Around this time last year I had no idea what to ask for for the holidays. Since then I have been keeping a wish list on boxedup.com. Whenever I came across an item that tickled my fancy I added it to my list. The great thing about Boxed Up is you can tag the items, comment on them, and get an RSS feed of your wish list. The site supports importing your Amazon wish list to get started. After you get something, you can save it to your ‘Things I Have‘ list for others to see what your interests might be. Finally, what web 2.0 site wouldn’t be complete without some sort of social networking aspect? Boxed Up lets you add your friends or you can browse through the recently added/ popular product list on the front page. All in all, BoxedUp.com has been a great resource for organizing my desired gifts.

Speaking of gifts, my list consists mostly of funny t-shirts from Threadless.com but if crafts are more of your thing, feel free to make me an epic shoebox diorama. A diorama? I remember having to make one for a class project in elementary school and haven’t dealt with one since. So my challenge to all my friends and family is to make a diorama of a scene that you think I would like. Use your imagination and if you need some inspiration just think robots, lightbulbs, umbrellas, or computers.

Have you made up your wish list yet?

Like most apartment dwellers, I get the occasional visits from roaches. After a couple of weeks of trying ineffective do-it-yourself measures like keeping things extra clean and plugging up any possible entrances, I decided to invest in a tube of roach gel.

After Googling around for the best way to kill roaches, I found NoMoreCockroaches.com explaining the Combat Roach Killing Gel that comes in a syringe is the best at dealing with the pests. How does the gel work? Roaches eat the gel and then retreat back to their nest where they die and other roaches eat the poisoned carcasses, thus eliminating the nest.

The best place to get this stuff is at Walgreens but since there are no Walgreens within a reasonable distance from my apartment, I had to order it online and wait for the mailman to bring it to my door.

I applied it to as many cracks and crevices in the kitchen before my week-long Montana vacation. Since I got back, I haven’t seen a single roach. They used to come out and scurry at night, but now they seem to be non-existent.

The only cons of the gel is it is a dark brown color (which looks like poo) which can clash with your room and it can be a little messy when applying. But aside from that, this stuff is well worth the price of $5.99 per tube which should be enough for a three bedroom apartment.

So forget the sprays, powders, and traps, Combat Roach Gel is all you need.

Twitter may be the king of the 140 character-limit hill but with it being down more than it is up, it is nice to have options. Pownce was seen as a possible “Twitter killer” offering a more stylish interface and a bevy of additional features like nested replies (keeping conversations neat and tidy) and embedded media options. But it says something when one of the main people behind Pownce, Kevin Rose, flings his Twitter address all over the place. It’s a real shame because Pownce is better organized and even includes a business model. Too bad it’s a virtual ghost town compared to the fluttering Twitter community.

Plurk is a similar service with a unique visual twist. Instead of reading your messages in a linear stream, Plurk displays your correspondents on an attractive timeline. Each Plurk can be directly responded to like a mini-forum eliminating the barrage of @ responses that comes with Twitter. Taking a page from Facebook’s status update feature, Plurk lets you specify an action like “is”, “likes”, “thinks” etc. which are uniquely colored similiar to the popular Twitter mashup Twistori. The site tips the scale when it comes to AJAX effects with lots of fading modal windows but provides a rich experience for consuming the stream of information presented before you.

The two most unique features that Plurk brings to the game are Cliques and Karma.

Cliques in Plurk are just like Cliques in real-life: an exclusive group of people. Plurk lets you separate your friends into different groups so you can better filter messages coming to you. Cliques also let you send out a message to a certain group of people so you can keep your messages to your family hidden from your group of co-workers.

Karma is a community status indicator so you can easily spot the active members from the passive on-lookers. Your score is calculated every day and is influenced by you and your friends Plurk activity as well as friend referrals. It’s a pretty clever idea by the site creators to help build buzz by giving a useless number to try and grow. Think of it like a score in a video game.

Plurk is still missing an open API so other people can build apps on top of the service and mobile support so people can send Plurks in while they are out and about. But Pownce was in the same boat when it first launched and adding those features hardly helped it’s market share. The real test will be if Plurk can attract the hordes of Twitter followers because microblogging services like this are only useful if the people you know (or want to know) are part of the game.

Oh and the mascot is a dog without a head.

Follow me on Plurk, Twitter, Pownce, and a bunch of other social services.

There are many web services and tools that can be used with Twitter. Such oddball web service/Twitter mashups include TrackThis which sends you a twitter message every time the status of a package you are tracking changes, and Timer which helps act like an alarm for things you need a reminder about. But I just stumbled across Fuelfrog which is one of the more useful collaborations.

Fuelfrog provides a simple service allowing you to track your cars mileage per gallon as well as the average price you pay at the pump. Using their website you enter 3 things: the miles you traveled since your last fill up, the price you paid per gallon, and the total number of gallons you bought. Fuelfrog will then tally your findings and provide you with some handy specifics over time. I only started using the tool today but the site will tell you the frequency you are filling up, the average MPG your car gets and the average price per gallon you are paying. In the future they hope to let you compare your performance to other vehicles to see how you are doing.

This simple tool comes in handy for tracking the performance of your car. My parents used to do this manually by writing down the mileage from the trip odometer onto the gas receipt and do the number crunching later at home. But thanks to Twitter integration I can ditch the pen and paper and simply tweet my gas stats straight to Fuelfrog. After providing my twitter username (kingkool68) I can now send a tweet from my phone to @fuelfrog with the miles, price per gallon, and total purchase amount in that order. A handy nemonic is MPG – Miles, Price, Gallons. There is also a Windows Mobile app if you want to be lazy about it.

I’m going to be using this over the next couple of weeks to see if I notice any patterns about my fueling habits. At the very least I can look back and remember when gas used to only be $3.71 a gallon!

(via DownloadSquad)

On my commute home from work this evening I came across a lost thumb drive at one of the metro stations. I decided to take it home and see what was on it. As much as I would have loved to stumble across some top secret military documents or a bunch of MP3 files all that was on the 128mb drive was some miscellaneous e-mail messages. Being the good samaritan that I am, I decided to reconnect the device with it’s rightful owner.

The e-mails were all .msg files, the file extension for Outlook message files. Since I don’t have Outlook installed on any of my computers or a program to read them I had to find some freeware to do the job. After a quick Google search I found the no frills MSGView from Priasoft. The program is a single executable (with nothing to install) that prompts you to locate a .msg file upon starting it up. From there it decodes the message from the proprietary Microsoft e-mail format and shows you the contents. The biggest pain was that I had to close MSGView and re-open it if I wanted to look at another e-mail document.

I decided to sort the e-mails by file size in hopes of uncovering a conversation that sheds light on who the owner is. After a couple minutes of sleuthing around I quickly connected the dots and found the name and e-mail address of the likely thumb-driveless metro rider. I sent them an e-mail and have yet to hear back from them but I did learn about MSGView which comes in handy in situations like this.

There has been a lot of commotion about net neutrality and packet shaping in the news recently. All of the stories that I have read have been from the point of view of the common Internet user whose freedom of access has been threatened by the gatekeepers of the Internet, the service providers. On the recent episode of Security Now, Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte take an objective look at how the Internet clogs up and what the ISPs have to do to manage their network. Starting off at how the HTTP protocol was designed through how ISPs swap traffic at the backbone of the Internet (known as peering) to the future of fatter broadband pipes, Steve doesn’t miss a beat.

To be frank about it, the Internet is short on bandwidth. There is simply too much demand and not enough space to squeeze all of the data around the world fast enough. Everybody wants fast, snappy web pages to spring up as soon as they click a link. But services like Bittorrent tend to max out the network’s resources causing the other web traffic to grind to a halt until the bottleneck is gone.


Map of the under-sea cables connecting the continents to the Internet. If one should fail then the packets will be sent through an alternate route.

The Internet was designed for traffic to automatically re-route itself for the best available delivery route. But if the packets encounter holes, your connection will slow down the sending of packets in hopes that the strain on the route to the destination clears up. This is why your connection might seem to slow to a crawl around the time people are getting off of work and heading home to surf the web there.

The Internet was never designed with the scale that it is today in mind. ISP’s are simply trying to manage their networks for the sake of everybody’s experience. For the sake of the net, researchers are busy devising new protocols to make network traffic more efficient but it is a tough nut to crack with many variables to take into consideration. And then there is always the ethical and political issues. Internet congestion is one tough pill to swallow!

You can listen to the 1:21:12 mp3 for Security Now Episode #139 and follow along with the transcript.

Kristina got me the mouse I have long been eying to replace my 5-year old Microsoft Wireless Explorer Blue mouse: The Logitech MX Revolution. It was an early anniversary gift as our 7 year anniversary is this Friday, March 21st. Logitech claims it is the most advanced mouse in the world and after dragging it around my screen for a minute or two I whole-heartedly agree. It works fine as a regular mouse, but where the real power is in the advanced configuration of the many buttons. Furthermore, you can program the buttons to do different things in different applications providing total flexibility with integration into your workflow. Since Firefox is the main application used on my PC, I decided to turbo charge my mouse shortcuts for speedier web surfing.

The first part was easy. The standard conventions of left-click, right-click, and the scroll wheel would remain in tact. The tried and true middle-click which I rely on to close tabs or open links in new tabs, is no where to be found (more on this later). Instead I have set up the clicking of the main scroll wheel to switch between two different scroll types. The Logitech MX Revolution can be controlled via software to scroll in click-mode or free-wheel mode. Click-mode is just like any other mouse scroll wheel with each turn producing a click. This is used for more precise scrolling. But if you need to get through a long web page in a short amount of time, free-wheel mode will let you spin the scroll with a mighty flick and continue scrolling for up to 7 seconds. Sure makes getting around the largest web page in the universe a lot easier. If you wanted you could define the default scroll-mode in specific applications. I found this difficult to get used to so I set the global behavior to be free-wheel mode with middle clicking switching to click-mode.

Moving on in Firefox, the back and forward buttons naturally would correlate to the back and forward buttons of the browser. This was a no brainier. But the thumb wheel left me puzzled about what task to assign to it. This wasn’t like the main scroll wheel but instead more like a lever that you could push up, down, and in with your right thumb. One interesting combination is to map the copy (Control + C), paste (Control + V), and cut (Control + X) commands to the up, down, and pushed-in positions respectively. In Firefox I find myself switching through tabs a lot so I decided to map Control + Tab (switch to the tab to the right), Control + Shift + Tab (shift to the tab on the left), and Control + W (close tab) functions to the thumb wheel. This set-up works great when tackling the daily news reading I do.

Of course if you have become used to the middle click opening links to new tabs, then you will want to install the free uberOptions which gives you a wide range of additional options for configuring your mouse. I set my one touch search button to perform a middle click. It’s a little out of the way from my index finer, but I can deal with that. The main scroll wheel itself is a bit too heavy to push in multiple times. Besides, Logitech’s configuration software, SetPoint, doesn’t let you assign a click function to this button.

It took a bit of experimenting but I believe I have settled on the ideal set-up for my mouse. This thing is such a joy to use I wish I had taken the leap sooner. If you are in need of a new mouse and you take personal configuration seriously, then the Logitech MX Revolution is a perfect pointing device for you.

What are some handy mouse or keyboard shortcuts that you rely on?

*If you’re more of a keyboard-shortcut kind of person, thanks for reading all the way through. I appreciate it 🙂

Valentin Agachi’s XHTML Challenge takes the rating meme under the hood letting users compare websites based on their (X)HTML markup. When a challenge is set up between two sites, a PHP script from XHTMLChallege.com slurps up the source code and begins a detailed analysis. Facets for competition include which doctype was declared, validation, content length in bytes, a ratio of content/markup/ and whitespace, use of conditional comments, and the number of table tags used.

As I have written about before, there is more than just HTML that goes into making a sexy source. I think XHTML Challenge could expand their analysis to include the number and positioning of CSS and JavaScript files, use of microformats (which results in more semantic, though bulkier, markup), and total file size of all components. This would paint a better overall picture of all the necessary components that go into a modern design.

Frontend web developers, like myself, take a lot of pride in how we structure our code. HTML coding is all about semantic, well-organized markup that is as small as possible while providing a solid structure for the content. It is good to see that there are others out there like myself that can appreciate the thought and planning that goes in to the under pinnings of a modern website.

XHTML Challenge should not be confused with Command Shift 3 which rates the aesthetics of a site not its code. Maybe the two sites should get together producing the ultimate website rating tool!

via (Web Designer Wall)

Around the end of October my Creative Zen Vision:M suddenly died on me during my morning commute. It’s no surprise that the player finally pooped out after being with me every workday for 2+ hours a day since I got it on Christmas, 2006. It was a fine media player and I would have gotten another one except Creative wasn’t making them anymore. Besides, the new Zunes were out with better features at a much cheaper price. So naturally I decided to “join the social.”

One of my favorite features of the Zune is how it keeps your place in the song or video after powering down. This makes it a breeze to pick up where you left off without fuddling around with bookmarks and now I don’t even hesitate listening to a podcast for a short drive. With my Creative Zen Vision:M I would spend more time loading and saving my place than driving on short trips. This feature is not important if you listen to music most of the time, but a podcast junkie like myself is always starting and stopping episodes and it is a relief to have a player take care of marking the place in my audio and video files for me.

The physical design of the Zune 80 is compact and simple. The player consists of two buttons, a large 3.5″ screen and a squircle for navigating. The squircle is a combination of a touch surface and button interface. Using your thumb you can flick up or down to move through list items just like an iPhone or press up or down for more precise navigation. Holding one edge of the squircle down will gradually speed up the seeking of a list when you need to go through a lot of items. To help you stay oriented as songs scroll by, the player will show the first letter of the track in a big, easy to read font so you know when to slow down. Basic categorization like Artists and Genre is available along the top which is accessed by moving left to right. To the right of the squircle is a play/pause button which is also used as an on/off switch when held down. On the other side is a back button. Navigating around the Zune is a real pleasure and a big improvement over the Zen player I was previously using.

The dimensions are pretty much like any other hard-drive based media player on the market. The Zune 80 is thinner than my Zen Vision:M and is probably just as thin as an iPod but I don’t notice the difference during everyday use. The player fits in my backpack and in my jacket pocket and that is all I really need to carry it

A Zune 30 would have been sufficient for my needs at the discounted price and with the newer Zune 2.0 interface, but the newer Zune 80 packs better video hardware. Formerly left to transcode MP4 files for playback on my Zen, the Zune has no problem playing these processor intensive video formats natively. Lots of podcasters offer their video up in the iPod-friendly MP4 files and since I have a device that supports the codec, a bigger selection of content is available to me. With the latest firmware update, I can now unsubscribe from a podcast feed right inside the player on the go making it easy to sample new podcasts without the extra hassle of managing feeds. When I dock the Zune with my host computer, the Zune software automatically adds the new content and removes the media I watched or listened to as well as updates any podcast feeds I have marked ‘unsubscribe’.

Speaking of the software, the Zune 2.0 software is good enough for syncing media to your device but falls short in a lot of areas. For one, it is resource intensive causing my machine to slow down considerably when using it. To be fair, my 4 year old computer doesn’t meet the recommended requirements but I still didn’t think the software would be a big resource hog. If you don’t use the official Zune 2.0 syncing software then you are out of luck as any third party software is locked out from managing the Zune hardware. I would prefer to use the excellent Media Monkey software for organizing and syncing my media but since the Zune uses proprietary drivers, there looks to be little anyone can do to break the tie with Microsoft.

Once you have your media set-up, the software isn’t that difficult. At first there were issues with duplicate podcast episodes showing up but as I made my way through the unplayed media, the issue sorted itself out. The Zune does a great job at staying synced with my computer. I just have to plug the Zune to the USB connector and off it goes with little intervention for me. I haven’t tried using the wireless syncing yet. In face I have turned the wireless capabilities off for the time being because I have never found another Zune device nearby and I would rather save the battery power than send out messages to my non-existent Zune neighbors. But one powerful feature about the wireless capabilities in the Zune has gone unnoticed. Wireless sync only works when the player is charging. Since I only have the included USB cable which connects to my computer, it doesn’t make sense for me to use wireless sync. But if I had a the Zune dock that connects to your TV than what I basically have is an Apple TV that I can carry in my pocket. Think about it. The Zune 80 will sync wirelessly with your computer and can output video to a standard definition TV at full resolution. Anything you can watch in your pocket, you can easily enjoy on a larger TV parked in front of a comfy couch. What’s not to love about that?

My biggest complaint about the Zune is there is no obvious comfortable way to hold it, especially when watching videos. The rectangular design is simple and makes great use of the space, but there is no place to put your hands. The best way I found to handle the Zune 80 is to rest the bottom corners in the web between your thumb and the index finger of both hands. Similar to holding a book.

A must have accessory for the Zune is the leather case. Not only does it protect the player from outside abuse, but it gives you something to hold on to while watching videos. The squircle pokes through but the buttons are covered but usable through the brown leather case. A large flap goes over the device to protect the screen when not in use and is secured by a magnet. It’s easy to open and stays out of your way while using the Zune.

If Microsoft is listening, they really need an accessory that lets you control the device while it is tucked away in a backpack. Creative had a wired remote control that allowed you to play/pause, change tracks, and adjust the volume all by a little dongle that goes between your headphones and the player. This was a dream to have on morning commutes with my Zen in my backpack and the remote clipped to my shirt. A wireless version would be cool but dealing with a battery to keep it charged sounds like a big hassle.

After a month of using the Zune 80 and putting it through it’s paces, I am really happy with my purchase. Every morning I wake up with glee knowing that my commute will not be a dull, monotonous one-hour train ride thanks to my slick media player to keep me informed and entertained. If a digital media player is part of your daily life then you will know how important it is to compare what is on the market and find the best player for your needs. Apple vs. Microsoft politics aside, the Zune is a fantastic device that I could enthusiastically recommend to any media junkie I meet. Don’t let the trash talking sway you, as I truly believe the Zune 80 is the best portable media player out on the market right now.

Update: On January 8th, after writing the bulk of this review, my Zune suffered a software crash as I was walking home from work. The podcast that I was listening to suddenly stopped and the screen read “Could not play track”. Thinking it was a problem with just the MP3 file itself, I tried to play a song from my music library. When I selected play from an album view my player froze and became unresponsive to any button mashing I attempted. When I got in front of my computer I looked up the hard reset button combo which requires holding the back button and the top of the squircle. This Microsoft knowledge base article details everything you need to know. Upon reboot I was greeted with this lovely message, “To recover from an error, Zune must erase all content.” The only option was to hit “OK” by pressing the middle of the squircle. The media player would then reboot and this process continued forever in an endless loop.

After digging around on the net for a better solution, I decided my only course of action was to replace the firmware and completely wipe out my nearly 40GB collection. Following these arcane directions, I managed to get my Zune back to its factory default. It then took me all night to reload all of the songs from my library back onto my fresh Zune.

I suspect this crash was due to a hard drive glitch and I can’t really blame Microsoft for the fragile nature of hard drive based portable media players. Problems like this will eventually be a thing of the past once solid state flash memory, which has no moving parts, comes down in price. For now I thought it was important to add this addendum to the review of what problems can happen after normal use out in the wild.

I’ve had my T-Mobile Dash for just over a year and it was starting to show it’s age. The Windows Mobile operating system was dragging to a crawl. Applications were taking 30 seconds to load and the overall experience just started to feel muddy. It’s horrible when a device can’t keep up with you.

I then found SKTools Lite for smartphones which cleans up temporary files and frees up storage space. After running the program it found 542 files that could safely be removed and my phone felt new again. Apps would open up right away, there was no lag when typing, and the Internet even seemed a bit speedier. So if you are frustrated with your Windows Mobile phone because it’s as slow as a rainy weekend then give SKTools a try. And if you are looking for other great WinMo apps, check out this thread.