Audiobook Builder

Just want to point out a fantastic little program called Audiobook Builder. If you take a look at my reading page you will note that over half of the books that I have “read” so far this year have been in audio form. That’s mainly because I have been so busy with writing lesson plans and grading papers that I rarely have time to sit down and actually read for pleasure. Atudibook builder has been very helpful in this regard. I just take my audiobooks, rip them into the program, set the chapter marks, and hit the build button. A couple minutes later I have a nice, fully iTouch compatible, audiobook waiting for me in iTunes.

If you like audiobooks, take a look.

Mac Whine

Short and unsweet: Firefox is a memory hog and Safari doesn’t post to WordPress correctly. -otto

Macworld 2008

Yes, I am a crazy tech addict. My primary interest is Macintosh, but I do keep an eye on Windows, Linux, and tech in general. A relaxing weekend for me is putting around the house with various TWiT Podcasts playing on my computer or iPod. And this is the time of year when it gets interesting.Macworld is next week, and with it comes the return of MacBreak Weekly and This Week in Tech. *sigh* if only I were still a slack college student, able to spend the entire day reading blog updates and listening to the Podcasts as soon as they come out. Here’s hoping for some interesting announcements. 

Flock Update

Just a quick word on my use of the web browser Flock.

On my desktop computer (a 3 year old G5 iMac) I really cannot use Flock (or Firefox2, upon which it is based). The memory leak “feature” simply bogs down a machine that is, otherwise, still incredibly fast. Flock seems to have the same problem still (version 1.0.5). On that computer, I use Safari for everything except WordPress and eBay, which seem to have issued with form entries.

Here on the MacBook (about a year and an half old), I use Safari and Flock. If I’m just going to be tooling around the net, I use Safari because it is a bit snappier. If I am checking Facebook or WordPress, or just feeling like something different, I use flock.

So Safari is still my primary browser, but I do like some of flock’s features. Here are the things that would easily make me switch entirely over to Flock:

1. Less resource hungry
(This may come when Firefox 3 is finalized and Flock switches codebases if it does).

2. Support for WordPress Tags
(I like the wordpress tags, and I find it annoying that the tagging in Flock goes through another site).

3. Support for Google bookmarks.
(One thing that keeps me in Safari is that it syncs bookmarks with my iTouch. Give me Google bookmarks in Flock, and I will be happy).

4. Google live search.
(One of the best features of Safari is a plug in called Inquisitor, which makes searching for anything online amazingly fast and simple.)

With those feature requests, I don’t know if I will ever be 100% Flock… but I do have some hope. Flock is a very good browser, especially for blogging, social, and media… it just still needs a bit of work.

Playlist: “Please Play Me”

In the far back corners of many an iTunes library lurk songs to which no man has listened for months. Timid creatures, many of these tracks live in mortal fear of library purges, hard drive failures, and ravenous dust bunnies. But there is hope for these wretched solos! Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the “Please Play Me” smart playlist.

Consider:

1. Match ALL of the following conditions

2. Playcount is less than (number)
I set this to 5. You should pick some number well under the playcount of anything in your top 25, but above 3 or 4.

3. Date added is not in the last 6 months.

4. (Exclude anything you don’t like in your smart playlists. I use several fields to block podcasts and videos)

Those who would attempt this should be warned that not all long-forgotten tracks are entirely subdued. Long isolation in the far reaches of an XML database has been known to drive some tracks to unplumbed depths of madness. To avoid the abject horror, and very real danger, of having teaming masses of forgotten, starving, potentially even zombified songs throwing themselves into your playlist, you may want to limit the list as follows:

5. Live Updating!

6. Limit to 25 items selected by least recently added.

Using this formula, many a brave iTunes adventurer has rediscovered old favorites. Sure, a few have been lost, dragged kicking and screaming into the darkness by vengeful Jefferson Airplanes, to be devoured around A Perfect Circle by ravenous Living Sacrifices. But that, I am told, is the exceptioAUGHHHHHHHHH!

It Wasn’t Dead Already?

Just read at Wired that AOL has announced the end of life for Netscape.

Personally, I thought that Netscape had gone away years ago. I certainly knew of it in its heyday though. In fact, I remember when my family paid something like $30 for Netscape Navigator 4.6 Communications Suite.

Remember those days? When we actually paid for web browsers. Oh, there are still some browsers out there that cost money (although OmniWeb is the only one that I can think of, now that Opera has gone free).

Personally, Netscape 3 was my favorite. Back then it was competing against the miserably unstable Internet Explorer 2. And it was free. But then came Communicator Suite, and suddenly Netscape cost money and was loaded with extra features that did little more than slow everything down.

Of course, I cannot say anything about Netscape without mentioning that it formed the basis of the Mozilla Project which, among other things, spawned the Firefox web browser. 

Flocking

I have decided to try out Flock, a variant on Firefox that focuses on blogging and social networking.
Not sure about it yet… While I like the built-in blogging and think that the RSS support is equal to that in Safari (and far better than in Firefox), we’ll have to see if I stick with it.

Three things stand against Flock from the outset:

1. Built on Firefox.
   Now don’t get me wrong: I love Firefox. Back in the Beta and 1.5 days, Firefox was my favorite browser, mainly because it was so fast. Sadly, ever since Firefox2 came out the memory leak “feature” makes the whole browser run so darn slow and bog down the whole system after about 2 hours or when I have about a dozen tabs open.
2. Social Networking.
   Frankly, I don’t do much “social networking.” I do not like myspace at all, only use Facebook to track college friends, and don’t share photos or videos on public sites.
3. Not Safari.
   OK, this is both good and bad. I really like the speed of Safari, and with the Inquisitor
   plugin, it has the best search of all web browsers. That said, I am looking around because Safari and WordPress do not get along well.

I’ll let you know how things go.

EDIT: OK, issue number 1 found… the “tags” link to technorati, not the wordpress tagging system.