brett's logjam

I got the Eye-Fi Share this week. It is generally great, but has some quirks.

Pros:

• Uploads to local folder/iPhoto and Flickr
• Easy to set up
• Dead simple to use
• Does just what it says

Cons:

• Slower writes than other SD cards
• Can’t do burst photography
• Movies are limited in length
• Only works on one wifi network
• Burns out batteries pretty quickly
• Photo uploads hammer network
• Camera is yet another thing to check

Overall, I’m happy with it. The burst mode thing got me at a birthday party, but I got over it. It’s really simple to use, and making me consider Flickr as a primary photo repository.

My PowerBook G4 is for sale.

Wow.

Amazon rolled out a Universal Wish List feature, which lets you add anything from any online store and add it to your Amazon Wish List.

Ten years ago at Trilogy we rolled out something very similar — a single site designed to centralize your wishlist with items from all over the web. It worked well technically, but not financially.

I’m glad to see the idea reappear and be so well executed.

Earlier this week, I had an email exchange with Banjocat about keeping track of what I’m up to. (She’s a senior Human Factors person, so when she talks about these things, I listen.) See, brettpeters.org was intended to be the place where my non-internet friends could keep up with what was going on — but sadly, it wasn’t working as well as it should.

Mostly, it’s Twitter’s fault; the volume of posts overwhelms the non-follower. Archiving them to LiveJournal didn’t help, mostly because no one knew I even had it! And reading the different flows via the badges on the front page is disjointed and lacks flow.

I’m taking Banjocat up on her suggestion that a quick summary of keeping track of me online is in order, and then doing something about the scattered pieces.

The short version: non-internet-obsessed friends go here, maybe here, and if you don’t know where my son’s site is, email me. Zen Masta Steve and Iron Chef Meat might find this interesting, too. And this is good if you’re pressed for time and need a laugh.

You don’t have to follow anything else. Not even this site.

The long version:

First, I post things from me to only six sites:

• Nobody Wants a Stylus, where I talk about iPhones and other technical babble,
• Brett’s Logjam, which has turned almost entirely into a personal log, and I haven’t been sure of where it’s going for about eight years now,
• Twitter, which is a 140-character stream of chatter from my cell phone. The bits that other people like wind up on Favrd or Favotter,
• Flickr, for my photographs,
• My son’s site, which is both the most active and the cutest of all my blogs,
• And, the latest, I just started a blog for Yahzie, my MkIV turbo Jetta.

(As an aside: frankly, this is crazy. It’s not as insane as my elsewhere page is, but it’s still insane.)

Second, I post things from other sites to only one place: Appendix A.

The last time I was in a consolidating mood, I dumped everything into this feed. That didn’t work: normal posts got overwhelmed by little trivial updates. People should be able to choose what they want in addition to getting it all in one place. Some folks are happy reading these infrequent updates. Others try to follow the Twitter firehose, while others just like the pictures.

So.

With all this in mind, I went ahead and created Brettbot-147, an automated site that pulls from my two main weblogs, Twitter, and Flickr. You can read it on the web, follow it in an RSS reader, or even subscribe to daily emails.

I have something similar already in place for my kid’s blog, which if you don’t know the URL just ping me for it. I’ll leave my car’s blog and Appendix A alone for now.

Holy crap. I totally have to redo my home page.

I must have totally lost my gourd to even be considering letting her onto the internet, but: after years of asking for it, my car finally has a blog.

She is very pleased.

Well, about two weeks after getting whatever-virus-that-was, I’m finally on the mend. Sadly, my son is now sick, so it balances out.

(Hopefully, it won’t hit him as hard as it hit his parents.)

A few odds-and-ends:

• I am both sad to see Cameron Hunt leave professional web design behind, and glad to see him moving on towards things that make him happy. No matter how good you are at something (and Cameron’s got mad skillz, as the kids say today), you’ve got to do what makes you happy. Best of luck with what comes next, Cam.

• A hearty welcome to all the folks coming here from Jason Snell’s Macworld podcast on the MacBook Air. I would like to say that CoolBook fixed my MacBook Air problems, but I’d returned it under the 30-day period and gotten a black MacBook instead. No hard feelings with the Air, though — maybe next time. You may enjoy my iPhone blog, Nobody Wants a Styl.us.

I’ve got some changes coming up with some of my sites, but I’ll leave those in the bag until they’re ready to escape.

Well, if it feels like the flu, aches like the flu, and behaves like the flu, I’ll call it the flu. Ugh. I hate the flu.

It’s been a rough week. I lost my voice early on, but finally started feeling human again on Thursday. Of course I pushed too hard on Friday and paid for it yesterday. Fatigue is the real problem right now.

Having talked to about a half-dozen people who have had this (including Merrystar, who had the exact symptoms before it went into a sinus infection), it pretty much runs 2-3 weeks barring complications. Nearly everyone reports complications, either a sinus infection or bronchitis.

The fatigue reportedly lasts a few weeks after the coughing, aching and fever go away. I’m reading the collected works of David and Leigh Eddings to keep my mind busy while it passes.

Fortunately, Trip seems to have escaped the worst of it; his biggest problem right now is that he’s decided to get up in the middle of the night and talk to his mother, which is not doing either of them any good. Well, that, and also that I’m really short-tempered right now with a voice like a very angry bear. No, really — I could seriously sing lead vocals for Morbid Angel. It’s that deep.

Tip: tired kids don’t take well to being growled at, at any volume. Just sayin’.

So… how’re you doing?

It’s been an intense few weeks here as my project kicks into high gear. This past week has been a rollercoaster, where it looked like the entire thing was about to go off the rails until it didn’t, and by Thursday night I was breathing huge sighs of relief.

Merrystar’s recovery from her first sinus infection continued apace, and I thought we were out of the woods yesterday.

Sadly, I slept 9 hours last night and woke up with the first-stage symptoms of the virus that took her out 2 weeks ago.

HINT: when you’re paler than your red-haired wife, you’re NOT doing well.

So.

As much as I’d like to write about the iPhone 3G / Mobile Me / iPhone 2.0 OS launch, or even play around with them, I’m going to sleep this weekend and see if I can avoid losing the next two weeks.

Wish me luck.

I’ve been a big fan of Dan Pollock’s replacement /etc/hosts file for blocking bad things on the internet, but for one reason or another never got around to automating the update process.

I don’t know why, it’s pretty straightforward to pull together a shell script:


#! /bin/sh
tdy=`date +%Y%m%d%H%M`

sudo curl http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts -o /etc/hosts.$tdy.tmp
sudo cp /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.$tdy
sudo mv /etc/hosts.$tdy.tmp /etc/hosts


… and then add it to crontab to run every few days. This will create a backup of the previous /etc/hosts file in case anything goes wrong.

You can also switch ads back on by keeping your original /etc/hosts file around with:


#! /bin/sh
sudo cp /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.tmp
sudo cp /etc/hosts.original /etc/hosts


I keep these in ~/bin/hosts, because I’m like that.

(Some days, UNIX actually works for me. Hallelujah!)