I have stopped using Google Friend Connect for blog comments. There are several things that Google could add to make this more usuable
- It should be possible to specify a home page when submitting an anonymous comment
- It should be possible to configure the wall to not truncate the messages
- It should be possible for the user to configure the what happens when a user clicks on their urls for their authenticated comment (link to Google Friend Connect profile, or blog)
- Google should, and maybe already do, process the javascript and index the page using the content of the comments. There could be a unique comment that someone leaves, and if Google doesn’t index it, people will not be able to find the comment.
Continue Reading April 14th, 2009
Seesmic Desktop is a pretty cool twitter client. It seems to me to be a cross between Twhirl and TweetDeck. It has a nice UI and it doesn’t use that much screen real estate.
I am running this on my Windows XP virtual machine. I haven’t tried to run it on Ubuntu.
Continue Reading April 14th, 2009
As I was thinking about before, I have disabled comments on this blog, and enabled Google Friend Connect for comments. I am interested in finding out how well this will work. I am still not requiring authentication for adding comments, in the hope that Google will still do spam filtering.
Continue Reading April 12th, 2009
The USASpec adapter was included as part of the iPhone dock install. The USASpec adapters have several ways of accessing the music on the iPod or iPhone. You can access the media either by:
- Direct - where you need to select the music to play on the iPhone/iPod
- Folder - where you can browse the music collection by Artist or Album
- Playlist - where you can preselect some number of playlists that will be easily playable on the headunit
I decided to use Playlist mode, as it also offers the ability to play 6 playlist, also "all songs" and a direct mode. For the six playlist, it looks for playlist named HONDA1 - HONDA6. If not all six are found, then it will randomly pick other playlists to fill in the missing spots. If the adapter is connected to the radio through the XM interface, the playlists are accessed by tuning to channels 1-6. When using CD changer interface, the playlists appear as CDs.
In addition to playing user playlist, number 7 is used to play all tracks. And number 8 is for direct mode. (This is the mode that is used if you want to play Pandora.)
I don’t have the time or patience to manually create playlists. Normally, I just randomly play all of my tracks, but some times I want to listen to a particular type of music. I thought that iTune’s Genius playlist would be a perfect way to get playlist for particular types of music.
I created a few of these, and then named them HONDAx. These playlists did not work on the USASpec adapter, but Smart Playlists do. What I am going to do is create Smart Playlists that contain the songs in each of the Genius playlists.
Continue Reading April 12th, 2009
I’m not into multi-tasking but if I can write an article that does two objectives, I’m game. As with many articles, this one started with a reader email. John in Canada has a problem reading a specific page on this site. My problem is I can’t figure out why so I want to gather more information from other readers. While there are many ways to collect data, I thought I would create a web form using Google Docs.
Continue Reading April 12th, 2009