Dear Computer at Work

Please note that your default printer is 5E501XT. Unless I specifically select a new system-wide printer, please assume that I always want to print to that one, it being nearest my desk. Do not infer from my occasional choices to print to a different machine or to use the PDF converer that I want continue using that setting forever. If I did, I would have changed the system-wide preference myself.

Thank you.

P.S.: No need to bring a window to the front when its document starts printing. I touch-type and often get through a few sentences before realizing you’ve switched windows without asking. I’ll decide for myself which windows go where.

A Fresh Entry

I’d just like to go on record that I don’t like that The WB has started using the word “fresh” to refer to new episodes. What idiotic marketing notes produced that one?

With that off my chest, I didn’t watch last night’s fresh episode of Smallville, but it’s first on my list for tonight. Oh, and sweet merciful crap: The O.C. was fantastic last night!

More TypeKey Info

Well, the cat’s on its way out of the bag about TypeKey. Yesterday I figured out that TypePad members can use their logins for the new service. They can then go and use their TypeKey identities to comment on pages running MovableType 3.0 beta.

With your login, you can also go into TypeKey and set up your profile and account preferences. (Again, TypePad users can use their current login and password. New users can sign up for new accounts.) For TypePad users, all the fields will already be filled in with your personal information. Using the new nickname feature, you can decide to have your full name or nickname displayed when you leave a comment. The Profile Page settings let you build a public TypeKey profile. Here’s mine. The options are: photo, email address, one-line bio, my websites, and sites I enjoy. I have not included the last two options on my profile because they’re a little broken right now. The fields come automatically filled out with information from your TypeLists, which is a handy idea, but at the moment it’s a little buggy. It seems to like to fill out one field for every list item you’ve ever entered into a link list and it repopulates them if you delete them. I can’t fault them for this of course, since TypeKey is still in testing and they haven’t announced TypePad functionality yet. Once it works properly it’ll be neat to have your blogroll already imported.

The feature that was really clever of Six Apart is that, though login names have to be unique, nicknames do not. If you want to be “sexkitten69” or “toker420” or “31337h4x0r” when you leave comments, you can set that to your nickname no matter how many other people have it, too. This will solve the handle scramble problem that happens when new services pop up.

TypeKey is Live for TypePad Users

Via Dive Into Mark, I hopped over to Idly’s MT 3.0b1 First Thoughts. Since MovableType 3.0 is in beta, it makes sense that they’re doing some major testing on TypeKey, their new comment registration system. Noticing that Idly has a TypeKey notice on his comment form, I clicked the link to see if I could sign up. I filled out the form and got an error message informing me that someone was already using my login name. This upset me, being that I’m the ruling daveXtreme in cyberspace.

Turns out that all TypePad users’ login names have been reserved for use in TypeKey, and I was able to log in using my TypePad password.

This was probably a good call by Six Apart, as TypePad is aimed at beginner users who would be confused and upset if they had to maintain different sets of identities for using their own site and commenting on others’. Yay for integration.

I guess privacy-skiddish people might be upset by being automatically thrown into the system, but since Six Apart already has all their contact information from their TypePad bill, they’ll just need to get over it.

Metadata Runs My Music

I’m really having fun with the playlist I talked about the other day. The key is not to worry too much about what to give five stars. It’s not a rating of how good the song actually is, it’s a rating of how much you enjoy the song. “We Built this City” is the worst song of all time? Nah. Five stars.

Assigning a song rating is no harder than dragging it onto a playlist, and once your music library is sufficiently tricked out with ratings, genre, year, and all sorts of other metadata, you’re got lots of smart playlist options. One thing I’ve already figured out is that when you get a new album you can give the really good songs high ratings until you’re no longer enamoured with them, then downrate those tracks until they’ve settled into an equilibrium with the rest of your music.

Trial of the Century Vol. 2

During last night’s The West Wing, NBC decided to shrink the screen down to make room for a banner directing us to change the channel to MSNBC to follow a breaking story. Keep in mind that advertisers spend lots of money supporting prime time television, so a network would never direct its viewers to stop watching its programming unless the story were very important. A big story warranting banner treatment usually falls into one of two categories:

• Local weather-related disaster, or
• National/international tragedy.

Alas, I had forgotten about the third type:

*Celebrity spectacle.

Yes, Michael Jackson’s indictment was deemed so important by the NBC/MSNBC network heads that they directed us to immediatly change the channel and start watching their anchors babble with little information over pictures of Michael entering or leaving the courhouse.

They can only hope that it goes to trial just after the Friends finale.

The Hits: A Smart Playlist

iTunes’ Smart Playlists provide lots of great ways to listen to music. Here’s one I’ve been toying with recently. There are two criteria:

• My Rating is 5 stars,
• Last Played is not in the last day.

You’ll get a handy list of all your favorite songs that you haven’t listened to today. Put it on shuffle and you have your own radio station playing only A-List jams. I call it “The Hits.”

This works well with a discovery I made today: on 3G iPods (and Minis), you can rate songs on the fly. While a track is playing, click the wheel button twice and use the scroll wheel to add a rating. Next time you sync to your computer all those ratings will show up in iTunes, too.

Pre-9/11 Misdirection

If Democrats want to win this election, they need to stop focusing on what President Bush did before September 11 and concentrate on what he did afterward. It’s easy to use hindsight to fuel speculation, but this president’s weakness is what he’s done since that day. Revisting the months before we were attacked won’t change the fact that it happened. Get the country to realize what the president did to the country as a result.

Kinja, Please

Internet hot spot of the week Kinja has been getting a lot of attention. My quick review: I like it. I’m not sure I prefer it to Bloglines, but it provides a different enough experience that I’m going to keep using for a few more days and see if it sticks.

Overview

What is Kinja? According to their about page:

Kinja is a weblog portal, collecting news and commentary from some of the best sites on the web. Visitors can browse items on topics, everything from food to sex. Or they can create a convenient personal digest, to track their favorite writers.

Weblogs are much talked about, but still challenging to navigate for the average web user. Kinja is designed to bring weblog writers to a broader audience, by making it easier to explore topics, posts and writers.

That’s how the Kinja crew describes it, but it’s better just to see it in action. Here’s my public digest. I add all the weblogs I read, and then it puts them all together in order, with the most recent posts at the top.

Usability and Interface

Kinja’s best attributes are that it’s free and it’s easy to use. You don’t need to know what RSS is to use it — you just type in a site’s address and it does the work for you. The main page sports a clean design by 37signals (though it’s broken in IE 5.5, but I won’t dock many points for that). The user experience feels fresh and unintimidating, and you only have to look at a few unobtrusive text ads.

There are, though, a few elements that I don’ t like:

• The excerpts for each post are too short. I’ve found that it often doesn’t give me enough of an entry to decide if I’m interesting in reading the whole thing or not. True, it’s not supposed to be a hardcore aggregator, but I’d just like another sentence or two.
• The little thumbnails only work for a handful of sites. I can’t quite tell where it’s getting the images for them from, and I like them when present, but the blank boxes are distracting.
• It groups entries by weblog alphabetically instead of sorting them in true chronological order.

The Friends Test

Kinja has caught the eyes of the main players, but there’s a large, often overlooked segment of the weblogging world that has a lot of experience with exactly this sort of thing: LiveJournal. One of its main features is the ability for me to add another LJ user to my “Friends” list. Every entry made by one of my friends shows up on my Friends Page. It works so well that, for most LJ users, the Friends Page forms the center of their experience. It gives you an idea of your audience. When you write an entry it feels like you’re writing to people, not just publishing into the ethers of the web.

LiveJournal Friends Pages not only keep people apprised of their buddies’ posts, but also the conversations they’ve started. At the bottom of each post is a numbered link to any comments people have left. I go to my page, read new posts, and then scroll down to see if the comment counter has gone up. The usefulness of this would skyrocket if it also let me mark entries I’m interested in and then bumped those to the top of the page whenever a new comment was made. If Kinja could accomplish this on the scale of the world wide web, it would have be a truly amazing app. I know I’m becoming a bit of a broken record on comment management and notification, but new services like Kinja really have a chance at innovating weblogging.

Jason Kottke and Tom Coates have already brought up the exciting potential that comes with everyone’s Kinja digests being optionally public. LiveJournal has been doing this for years, and it works very well. Find a friend, click over to his page, and read what he reads. Find someone whose stuff you like, and add them with a few easy clicks. Kinja could make this easy by identifying posts made by registered users and providing a little icon pointing to their public digests (like Kottke’s done on his “Not Recommended At All” blogroll). The web is a big place, but features like this connect people. Comment bumping and interlinked digests could push Kinja from neat tool to community portal.

The Bottom Line

If you read more than 3 weblogs regularly, Kinja is for you. Consider also that Yahoo! News and The Washington Post come in RSS along with all major weblogging apps, and its usefulness applies to almost anyone who wants their own personal flow of information.

NYC Cheers for Self

New York City is making a bid for the 2012 Olympic Games. Today they released their campaign logo while (I can only hope) chearing for themselves in the exact same pose. Quoth the press release:

Our goal was to create a symbol for New York’s Olympic bid that would be instantly understood by anyone who saw it from anywhere around the world. The image speaks to the ethos of a city celebrating the Olympic Spirit, and nothing could say it better for New York than the image of the Statue of Liberty, with her outstretched arm holding the torch, joined to the arm of an athlete lifted in celebration.

The Mystery of Rampo

My VCR may or may not be hooked up correctly. I’m sure I plugged in the cables, but I’ve never tested it because I really don’t care. Except that now it’s the only clock in the apartment that hasn’t sprung forward, and I can’t change the time without using the onscreen menus. I was thinking of just unplugging it.

I don’t own many movies on VHS anyway, but there is one item in my collection that has kept me tied down. Thinking about it this morning I strolled over to Amazon and was delighted to learn that it’s now out on DVD.

The Mystery of Rampo is a beautiful film. I strongly recommend it to all. Now there’s almost no reason to ever fire up my VCR again. Oh, alright, there is that reason, because of course it’s still not out on DVD.

Catwoman Spy Photo

Today being April Fool’s Day, lots of websites are going to try to make little jokes like announcing they’re going to offer email accounts or that Jackie Chan’s son goes to your college.

On an unrelated note, I’ve obtained a super secret spy image of the costume that Halle Berry will be wearing in the upcoming Catwoman. I assure you this is a real, undoctored photo of the actual costume and not an April Fool’s Day joke.