Roundtuit

I’m going a bit crazy with the Facebook apps this week. I think the best ones are those that allow you to share your current environment: iLike shares your recent playlist from iTunes, and there are those that share your blogs, del.icio.us tagged items, GoogleReader shared items, etc.

But what about an app that makes a thumbnail from your current wallpaper, and shows it on Facebook? I have a huge collection of wallpapers that I randomly rotate with WallpaperChanger. Many of them give me giggles, like that above.

And sharing giggles is the core activity of life, isn’t it?

Contributed by Rob Smith

So, I took the plunge, and got myself an iPod. Two comments for those consider it:
1) The interface is the value added everyone says it is, and
2) Get yourself some InivisibleShield. It’s awesome. Why the heck doesn’t it just come with the iPod (whose only design flaw seems to be how easily it scratches)?

They were out of everything except the 160Gb, so now I’ve put on all my music, photos, podcasts, and recently recorded TV. And I’ve still got tons of room! What else needs to be there…?

So, back on that interface again: Coverflow is one of the best things about it. Being able to browse through the cover art just makes it more like the old days, where that art was a part of the musical experience.

But the part of that experience that is missing are liner notes. I know I’m not the first person to comment on this, but this is a roundtuit: how hard could it be to write a downloadable liner notes system that works with the iPod!!

Contributed by Rob Smith

Tagging content on the web is all the rage, and with good reason. But as I gather tags over the years, I find that errors in my tagging habits have accumulated.

Someone should build a tag cleaner (for instance, for use with del.icio.us)!

Some “cleanings” should be obvious: things like;
- eliminating plurals (or making certain singulars all plural, where the plural tag also exists)
- changing British tag spellings to US, or vice versa
- bulk substituting synonyms to the most-used in the system

But you could also do fancier semantic things, like looking for pairs of tags that can be substituted for a single tag.

At any rate, it’s something that is really needed!

Contributed by Rob Smith

Shared the Roll Your Own A9 item with the good folks at MozzillaZine forum, and they immediately recommended the fantastic Firefox Search Sidebar extension. Gotta say: everyone should install this. It’s essential!

I’m a huge fan of del.icio.us, the community tagging site. And I really recommend that those who also use Firefox try this advanced add-on from the folks at del.icio.us. This isn’t the standard del.icio.us add-on, but a complete replacement for the bookmark functionality in Firefox. I now have a bunch of special tags that I keep on my toolbar, and I couldn’t be happier with the way it all works.

However, there’s one thing I’d like: the ability to pull up a dialog that gives me the complete list of open tabs, from which I can select several, and tag them simultaneously with the same set of tags.

And maybe I could additionally mark the set of tags as a “bundle” (a group of tags that appear together in lists on your del.icio.us pages). In fact, that functionality should probably exist in the tool, regardless of the multi-tab-thing I’m suggesting here.

Contributed by Rob Smith

Gizmodo is reporting this product, which clearly makes “Ambilight for All” into a Been Done.

Did they get the idea here at Roundtuit? Guess we’ll never know!

Here’s another DIY version.

I was lucky enough to go through the recent liquid terrorist Heathrow Hell ! Not only was the total travel time increased from 8 to 16 hours, I had no precious laptop on board. I was forced to read the airline magazine, and watch Mission Impossible III, twice. The humanity!

And now there are banned laptops. Given the intrinsic power density of batteries (sure to only increase), I don’t really find this surprising.

I figure the next step will be stripping down and boarding in a white paper boiler suit. I don’t really mind.

But it does open the market up for a seatback PC, possibly with a USB port for a (FAA approved) personal computing configuration. Or perhaps we’ll all be using web apps, so all we’ll need is an airbourne internet connection.

Just an idea. It may be a been-done, but I’m not sure this patent ties up all the options. It seems to me all the real innovation is in the OS, office, and personalization.

Contributed by Rob Smith.

There are several kids in my life who have their own computers. They
are not sophisticated computer users: they simply do not understand
that they should not open random email files, pay attention to virus
warnings, firewall warnings, and the like; and they love to fill
every byte of drive space with music and crap. They need an OS that
takes care of the important things for them.

Their computers are antique hand-me-downs. Their main software use
includes MSN Chat, email, web browsing, file sharing, media playback,
and basic wordprocessing. The OS and software suites they currently
use are resource hogs, which means their computers are slow,
unstable, and continually problematic.

I’d love to see someone release a Un*x-based OS package that is
simple to install, has a UI designed to provide one-click access to
their primary software, is secure by default, is dead-easy to update,
sets up a drive quota such that the OS is guaranteed enough space for
its temporary files et al, yadda, yadda. It should install a default
application suite that is suitable for kids; the wordprocessing suite
could well be a simplified OpenOffice. And, of course, it should
have a UI that is simple to modify with custom icons and such; that
may end up being the big attractor over, say, WIndows.

And, heck, if it’s Un*x-based, it would be very easy to have a
parental admin account, parent-controlled IP-blocking and spam
control, and a reporting/logging system so that one can be kept aware
of what the children are viewing on the web. If one’s kid is viewing
a lot of man-on-goat porn, one may wish to know about it, so as to
nip that problem in the bud. If there’s one fault with the internet,
it’s that rare perversions can be presented as perfectly common
behaviour.

Contributed by David Priest
(sorry for the delayed post, David!)

On my personal blog, I’ve noted how A9 screwed its users by switching from Google to Windows Live, without any notice, while providing no alternative way of getting to Google content, after having made so much noise about A9’s ability to integrate any kind of search engine as a new column.

So screw em. The only really cool thing about A9 is that you can search multiple sites simultaneously, or open a new search site as an extra column with a single click.

But you could clearly do all this with Firefox and tabs. You can open groups of Firefox tabs simultaneously, and close them this way and that. And you can add just about every search engine on Earth to good old Firefox.

So, all that’s needed is an extension, such that you can type in a search term, and automatically get tabs opened in parallel, with the results of different search engines in each tab. Then if you had a check box interface (possibly in a sidebar) to select and unselect engines (thus opening or closing the associated tabs) you’ve got everything A9 offers, in your own custom configuration.

Contributed by Rob Smith

A quick one today: Google Maps: you can search for things near a location. And you can search for routes between two locations. But what I’d like to do is search from things near the route! So, if I want to find hotels, or gas stations, or world’s largest balls of string that are within x-distance of your route, you just do a search.

Sounds like an easy and perfect mashup of gmaps with itself, to me.

Contributed by Rob Smith.