TechLifeBlogged

Wired has an article on converting a DVD to your video iPod.
Tags: ipod, video, dvd

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Managing Digital Images: Applying Ratings and Keywords is an excerpt from the DAM book (Digital Art Management). It takes an interesting approach for managing your pictures via tags and ratings. I think it's got merit for professionals but the average person won't take the time.
Personally, Picasa organized by date works the best for me.
Tags: photos, organization, photography, picasa, make
[via: Make]


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Dave Winer's elevator pitch for his new OPML tool for blogging:

Did you ever have an idea you wanted to post on your blog that didn't seem big enough to be an essay? An idea that could be expressed in a sentence, or less, but still deserved to get out there? In writing school they teach that less is better. If you can say someting in three words instead of twenty, say it in three. It communicates better. Well, none of the existing blogging tools can do little sentence or phrase-size blog posts.

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I just stumbled across this notice from Canon that some of their CCD sensors are malfunctioning. The affected models are:
PowerShot A60, PowerShot A70, PowerShot A75, PowerShot A300, PowerShot A310, Digital IXUS V3, Digital IXUS II, Digital IXUS IIs

That website is for Asia but I've confirmed it for US for at least the A75. Here is the US A75 notice.

When the product is used in recording or playback mode, the LCD screen and/or electronic viewfinder may exhibit either a distorted image or no image at all. While reports of this malfunction have been rare in the United States, we have determined that it may occur if the product is exposed to hot and humid environments.

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I received an email from the good folks at Qumana today. It seems they have fixed the Blogger title issues in version 3 beta 2 but if you had previously set up your Blogger blog in beta 1 there is a couple steps to do to get them to work.

From the email:

To get Blogger titles working on a blog that was added with beta 1
you'll have to change the blog type. To do this:

1) Open the blog manager
2) Select the Blogger blog
3) Open the Blog Properties dialog by clicking on the File->Blog
Properties menu.
4) Change the blog's platform from "Blogger API" to "Blogger"
5) Click "OK"

Now if you refresh the posts the titles will be retrieved. And new
posts will also publish with a title.

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testing
Tags: test

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Qumana is out with a new beta: 3.0.0.b2.

Updates to version 3.0.0-b include:

• MSN Spaces autoconfigures correctly (note: MSN Spaces has a bug, see here for more details)


• Drupal autoconfigures correctly


• Blogger titles now work (yeah!)


• 
  

  Wordpress issue of XML-RPC errors is resolved

  
  

I haven't been using the last version since I discovered the Blogger titles issue. Looks like they're working on the bullet points issue too. Bullet lists are still a little kludgy because they don't quite pick up where you think the cursor should be. It's nice that you can dip into the code and check that things are ok. Paragraph formatting is the same way. You select your paragraph and click 'align right' and everything aligns right. Still beta.

I realize that the editing is supposed to be WYSIWYG but think they need a preview mode so you can be sure what your post is going to look like rendered on the web.

Other thing of note, if you are used to the old system, Insert Tags now requires commas between the words. Should be intuitive for new users but I keep forgetting.
Tags: qumana, blogging

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Firefox lead engineer Ben Goodger explains Firefox's 'memory leaks'. He says it is a feature of Firefox's Forward/Backward caching as a trade off for faster browsing.
He presents a chart like this one. Based on the RAM in your system, Firefox caches a certain number of pages:

The setting in question is browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
when set to -1 Firefox uses the chart above. Setting it to zero turns this feature off. I think you can also set it to a number (say, 4) if you want to try that.

Inside Firefox
Tags: mozilla, firefox, tips, browser

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Google blog reports that Google has updated Google Earth and Local with more details around the area of Torino, Italy where the Winter Olympics are being held. Google Earth and an HDTV...it's like you're there!

Here the mountain behind Sestriere where skiing is held.

Tags: google earth maps local

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Congrats to Steve Fossett. 26,389 miles in about 76 hours.


Tags: flight, aircraft, fossett

Qumana, the offline blogging tool now has version 3 in public beta. I've just downloaded it (little over 8MB). In fact, this is my first post using it. We'll have to see over time and, granted this is still beta but I'd have to say this is definitely the best version yet.

I chose to install the new version (now called QumanaXP) into a different directory than the previous version. This meant that I had to set up the connection to my blog again. That went without a hitch and was as easy as entering my blog address and then my user name and password. QumanaXP auto-discovered that I use blogger and set everything up automagically.

The new interface is much cleaner. I was pretty critical about the icons in version 2. They seemed to be jumbo and take up too much space. I'm not sure that the new ones are any smaller but they seem to fit in much better.

One thing that is cool is the new 'spell as you type' feature. I is similar to MS Word in that it puts a red underline under a misspelled word. Then you just right click on the word and look for a suggested spelling. Very nice. The only slight drag is that the red line is there as you type each letter until you space to the next word. Not huge but take a few seconds to get used to.

The real treat is something I've been asking them for since the beginning. HTML source! Yes, finally! At the bottom of the edit window are 2 tabs, WYSIWYG and Source View. Sometimes you just need to hack the code a bit to make things better and this now allows easy back and forth switching. You can also edit right in source view and you'll see the changes in WYSIWYG when you switch back.

Preferences have changed too:
You can have the enter key start a new paragraph or a new line
You can have the edit window close after you publish.
You can have QumanaXP ping all sorts of services. This isn't on by default but QumanaXP does list 2 services to ping if you check the box.
You can turn off the default 'Powered by Qumana' text.

All is not completely roses. One thing that doesn't seem to be working for me is the bullets and indenting and blockquoting. The all seem to push the text to the right (all text, not just the section I'm trying to work on) but don't do what they are supposed to do. Also, it doesn't look like you can resize the drop pad. Not a big deal but it also is opaque. I'd like  to change the value of the opaqueness so it becomes a bit more invisible like we had in version 2.

All in all, if you blog, go get QumanaXP and give it a try. I think you'll find it a nice tool for working off line and much improved over the last versions.

Tags: blogging qumana

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Most Web 2.0 logos all in one place. Interesting. Whether you call it Web 2 or not, clearly something big is going on.

• Improved stability.
• Improved support for Mac OS X.
• International Domain Name support for Iceland (.is) is now enabled.
• Fixes for several memory leaks.
• Several security enhancements.

Update: I forgot to mention, if you want to kick off an update and not wait for Firefox to check, click Help -> Check for Updates. My second machine worked fine,  nice small download (less than 1MB).

Technorati Tags : Mozilla, Firefox, Browser