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Some people at MIT have been working for awhile on developing a laptop computer for use by people in the developing world. The goal is for a rugged computer designed to be used mostly outside that only costs $100 per unit to mass produce. They have also designed a custom user interface built on Python, GTK, Gecko running on Linux. The goal is to encourage interaction and communication and provide an Internet platform for people who have likely never used or perhaps even seen a computer before. It’s a noble concept and I hope they go far with it!

Pictures of the first prototype have been unveiled and it looks pretty goofy. It does make me want to touch it and play with it, though! More details and some interesting commentary at Ars Technica.

The major networks are finally doing something smart in their fight to keep their advertising properties relevant in the age of the DVR. The major television networks are experimenting with a variety of part advertising/part entertainment concepts now. These include fake commercials for the fictitious “Hanso Foundation” aired during episodes of Lost (as part of a larger “Lost Experience” concept involving non-televsion content), fake comedic PSA’s shown during episodes of The Office, and a $2 million interactive game called “Gold Rush” being put on by CBS and AOL. I don’t think I’ll personally be tempted to actually watch commercials again (the shows just really aren’t good enough to make me watch commercials!), these steps will likely work for some of the viewers out there in TV land.

This was passed to me and I think it’s pretty nifty. It’s a pair of glasses that requires piercing the bridge of your nose to wear. This exact concept has come up (somewhat jokingly) in various conversations I’ve been involved in over the years and has now become reality. To help explain away the ‘extreme’ nature of these things, the creators said, “Paying … to have someone cut your eyes and shoot a laser in them (just so you don’t have to wear glasses) seems extreme to me…”. Viva la future!

Last weekend a bunch of us were at a sweet Go-Kart racing track driving like the wind (I wasn’t one of the stronger drivers) and the radio was playing some nice modern rock through the loudspeakers to help set the mood. At one point during the radio broadcast we all heard a commercial for rental rims! I guess it’s for those people who need to impress people with the stylish rims on their Escalade only sometimes. I guess for dates or record release parties or something? Or maybe people rent an Escalade on Friday afternoon, get it fitted with rental rims, roll for the weekend and return it all on Sunday? It’s a mystery to me.

For maybe the past year or so I’ve been searching far and wide for some sort of relatively easy way to synchronize two iTunes libraries, one at home and one at the office. I could use something unixy like rsync but iTunes has to be quit to make sure the library xml file is actually updated properly. That’s doable but not ideal. There’s also iPod.iTunes which uses your iPod as a go-between medium. That looks pretty featureful and would probably do the job if not for the fact that my iPod is full.

So, when I heard about MP3tunes.com, I was excited. It’s basically a music backup service with unlimited disk space. It has an iTunes plugin (it’s actually just an application that sort of behaves like a plugin) that facilitates syncing your library to and from the server and it also lets you stream your library from the server using the iTunes plugin or their own custom web interface. In theory this all sounds perfect so when I was offered a deal to get in on the fun for half normal price (half of $39.95 per year) I decided to do it! (Note that they also have a free account but it doesn’t do this iTunes syncing so is mostly useless to me).

First the good:

1. It pretty much does work as advertised.
2. half price is probably worth it, but full price might not be.
3. the online player is pretty good but kinda slow
4. It’s neat to have access to all of my music from anywhere!

Now the bad:

1. I actually already had access to all of my music from anywhere via slimserver.
2. The upload speed is sloooooow. It took like a week of straight uploading on my 768k uplink to get my 40GB of music on the server. I haven’t done the math but it seems like that’s slow.
3. The sync application is buggy and the cache has to be reset from time to time during the upload process. It just errors out sometimes and that’s the fix.
4. The iTunes ‘plugin’ seemingly requires that you re-login on each launch. That’s not ideal.
5. And here’s the biggie for me… It’s not a true two-way sync. It can detect changes made on your computer and upload those to the server but it cannot remove files that no longer exist on your computer. In practice this means that if you update a bunch of meta tags (like if you add album art work or something), it will re-upload all of those files creating duplicates on the server. Agh! You have to manually remove the changed files from the server before doing another Oboe sync. I asked them if they have plans to fix that and they said, ‘No’. Weird!

Update April 18, 2007: After my first year of mp3tunes.com service I decided to not renew, even though they extended the same half price offer I got for the first year. After fighting with it off and on for the first few months I ended up hardly ever using it and have probably not used it once in the last 4 or 5 months now. None of the features worked the way I had hoped and it didn’t do what I hoped it would.

As you may know, my iPod is full. Since first reporting that I have added another 5 or 6 albums to my library (I went on a CDBaby shopping spree) and have had to once again reconsider my strategy. I now have a system that requires some manual effort but I think may work for me for awhile.

Here’s the gist:

1. The iPod no longer syncs with all playlists, but instead syncs to a few chosen playlists that are handy to have around for parties and for general-purpose listening as well as a special ‘iPod’ smart playlist.

2. The iPod smart playlist is defined as so:

That first ‘3-5 Stars’ playlist is another smart playlist I’ll explain later. The ‘Not on iPod’ playlist is a regular playlist and lets me selectively exclude albums and songs. The ‘MacBreak’ one is a one-off for some video podcasts I have but don’t watch. I might just stop downloading them altogether… hmm…

3. The ‘3-5 Stars’ playlist is defined as so:

It also includes tracks not yet rated so I’m not forced to rate every new album I add before it will be copied to the iPod.

4. I have to use a smart playlist including another smart playlist so I can combine some ‘and’ and ‘or’ logic (or ‘Any’ and ‘All’ in iTunes-speak).

5. The ‘Not in iPod’ playlist is my stoke of genius that allows me to remove albums I never listen to on the iPod without setting their ratings artificially low. I have some music I may want to hear once a year in my iTunes but never on my iPod. Genius!

My pal, Tony, spent his lunch break going to see David Blaine’s latest stunt, Drowned Alive. He’s living underwater in this bubble for a week or something and at the end of it he’s going to be chained down while he holds his breath for 9 minutes, breaking the current world record by 2 seconds. He’ll escape from the chains in the nick of time too, I suspect.

The ABC News story about it is kinda funny. People seem to think he’s a publicity hound and doesn’t deserve all the attention. Me, I like anything that helps us all remember to look up from the daily humdrum and check out the scenery blazing past us ever faster. Stunts like this don’t do anything to rid the world of disease, poverty, war, or fossil fuels but it’s kinda fun. It’d be more fun if it was a bunch of bikini girls underwater, but we’ll have to take what we can get!

I recently got my Mac mini media center set up and running and it’s pretty nifty but there was one nagging issue I had not yet solved, until now!

I have a Mac mini core duo (early 2006, 1.66 Ghz) hooked up to my Panasonic TH-42PD50U EDTV plasma as a media center. Out of the box, just hooking up all the wires gets you most of the way there but the overscan issue makes it so the picture is larger than the TV screen by enough pixels all the way around to be annoying though still usable. There’s software called DisplayConfigX that lets you set up custom resolutions for situations like this but it’s very complicated and I wasn’t able to make it work myself. Well now the magic of the Internet has allowed me to stumble upon the answer.

To help out any others in need of this same information, here are the settings I ended up using. It’s not a perfect fit for my TV but it’s very close and might be as close as is possible. I may try some other settings later myself but I am more likely to just be lazy and use what other people figured out.

My DisplayConfigX settings:

Horizontal

• 1224 pixels
• 136 front porch
• 80 sync
• 208 back porch

Vertical

• 690 pixels
• 26 front porch
• 5 sync
• 29 back porch

Updated Jan 1, 2007 with my most up to date setup!