReads and he enjoyed this idea of letting people know, because it created community and let his friends know some of the things he’d been reading. It caught everyone up on the smaller thing in his life. And he liked Twitter, but only wrote something on there every few days, and found the replying to other messages kind of difficult.

So not being a social media butterfly, Pete figured that FriendFeed was not for him. He only heard FriendFeed being mentioned by Ted and his other ubergeek friends, so he figured it was just for that social media elite.

But this is where Pete was all kinds of wrong. Even though Pete only used three services (Google Reader, Goodreads and Twitter), FriendFeed was perfect for him, just as much as it was for Ted, and even though he had no plans to try any other services. But he could set up a FriendFeed for those three services and forget about it. Then he could easily pipe it into his Facebook profile, where other people could see what he was reading. Plus, he found that, with FriendFeed, you could reply to Twitter messages much more easily, and that you could reply directly to older Twitter messages.

Pete and Ted talked about FriendFeed every now and then, but mostly, they talked about other stuff and let FriendFeed do the web work, both the light-lifting and the heavy stuff. Later on, Pete stole Ted’s girlfriend, and they didn’t talk much after that.

THE END.

Hm. That probably didn’t help at all. Maybe a list would have worked better. Oh, well. Everyone just do some quiet reading until the end of class.

The downside of social networks and media software is the weariness that comes with having so much. The weariness sneaks up on you. One second you’re enjoying one great new web software after another, and the next thing you know, you feel to-do list-like weight on your shoulders. Managing this weariness has become an essential skill for anyone who dives into the social media waters, to prevent what experts are calling “Fuck It All” syndrome.

Facebook is obviously a spot where you can feel “Fuck It All” syndrome without ever even having to leave the site. All those applications seem like fun for a while, and the next thing you know, you’re smothered and even typing in facebook.com into your browser starts to bring on the shivers similar to shell shock (apologies to all WWI veterans reading this for such a crass comparison).

There seems to be a definite dividing line of Facebook users who can’t keep up with it all, and it seems to have a lot to do with age. Only it doesn’t go the way you might think. I’ve found that the people on Facebook who find it most interesting and useful are the older ones; people who are much less likely to overload their profiles with every application they see, and more importantly, have a manageable number of friends.  They use it to keep in touch with the people who have moved away or who they just don’t see as often as they like.

On the other hand, people who got into Facebook in school are a lot more likely to be burned out.  They got into Facebook at a time in life when you added every single person you came in contact with to your friends.  Most of the recent college graduates I know have well over 200 friends and some have over 500.  And not only that, but they associate Facebook with the dumb fun college shit and start to sour on it as a whole once the notices of the zombie application turn from hilarious to annoying.  Meanwhile, the thirty-somethings are reveling in the ability to suddenly be back in constant contact with people they haven’t spoken to in decades.

The lesson to learn for anyone in the Facebook space (especially those new to it, Hans) is to not overdo it, and this goes for any social media.  It’s tempting to start a blog and post four times a day or join Twitter and tell everyone everything you’re doing, but doing a lot off the bat heightens the chances that it will start to annoy faster and shortens the time you’ll ever be interested in it.

Nutshell: Mint, an online financial management tool, is everything Quicken should be, and more…if you can get over the privacy concerns.

Last summer, in a fit of productivity, I decided to give Quicken a try to get my financial life in perspective, if not in full order. Like 95% (estimated) of all people who get Quicken, I used it for a few weeks, before the difficulty of keeping up with it became too much of a pain, and it sat unused in my applications. True, you could automatically import data from your financial institutions, but most of them charged a ridiculous monthly fee to do so. The only way I could get around it was to go in and tag each and every credit card transaction, and I don’t have that kind of time. No, wait…I have that kind of time; just not that kind of patience.

I was interested to see that people in the tech world were talking positively about Mint, an online version of Quicken. Like pretty much everyone else, my first reaction was somewhere along the lines of “no way in hell”. That was also my second through forty-fifth reactions as well. Plug in your usernames and passwords to all your financial institutions in one place? Seemed like the quick road to identity theft, and I prefer my identity to be my own and no one else’s. I’m selfish like that.

But my curiosity got the better of me (as it always does) and I went and took a look at Mint. Their privacy statements are comprehensive to say the least. They obviously realize that asking people to plug in their financial data is going to make people skittish, and they addressed that really well. Plus, I started to realize that, while Mint may compile the numbers, it’s really not that much of a leap from having any of your financial data available online. That is, if you’re worried about identity theft from online financial data, you shouldn’t be using online financial management at all: no online banking, no online access to your stocks or retirement plans, etc.

So I dove in.

I love it. What I immediately realized that Mint does that Quicken doesn’t is it just aggregates. It accesses your online accounts and starts storing the data from the day you sign up. Quicken, on the other hand, wants to access your entire financial history, which is why a lot of banks charge for the automatic download of data into Quicken. But I didn’t really care about that. Sure, it’d be nice to have my full history in the software, but I’m fine with just watching it from this day forward.

The interface of Mint is fantastic: smooth, clear graphics that make navigation a snap and comprehension a breeze (and, apparently, provoke the use of cheesy expressions like “snap” and “breeze”). You can create rules for the entries from your bank account so that when, say, “2 Amy’s - Restaurant” shows up as “Amy’s Nails - Hair and Nails”, you can rename it from there on out. You get a great pie chart showing your spending trends (big shock: I spend a lot of money going out to eat) and even a chart that shows your spending habits compared to other people in your city.

Mint makes money in a way that works out to be one of the biggest benefits of the software: companies pay to have your bills, credit cards and bank accounts compared to theirs so that, in a single click, you can see how you can switch services and save money. I even saw that I could save almost $600 a year by switching from one plan in Comcast to another. Something tells me that Comcast wouldn’t call me up to tell me that.

Now I just need to do something about all that money that eating out is costing me…

The internet’s become a noisy place, and while it was always the pinnacle of distraction, it’s gotten even more so. Every five minutes, there’s someone tugging at your sleeve asking you to friend them on some new software that seems exciting for five or ten minutes before you get distracted with your actual life.

Enter application-of-the-moment FriendFeed. It’s not a new or original idea, but it’s off to a perfect start and has nowhere to go but up. The concept is integration–something I’ve always been a huge proponent of with internet apps–and nothing but integration. It simply takes the public profiles of all the applications you’re using (or just trying out) and puts them in one place. You now have one place with one feed that takes in whatever you want it to, and just as importantly, can exclude those apps that you’ve stopped having any interest in. Should you get an itch to try something new, you just add it onto your FriendFeed and know that you don’t have to ask your friends to join that new one to see what you’re up to.

My footsie with FriendFeed started tentatively, but now I love it. In fact, I signed up to both iLike and Goodreads, knowing that the single point of FriendFeed not only makes it easier to manage, but I’m reminded of the services. You can embed the feed on any HTML page and in Facebook (where you can also have it display on your news feed, though I turned that off). It has the fantastic features of being able to comment on anything that a friend posts as well as post individual pages to FriendFeed, two features that Google Reader (among others) sorely needs.

But this is a service not worthwhile only for those of us who can’t control our application gluttony. It’s just as (if not more) useful for those who are only on a couple of the services available to plug into FriendFeed.

Wishlist for FriendFeed:

• The ability to turn off services by friend. So let’s say that you wanted to follow the Twitter and Shared Items of a friend, but not their Diggs. You could turn off just Diggs for that one person without affecting anything else by that friend or any of your other friends.
• Your own updates not coming through the Friends page and RSS feed. I’m the one sharing my stuff…why would I want it to come through my “Friends” RSS feed as well?
• Statistics. If FriendFeed could start reliably tracking and ranking articles being shared through their service, it would immediately turn it from a useful service to a marketing must.
• Exclusions. As with all the services it pulls in, FriendFeed is exciting for a while, until you’re overwhelmed with so many updates that it ceases being useful. FriendFeed needs the same ability to exclude certain services from certain friends if it gets too loud.
• Being bought. This is a fantastic service, but can you imagine how much more powerful it could be if it was automatically included in Google or Facebook? To be able to pull in everything into a single profile that you’re already connected with your friends through, not as separate applications or extensions, but as a feature of the product? That’s what the world’s looking for.

Of course, if you jump on the FriendFeed wagon: feed me, friend.