tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-114005852011-11-27T19:13:11.696-05:00Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.comBlogger291100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-66661579965130536382011-03-31T21:24:00.014-04:002011-04-01T11:37:08.456-04:00

A flowchart to help you decide. (Click to enlarge)

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-36910527369324532352011-03-17T22:13:00.010-04:002011-03-17T22:52:26.112-04:00

Over the past year I've been using the Google Chrome browser quite a bit. It has a clean, minimal UI, it's very fast and very stable. It also has one incredible feature. Can you spot it in the picture below?It's the little icon in the upper right hand corner: That up-arrow on the wrench means "You've had your browser open for a while, and in the meantime Google has released a software update."

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-16060533786037616952010-11-24T09:00:00.000-05:002010-11-24T12:08:07.953-05:00

The checkout lines at Trader Joe's in Manhattan are based on a lie.Background: Trader Joe's supermarkets in Manhattan use a two-line system for checking out purchases. The checkout lines are often very long, wrapping around the store at busy times. An employee waits at the end of each line to manage new arrivals and sort each into the proper line. Those with many items go into one line, those

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-54522378291928193842009-01-01T16:10:00.005-05:002009-01-01T16:40:17.771-05:00

I've got a Zune music player, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. It's a very good player, and it seems to get better with each software upgrade. So I was surprised when I picked it up on 12/31 and found that it was completely bricked. I checked Google for answers and found that I was not alone. This was happening to thousands of Zunes worldwide! Must be a year-end date bug, I thought.Turns out I

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-27713500531945913962008-09-18T08:25:00.003-04:002008-09-18T13:51:23.769-04:00

This is of interest to parents of students in NYC District 3 Public Schools (Upper West Side of Manhattan).I recorded this from the back of the auditorium. Audio quality is listenable. I've captured the main presentation by John White, and also most of the Q&A session.The presentation references reports at http://schools.nyc.gov/Offices/Portfolio/News/District+3.htm.Listen using the audio player

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-40710627199594331972008-07-18T17:06:00.001-04:002008-07-18T22:14:02.046-04:00

...without a floppy drive, when you are several thousand miles from your office tech support staff. I had to do this last month while travelling in Israel. My work laptop hard drive is encrypted with PointSec security software. PointSec distributes their recovery tool as a floppy image, which didn't do me any good. I found a way to prepare a bootable CD from the floppy image and rescue my PC. The

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-41380103418055522342008-07-17T21:21:00.002-04:002008-07-17T21:37:03.715-04:00

Have you seen the Dash Express? It's a GPS with built in Internet access. The genius feature is that it tracks each Dash user's speed and position and continually relays this information to its central servers, where data from all Dash users is combined and crunched to provide an accurate real time report of traffic conditions.Brilliant product, but costly and with a monthly fee Also there's the

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-83169262928480092852008-06-04T21:06:00.003-04:002008-06-04T21:17:04.078-04:00

I'm a recent convert to Remember The Milk, the Web 2.0 todo list with excellent Gmail integration. It's especially useful in conjunction with Jott, a free phone transcription service. I have set up Jott to feed tasks into my RTM inbox, so it's easy to phone in new tasks from anywhere. The problem has always been: how do I check my todo list when I'm away from a computer? An iPhone would be the

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-88833764795362524192008-05-30T00:15:00.001-04:002008-05-30T00:15:01.413-04:00

For a couple of years now, I've been listening to The Daily Show, All Things Considered, Kol Israel (in English) and other programs as podcasts on my iPod. These shows are not normally available as podcasts, so I have rigged up a set of bash scripts on my Linux server to capture the programs and build the podcast feeds, which are then picked up by iTunes running on my Windows PC.The flow goes

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-80824016201789183402007-10-10T22:16:00.000-04:002007-10-10T23:18:30.557-04:00

For their latest album, In Rainbows, Radiohead have gone direct to their fans with a bold new experiment in music distribution. They are selling their album directly over the Internet, in MP3 format with no DRM. What's more, they offer an interesting choice: set your own price for the download (even free!). I almost never buy music on iTunes - I'd rather have the CD, thanks. But in this case,

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-71277113342474535822007-09-14T14:11:00.000-04:002007-09-23T22:04:49.652-04:00

This information is a bit hard to find on the web so I'm posting it here. How to cancel AIM Phoneline:Call 800-279-3192 and follow the voicemail prompts to cancel AIM Phoneline Unlimited service.Service rep will go through his script and ask you for your AIM Screen Name, security code, and a few other bits of info. You'll get a confirmation code. Done.This process was surprisingly quick and

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-42780449804054495312007-06-29T11:03:00.000-04:002007-06-29T11:17:55.114-04:00

At last the long-promised map updates have been announced. (warning: link will not display if you are using Firefox.) Pricing is very reasonable ($14 + $9.95 S&H). Order on July 16 at www.mio-tech.com or avoid the S&H by buying at Circuit City.

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-77665274137888130412007-05-14T22:54:00.000-04:002007-05-15T09:49:58.388-04:00

Out Of Box Experience (OOBE) describes a customer's first contact with a product. Unbox, assemble, plug in and power up. Apple is renowned for lavishing attention on their OOBE to the point where there are fan blogs and videos sharing each step of the process.How does the competition measure up? I recently purchased a Dell Inspiron E1505 laptop. Nice machine, great price. I'm very happy with the

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-85912028913032497272007-02-03T21:30:00.001-05:002007-02-03T22:31:26.004-05:00

I just signed up for lala.com, the online music exchange that launched last year. Lala works like this: You list the CDs you have and the CDs you want. Others do the same. When another member wants a CD from your collection, a "Ship it" button appears in your "Have list". You can choose to ship out the CD or ignore the request. When you ship, Lala.com provides mailers, facilitates the trade

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-1160368450217882412006-10-09T00:19:00.000-04:002006-10-09T00:35:21.446-04:00

My iPod Mini was lasting only 45 minutes between charges so it was time to replace the battery. Apple will replace the battery for $65.95 (and you won't get your original iPod back!) Rather than go that route, I thought I'd try a DIY battery replacement.FifthUnit.com is my new favorite store - a Hong Kong based online store that sells iPod accessories incredibly cheap ($6.25 for a battery

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-1156993361930154482006-08-30T22:56:00.000-04:002006-08-30T23:02:41.940-04:00

I'm glad to see that CDParanoia, the popular CD ripping software for Linux, has delivered its first official code update in about 5 years. Version 10.0 is still prerelease, but this is great news for everyone who needs good quality ripping software on Linux!

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-1154579737651607342006-08-03T00:13:00.001-04:002009-01-01T18:01:13.762-05:00

Google Calendar is great! I really like the way it allows you to manage multiple calendars within a single view. I"m now using it to show a unified view of my work, personal, and holiday calendars.How to get my calendars into Google? Personal calendar is easy - just type it in. Holiday calendars? Subscribe to one of the many holiday calendar feeds on the web. My work calendar is in Lotus Notes

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-1154577501467907082006-08-02T23:37:00.000-04:002006-08-03T00:13:41.196-04:00

After many frustrating attempts to get ABCDE to work exactly the way I need it to work, I gave up and looked for another tool. The best one I've found is an obscure project called flac-archive, a set of Perl scripts that automatically rip a single WAV file from an image of entire CD, download metadata, encode to the lossless flac format, and transcode to mp3. Works well with only a few manual

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-1142487114396598282006-03-16T00:08:00.000-05:002006-03-16T08:59:44.076-05:00

I've been trying out Feed43, a site which allows you to create simple web scraper HTML to RSS conversions. I've built RSS feeds for the NYC Subway Alert section of the Trips123 website. It's something I've been meaning to do for a long time. The Trips123 website is a mess- bad user interface, HTML pages riddled with errors. But the data is useful. Now that I have RSS feeds I don't have to wade

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-1136610187057869252006-01-06T23:49:00.000-05:002006-01-07T00:03:07.076-05:00

I have a large CD collection that I need to rip and encode, but most of the available tools don't seem to be designed for efficient encoding of a lot of discs.In a perfect world, A tool would:1) Default to fast ripping speed (burst mode) but fall back to secure mode upon error detection2) Rip the entire disc to single WAV image + cue file. Retrieve freedb information.3) Start encoding as soon as

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-1133845995992944122005-12-05T23:40:00.000-05:002005-12-06T00:16:32.206-05:00

With the status of Grateful Dead music on the LMA in doubt, lots of folks have been searching for soundboards from other sites and on BitTorrent. There's a lot out there - probably the entire content of the LMA can be pieced together if you have the time and determination.So, what would it take for a collector to build their own private archive of the Grateful Dead collection on Archive.org? I''

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-1133642290805430472005-12-03T15:28:00.000-05:002005-12-05T00:20:07.570-05:00

The removal of the Grateful Dead downloads from the Live Music Archive caused a huge uproar among the Deadhead community. There's been a surprising amount of coverage in the mainstream media, and some pro-archive statements from band members Phil Lesh and Mickey Hart. As a result, the AUD recordings are again available for download from the archive, and SBD recordings are available for streaming

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-1132805511567579072005-11-23T22:55:00.000-05:002005-11-23T23:11:51.583-05:00

Posted about the Archive.org's Live Music Archive on Monday. I should have known better. As of today, Archive.org has removed all download links for Grateful Dead soundboard recordings. Audience recordings still are available but they are stream-only, no downloads. Here is the announcement from Archive.org. A sad turn of events for what was (for a brief time) a unique cultural resource.

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-1132637317395688812005-11-21T22:50:00.000-05:002005-11-22T00:41:15.073-05:00

Interesting development today. Ray Ozzie and his team at Microsoft just published a spec for RSS replication.This is intriguing for several reasons: It's based on the Lotus Notes replication algorithm. The Notes replication engine is the heart of the product, the "secret ingredient" that enables features like disconnected database usage (just drop a database replica on your laptop and you're

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-1132630164717032832005-11-21T22:15:00.000-05:002005-11-21T22:29:24.730-05:00

About a month ago I found Archive.org's Live Music Archive. These folks are hosting just about every Grateful Dead concert ever recorded, with setlists, commentary and nearly infinite bandwidth for downloads. Simply incredible.

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-1111773854627195192005-03-25T12:46:00.000-05:002005-03-26T23:06:56.513-05:00

My daughter is 22 months old. Some time back, we bought a big, child-friendly trackball and introduced her to some websites: sesamestreet.org, pbskids.org, and noggin.com. Aviva loves to play the Flash games, she's mastered using the trackball buttons and can press keys on the keyboard. She hasn't gotten the cursor movement skills down yet, but that will come in time.We play on the computer

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-1110775082448029752005-03-13T23:19:00.000-05:002005-03-14T22:37:20.623-05:00

Every few weeks the tech publications put out an article asking the question "Is Linux Ready for the Desktop?" I'm sure it is ready, but I haven't given up my Windows XP desktop yet. Before I do, I need these applications or perfect substitutes, running on Linux.These run under WINE:Microsoft Office 2000, Internet Explorer, Visio, Lotus Notes 5Note, you'll be a lot happier with WINE if you use

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-1110650291451542222005-03-12T12:48:00.000-05:002005-03-12T17:48:56.940-05:00

Every few years over the past decade I have followed a pattern that went something like this:1) Purchase the latest version of Quicken2) Set up accounts and start entering every single bank statement and stock transaction3) After a few months, get bored of all the data entry and give up.This year has been different. I purchased a copy of Quicken 2005 Deluxe and found that, unlike in the past, all

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11400585.post-1110649686003839622005-03-12T12:43:00.000-05:002005-03-12T12:48:46.573-05:00

I have a bunch of ideas kicking around my head that I know I'm not going to have time to work on. So I'll post them here.

Dan Schwarzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14011918679331964055noreply@blogger.com0