Posts

iTunes and Starbucks together

Image
Apple and Starbucks just started (October 5, 2007) a new service in participating Starbucks stores. Using your laptop, iPhone , or iPod touch , you can get free access to the iTunes site and review and buy up to the last 10 tunes played in the Starbucks store. When using your iPhone or iPod touch, you will also be able to get the song on your Mac or PC for no additional charge. I learned about this today when I went into Starbucks. As part of the promotion, you can get a free, new song every day in Starbucks through November 7th. The first artist was Bob Dylan and has include greats such as Gloria Estefan and Mavis Staples; upcoming releases include Herbie Hancock, Dave Matthews, and John Mayer. Personally, I think this is a great combination of two great products, coffee and music, brrought to us by folks who know how to do it so well, Starbucks and Apple. That'll be a triple-grande-latte for me.

Stream your own Internet TV

Ever consider having your own Internet TV? Perhaps you are an Indie band trying to get some exposure or you are a tech geek helping others. Using Ustream.tv you can do exactly that. As I write this, I am listening and watching a live stream from Indie Game Conference hosted by GarageGames (the band's name isn't listed) -- the band is about as good as I might hear on a night out at the clubs. All it takes is a computer with a webcam and mic, and 320 Kbs minimum upstream bandwidth, and you're good to go. After registering and providing some basic info on your feed, you get a custom URL that you can share with all your Internet friends. In addition, you can embed the stream into another web page and you can have real-time chat with your viewers. Of course it's not a perfect solution. Ustream.tv could really put some work into finding recorded and live streams, as there is a lot of junk. For example, when I click on a tag in their tag cloud, I get all shows from one poste

Solving the Firefox Memory Leak Problems

Thanks to Digg , I found a very interesting blog from Jesse Ruderman, Indistinguishable from Jesse . Jesse has a great post on how you can help in the effort to remove memory leaks in Firefox . Of course not all of us have the skills that Jesse and others working on Firefox have, but he indicates there are other things we can do to help. If you're a Firefox user, an easy way to help is to browse with a trunk nightly build wrapped in a script that calls leak-gauge.pl when Firefox exits. If it reports that documents or windows leaked, try to figure out how to reproduce the leak and then file a bug report. In addition to coverage on Firefox, Jesse has assemble a wealth of useful information in the 4 years of writing his blog. For example, he has a link to his del.icio.us links , a list of 43 things he wants to do, and a humor list . So if you're looking to learn more about Firefox or just looking for a good blog, give Indistinguishable from Jesse a look.

Free Secure Wireless Connection from your Home

If you're lucky enough to have free access to a wireless Internet hot-spot, it's easy to connect your entire home network to it and get free Internet access. David A. Karp explains how with just a few slides at PC Magazine (pcmag.com). This is a great solution if you live in an apartment complex or close in the city.

Internet Brand Recognition

Image
How much do you really pay attention to the logos of Internet companies? I bet not as close as you think you do. Go to guessthelogo.com and find out for yourself. This is a simple, 10 question, multiple choice quiz; how well can you do? I was just a bit under 2 minutes -- good luck!

Master Your Music Domain

I recently learned about a new beta music service, MediaMaster . MediaMaster provides the ability to upload your music collection and then access it from any PC. In addition, you can stream it to your PC or portable device, such as a cell phone. You have the ability to create playlists and a radio station that others can listen too. You can also create a widget to embed in your website -- choose from recently played to newly added to a playlist. Here's my recently played list -- click the play button to listen. So far, so good -- looks compelling. Well with the good comes the not so good. I have over 1500 music titles in my collection, and 3 days into it, I am still uploading. I can adjust my upload speed from as little as 100 Kbps to 5,000 Kbps -- it just takes a long time. In addition, the site responds very slowly. Perhaps because it is still beta or perhaps it's slow because my uploads are being processed, but it is definitely slow. In addition, the find functionality to di

Firebug: Firefox Extension for Web Developers

Image
I have been using the Web Developer toolbar for Firefox for some time now, but I recently learned of a new, powerful Extension, Firebug from Joe Hewitt. Firebug makes it very easy to inspect different portions of your code while on your web page. For example, click the Inspect tab and then you can see the related code as you hover over different elements on the page. Where the Web Developer toolbar makes it easy to look at different parts of the code on a page, Firebug lets you interact with the page and subsequent code. If you want to see how fast (or slow) the various elements load on the page, click on the Net tab. In addition to showing the time to load the various elements, it is very easy to filter by element types such as JavaScript, images, and even Flash. You can use Firebug as a part of your browser window (while you're interacting with it) or in its own window. the one drawback I see is that each time I change tabs, the new website is processed by Firebug; not that it&