rickshangle.com

I’m pleased to note (in small part due to using the bare-bones (or, as some would call it “clean”) Zen Minimalist Wordpress theme) that this blog is pretty much exactly as usable via Lynx as it is via a regular web browser.

clean, fresh

For those whom demand more dorkiness plus that olde-school slow-roasted cathode-ray Wyse flavor, you could always ram lynx through James A. McCombe’s GLTerminal for true power, and in the process truly welcome yourself to the “limit”.

Lights out.

rds

So thousands (hic) of you have asked, and I’m using Joni Mueller’s Zen Minimalist wordpress theme here on rds.com. It’s pretty much unmodified except for the now playing stuff that I stuck in the sidebar (and, as a side-note, is not working very well in recent versions; for $10, I’m not exactly expecting rocket-speed updates, but that’s another topic).

I like it (zen minimalist wordpress theme) because it’s simple and I like to think I try to be a sort of zen guy, although thinking one is zen is probably the antithesis of zen-ness.

There are lots of other awesome themes out there, but none of them are compelling enough to make me switch.

Now, there is an idea for a theme that, massive Apple power user (or, as others have suggested, “lemming”; at least i never bought, nor do I plan on buying, this) that I am, would make me switch, but as far as I know it doesn’t exist. That would a theme more or less modeled on the Apple website.

More specifically, the style of one of the product pages, not necessarily the main page which is sort of sparse.

With the release of iWeb, which features a default web page theme that is kinda-sorta modeled on the Apple web aesthetic, it looks like I could actually create a blog in the Apple vein, and be an ever huger nerd in the process.

Looks like I’ll be learning how to create wordpress themes… or not. CROSS-CHECK!

rds

Nothing like a good shakedown. Also, little like RSS enclosures.

Why not combine the two in one post via a shakedown of Kyle Gilman’s EnclosureFlex plugin for Wordpress.

What, oh what, shall I enclosure-ize? I know… how about this picture of me drinking a giant beer? A heady days. Foamy, heady days.

rds

Although I’m sometimes flambasted as an Apple fanboy, when I became aware of iTMS-competetor music download site eMusic, I had to give it a shot.

I first signed up for the 14-day trial, then after sniffing around decided, what the hey, I’ll go for the discounted $100 12-month subscription. In iTMS terms, I’ll need to download about ten albums to break even.

###The eMusic model:

1. you pay X dollars a month (the plans are $10, $15 and $20)…
2. … to download Y songs a month (mapping to 40, uh (I’m trying to find the T+C, now that I’m a member)… maybe 60, and 80 songs, respectively?)
3. The songs are in MP3 to do what you wish.

Why, one might ask, did I try out eMusic considered i’m an iTMS users but not a Napster user?

My friend Mike told me about an eMusic commercial featuring a 1/10th of a second clip of Bob Pollard, so that pretty much made it worth checking out.

So… based on that model… I have 480 songs to download over the next year… and I’m basically paying $0.21 a song, compared to $0.99 per song or a little less (if it’s part of a standard-priced $9.99 album, and has more than ten songs) on iTMS.

###The pros (after 10 minutes of user-dom):

1. MP3 @ 240kbit VBR means relatively good quality without DRM issues
2. 1,000,000+ songs, 3,000+ (can this be?) labels. A lot of indie content.
3. User reviews, message boards, “neighbors” (listing of people with similar interests), etc.
4. It’s MP3 so I can use it in any player… but I’ll (shocker) continue to use iTunes
5. This may be my ignorance talking, but the fact that there’s no DRM means that although eMusic can change their T+C for music I have yet to download, they can’t do anything for the music I already have downloaded.
6. Lots of indie content.

One might think, “ok, how is this different from iTunes?” Remember that iTMS’s FairPlay-DRM’ed content is always being cross-checked back to the mother ship. If Apple decides to change their use policies (which I doubt they’d do for already-purchased content, unless they’re willing to weather a major user backlash), that means they have control over determining if / how / in what way you can continue to use the stuff you bought.

###The cons:

1. (Puzzling) No album artwork included, although it takes two seconds to get that from Amazon or a dozen other locations
2. Uses a seperate app to download - you browse on the web, then when you click “buy” it kicks over to the other download manager app to seal the deal. It works, it’s fast. I haven’t found a downside it in yet… but it’s not a clean as iTMS/iTunes.
3. I’ll post more as I find them.
4. “Lots of indie content” is a bit of an understatement - almost entirely indie content and, well, sub-indie. You won’t find most big bands here, so I won’t be using this to replace iTMS. However (a pro), you will find tons of good stuff that you’ll probably never see on iTMS.

rds

St. Bob wants you to watch him jumpstart. also, his bands and other indie rockers can be found at eMusic.

Yup,it’s beta… or maybe it just doesn’t like Safari… or me.

The Right Thing for the world… trying to figure out the lime green / “fend[ing] off potential thieves” connection.

rds

The first outing, which for good or ill was created within one hour of launching iWeb 1.0.0.

iWeb is Apple’s new iLife-branded drag-and-drop-and-Apple-Feel-Good-Web-Development-Tool for the masses.

After 60 minutes with the product, there’s this:

Good:

It’s pretty much as drag and drop as Jobs demo’ed.

Nice forms. Always have to hand that to Apple.

Easy enough to use that (after proper setup) it will allow my Mom to enter the web publishing world. at last.

The media browser is probably speedy enough for most users libraries. Could scroll through my 24,000 photo iPhoto library without causing a kernel panic.

So so:

The WYSIWYG element is probably only 90% there.

A good number of spinny-lollipops encountered the first goround… and that’s on a site with like six pages.

Upload / publish speed to .Mac is marginal at best, but that has ever been the case with .Mac.

Ugly:

Lack of interactivity in the “blog”-type pages. It appears that authoring can only happen through iWeb. No comments. No ability to author new content through the web. For now. We’ll see about iLife 07.

Note: The elitist snob in me wants to say, “The ‘blog’ function in iWeb isn’t, in the least, blog-like”, but I’m keeping the jackheel down. For a .Mac user who has dreamed of having their own simple blog, but has lacked the capability until now, this will suffice, although it will probably get old fairly quick without the interactive element.

Publishing setup is non-trivial, considering this is an iApp. When you don’t have your “publish’ settings up right (at least this was true in my case), when you hit “publish” you just get an endless lollipop instead of a helpful dialogue such as, “Hey, I notice you’re not set up publish to any sort of meaningful web page. How about we help you out with that. Want to buy .Mac?”

Uh - can you actually see the page I linked above, without a .Mac account?

In any event… half a kudo to Apple for addressing a gap in their QoL-enhancing apps that’s only been there for five years or so. For a v1.0.0 app, could be lot worse, but there is work to do.

I’m sure by next revision (and the version number is, literally, 1.0.0. Couldn’t they have made it 1.5, just for fun?), in addition to the standard stability / performance increases we are used to seeing v3 (or 4… or 5) iApp products, we’ll see the standard Apple-visionary-my-god-I-never-knew-i-needed-that-feature, but-now-that-you-mention-it-hell-yeah stuff:

1) Lists of your most recent iTunes songs… including a special jelly button indicating the ones you illegally ripped.

2) iWeb Double-Ender Extension

3) iWeb Studio Space Explorer

4) iCowbell (wait… that’s another iApp… I’m getting off the topic of iWeb here)

5) iWeb Power Launcher

6) iWeb Setup Wizard v9X6

7) Real interactive blogs

Manual override for studio space exploration

9) Sports and sh*t.

10) Some other stuff re: Photocasting, which I haven’t quite figured out yet… but soon. Another entry. Because trust me… I have a lot of porn to share.

Respect,
rds

My former colleague Tim sent me this awesomeness over at engadget.

Seeing those styles seemed to open a wormhole in the iPod of my mind, and before I knew it was sliding back to 1987-1989, when I was running a BBS.

My perception was flooded with memories and emotions.

old sk00l, 1987-style. k-rad warez, RLE graphics… in the days before GIF. USR Modems… should i choose the HST, the V.32 or the Dual-Standard model, for $950?

18Kbits per second. I’ve never seen a 400K floppy fill up so fast! This phone call to australia to download these warez is almost going to be cheaper than just going out to buy the program! Almost!

White Knight BBS for old Classic Mac OS… 5? 6?

Wait… was White Knight the BBS program? Yeah. The same guy also wrote the term program, called Red Ryder.

Or maybe Red Ryder became White Knight. Can’t remember with clarity.

Z-MODEM!

My board, at various points, was called:

The Bat Cave
…

sadly… I can’t remember any other names of the board. Maybe, by some miracle, someone reading this does.

Had a 20MB internal hard drive on my Mac SE, which ran the board. It died. Seagate piece of s**t.

I would turn on the SE, and I would hear the drive spin up, then crash stop. Click.

You’d take the drive out of the chassis (and this was a known problem with the old Seagates… they would get smooshed drive bearings), you would hold it between your hands, like you were praying, and you would SPIN the drive mechanism, to free whatever bearing was stuck.

I guess you were, in fact, praying. Praying that, as a middle-schooler, you could save enough money to buy a non-crap hard drive.

Then it would work for a while, until it stopped working again, and you had to repeat that process.

In 1989 or so, replaced that with a 80MB external SCSI Ehman systems (also Seagate) which got me along for a while. That was like… $650. It was also a piece of crap, and lasted about a year.

My first two hard drives seem to have set the tone for my lifelong experiences with premature data loss.

Yesterday, in 2005, I bought a 300GB Maxtor external drive for $300.

Backed up that 80MB focker via 70 or so floppy disks and a program called… well, through the ages, it eventually was purchased and became, in some way shape or form, Dantz (now EMC) Retrospect. But at the time, what was it called… can’t remember… can’t remember. Maybe something pragmatic like, “Backup”.

Sitting at my desk, stack of floppies, labeling them, feeding them one after the other into the gaping maw of the floppy drive. Hours per backup. Hours. Hours. Hours. I don’t even have MP3’s to listen to. Just this crap Sony radio. I haven’t even discovered alternative / punk rock yet. I’m probably listening to Michael Jackson. Perhaps, if I was cooler than I remember myself to be, Billy Idol.

Maybe if I was supremely fortunate, I was listening to the Police, Synchronicity

i don’t think the concept of incremental backups had occurred to me… or perhaps whatever program I was using didn’t support them.

Still swirling, through the mists…

rds

So yes, welcome! This is my first blog that I’m doing under my given name (not related to technology), as opposed to the numerous superhuman alter-egos/false media dwellings I inhabit throughout the web.

Nothing of true or lasting meaning to report at this moment, just checking out WordPress, the blogging software that I’m using, and comparing its features to Movable Type, which I have some experience with and can honestly say is somewhat awful.

So right, as of now, no entries, boring theme, just great stuff. Stay tuned for RAW POWER.

Check,
Rick