Axodys

Fuzebox is a pretty sweet do it yourself 8 bit console that you can buy in kit form from Adafruit Industries. If my kids were a little bit older I could totally justify getting one because this would be an awesome project to do together.  The fun and learning possibilities for this are pretty unlimited.  Also, here’s a video demo of its Uzebox relative in action:

I’ve been using Pandora to fuel my internet radio listening habits for quite a while.  It’s a cool service and does a good job of finding music that I both enjoy and often haven’t heard before (at least unti l’ve listened to a given station for hours on end).  The one minor downside has been that it takes up yet another tab in my browser.  Until now that is- I had a brief 3:45 AM aha moment and realized that there was probably a Pandora Dashboard Widget. 10 seconds later I had it downloaded and installed. Problem solved.

It was recently announced that President-Elect Obama will be doing weekly YouTube addresses to the nation rather than the more traditional weekly radio address U.S. Presidents have done in the past.  A simple yet highly worthwhile change that embraces today’s information on demand paradigm.  Here’s the first one:

Not a whole lot of new information if you’ve been following politics in the last couple months, but a decent first step towards improving government accessibility and transparency through technology.

If there’s one cool thing about the internet it’s that it makes it easy to set up a specialty store for just about anything imaginable.  Case in point, I just discovered a store that specializes in outdoor basketball goals.  They carry a huge selection of indoor, outdoor, portable, wall-mounted and even poolside hoops. I’m not in the market for a basket right now, but when the kids get a little older I plan to start here.

Google finally released Chrome, their new (and long rumored) browser yesterday so I had to take it for a quick spin at work.  My initial reaction is that it’s a pretty solid and fast beta.  Its biggest flaw at the moment is that it’s Windows only right now, but there’s a lot to like otherwise.  Things that I like:

• Tabbed interface - every tab gets its own address bar and can be easily moved around
• Sandboxing - every tab/page is kept in its own process/memory sandbox and a bad page can’t take down the whole browser.
• Fast - javascript is blazing and this browser ran great on the old 1GHz/512MB XP machine I tried it out on.
• Efficient - memory management is really good.
• WebKit based - builds on all the quality open source work that Apple has done with Safari.
• Open Source - innovations should trickle down throughout the rest of the industry.
• IE 8 just became that much more irrelevant.
• Evan Martin - I’ve been reading this guy’s LiveJournal for years so it’s really cool to find out he’s directly involved in the project a developer.
• Scott McCloud comic - I can’t think of a cooler way to introduce the features.

Useful iPhone Applications for Travelers

A pretty good list of useful iPhone applications for travellers. Not sure how useful the Morse code app actually would be, but the WeatherBug, Accufuel (mileage tracking), Steps (pedometer), and Lonely Planet Mobile Phrasebooks looked particularly useful.

iPhone 3G: Released Friday, Pwned Tuesday : Boy Genius Report

It’s pretty much a given that any phone computing device like the iPhone will be unlocked within a matter of days once the right people get their hands on it.

DCoda & WP_StumbleDigest

WordPress plugin that allows you to post a daily digest post of all your recent Stumbles. Looking forward to giving this a try on axodys.com.

James Hubbard’s My Family Doctor Blog & Blog Archive & Write It Down to Lose More Weight: How to keep a food diary

My wife has used this technique very successfully to lose weight after her last pregnancy and it’s probably something I should look at doing myself.

Failure plus Persistence equals Success | Alex Shalman . com

Good blog post about the importance of tenacity and not giving up after failure while striving for success.

Six Free BlackBerry Downloads You Dont Want to Miss - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership

GoogleMaps and TwitterBerry are the two apps that really jump out at me.

Anatomy Ads - Monetize Anything - Home

Interesting looking new social advertising system that’s now in beta testing for those interested in signing up.

The Story of the Fail Whale - ReadWriteWeb

Pretty cool story about the Fail Whale image and the community that his embraced it and helped make money for the illustrator who created it.

There’s a new url shortener called bit.ly on the scene and it’s got some sweet new features.  I wanted to throw this post up as a cool self reverential test before I left work and it seems to have worked like a charm: http://bit.ly/indahouse.  More thoughts to come when I get back home and have a chance to further play with it.

I’ve been an occasional Twitter user since I discovered it nearly two years ago, but it’s not something I use on a daily basis yet. That said, I’ve been following its service level woes with interest as more and more users hop on board and the company struggles to overcome their service’s initial architecture. There is no question that Twitter has a lot of compelling uses and unlimited potential, but the the lack of reliability and regular downtime has become a significant issue.

While there are other competing closed services out there like pownce and jaiku today I discovered a new federated open source alternative called identi.ca that looks like a pretty promising alternative. The software that powers identi.ca is called Laconica and anyone can download the source, tweak it and run it on a server of their own choosing. This is incredibly important because it moves microblogging from the closed, centralized, company dominated realm into the decentralized internet service realm of email, irc, rss and dns.

I’ve been test driving Firefox 3 for a few hours now (after finally getting access to a download link) and I’m really liking it so far.  The fact that it actually looks like a native MacOS X application, is huge in my book.

I only have a couple add-ons installed at the moment, but Firefox 3 definitely seems speedy out of the box.  We’ll see how it does once I start adding in some more plugins.

At any rate, if you haven’t downloaded Firefox 3 yet go download it and check it out (and help break the world download record if it’s still June 17/18, 2008).  Official Firefox 3 Download Counter (1.8 million and counting as I write this).

May has ended up being a really busy month for me. I’ve done a lot of biking (550 km so far this month), but not a lot of blogging here on axodys.com. I’ve also had a hard time getting anything done during my prime evening project hours (roughly 10PM - 12PM) because I’ve been regularly falling asleep while getting our middle child settled into his new big boy bed. More often than not I’ll wake up at 1 or 2AM and realize that I need to get to sleep in my own bed and I’ve missed out on doing anything productive. On the other hand our son is finally getting settled into a nice nightly routine and usually sleeps through the night now so it’s worth the time investment.

Feedapalooza didn’t end up being much of a success for me as far as adding RSS subscribers go (as of today I’m down 7 from where I was at the beginning of the month), but I got good practice writing an eBook (Open Office has great PDF export support by the) and learned quite a bit going through the whole process.

Although I don’t feel like I’ve been as productive as I wanted to be, I’ve still been able to do a lot of reading and learning this month. I still want to try to get one niche project launched before May is over too. It’s time to stop thinking about taking action and actually taking some action. More to come.