monkinetic weblog | redmonk.net

I’ve talked a good bit about TiVo on this site, and on my early forays into listening to podcasts on my TiVo by way of the TiVo Desktop software (most recent tivo+podcasting post here ).

Recently, TiVo added podcasting support to it’s software. This is a great step, though it’s not perfect by any stretch. From my first tivocasting post:

I’d love to be able to setup a WishList that automatically downloads podcasts that match my keyword, participant, or producer search.

TiVo is going to need to partner with someone (a Technorati or similar) in order to accomplish this level of integration, but until they do I think they’re going to miss out on the kind of user interaction that their customers have come to expect.

My friend Bill has been sitting on a secret project at his work for a year or so now. I knew he was hyper-excited about it, but the little scamp wouldn’t give me a clue about it. Eventually he clued me in that it had to do with blogging, and only recently he gave me some access to the system with some dire grumbling that I keep my big yap shut.

Today he pointed me to their first public product blog, and said I could post about it. Weee! Check out the first Quick Blog at http://www.onlinequickblog.com/.

Bill works for Go Daddy up in Scottsdale, AZ, and is on the Quick Blog team there. He wrote a lot of the specs and was the first developer working on it. The tool looks really good, supports all the usual features, and is free (with ads) to current customers who have domains with Go Daddy. There is also a cheap ($2.95/mo) option (for anyone!) that gives you multiple blogs, multiple authors, and no ads.

Update: The BlogHerald picked up the story.

Camino is a web borwser for the Mac that wraps a native OS X interface around the popular Gecko rendering engine. It’s fast, and renders 99.8% of sites exactly like Firefox. After 1.0 came out, Idecide to try it out as my main web browser.

End result? I liked the interface a lot, but two things brought me back to Firefox:

• Find-As-You-Type (FAYT): I had grown completely dependent on this before moving to Camino as my main browser. Even after a month, I was typing to find stuff. Muscle memory is hard to change.
• Also in the muscle-memory category: Camino does not focus the address-bar when creating new tabs. My shortcut for a new Google search (a surprising percentage of my “new tab” activity) was Cmd-T-tab. I simply could not get my fingers to do Cmd-T-Cmd-Shift-F.
• Visual irritations: In the dock, I could not seem to stop clicking on that bright orange-and-blue globe. The click-area on the Camino icon seems smaller, and the blue icon blends in with about 8 other deep-sky-blue app icons.

I still detest the form elements in the Mozilla strain of Gecko. But apparently my fingers care more than my eyes do in this case.

I just received my first Moleskine notebook. After opening it, and experiencing the quality of the cover, the leaves themselves, and the binding… I may never buy another brand of journal/notebook. My weapon of choice? The Large Plain Journal: 5×8, 120 pages, no lines. As I told |Jim|:

Steve: this is serious crack for office supply / paper fiends

Afterwards, I had to have new pens for my new notebook (new wineskins, anyone?) soi I headed to Staples and came from hence bearing a 4-pack of UNI-BALL Get RT .38 Micro Points

Most awesomest poster ever (original).

(This post is the top hit on my site from Google. Funny.)

Somehow I can’t get that excited that about the iPod HiFi, when my daughter has the equivalent of an iPod > brain interface:

Auria Direct Connect

Your simple audio input connector for easy access to auxiliary microphones, FM systems, MP3 player, CD players, telecoils, and other assistive listening technology and consumer electronics.

I just upgraded this site to Wordpress 2.0.1, and my stats page at Dreamhost stopped working. This happened once before, and I had fixed it, so I had to go Googling for the answer again. Here it is for posterity:

Making stats accessible with htaccess.

I’ve also added it over at the Wordpress Codex:

Wordpress broke my site stats at Dreamhost